Quality programming is difficult to supply when your company is continually buffeted by the changing mass opinion. This goes especially for news channels where there's more money to be made by pandering to a specific audience than just reporting the damned news.
Personally I've always quite liked the way the BBC operates. While you can get satellite and now cable, in the UK, the 4 main BBC channels have, for the most part, been funded by the TV tax.
For each TV set you own, you pay a yearly TV tax, and a portion of that tax money is set aside for the BBC. As they don't have to pander for advertising dollars, the result is a polished, quality programming, and independent news coverage.
While this doesn't necessarily apply to cable in this country, it's a similar model that allows for greater creativity since each individual show/channel doesn't need to be marketable. Since the price of failure in a packet medium like TV can be crushing, this is a crucial way to new and interesting shows to develop.
Hey, sometimes the keys just get... well, gunky. My keyboard at work is greasy as all hell, and considering it's a spiffy cordless one, not cheap enough to trash and replace on a regular basis.
Health concerns are valid, but I'd just like a good solid hour of coding without having three coats of grease on my fingers by the end of it.
Sorry about that, actually. Actually, I meant to reply to the parent of your post.
The author point I was responding to was argued that Apple's business model is to make shiny toys for non-power users (paraphrasing, of course), hence my response about the level of power-user friendly-ness in OSX.
Inaccessible to the power user? For the last few years, you've been able to recompile the bloody kernel. Hell, you can run GNOME on top of OSX, replace the default BSD utilities with GNU ones, and install GCC.
And how on earth is that inaccessible to the power user?
KHTML (the rendering engine) is not proprietary, and is, in reality, about as open as the Gecko engine, which is what Firefox uses. Everything else is just window-dressing.
I don't know what Apple systems you're looking at, but when I boot my MacBook in single user mode, it pops up "Copyright UC Berkley board of Regents", so does that count as attribution? Now, if I were at said MacBook, I'm pretty sure I could bring up a similar statement for each and every BSD utility that comes in the default install.
No offense, mate, but this seems like a bit of a weak crack at Apple. While they are using a fair bit of the core BSD stuff, Apple has also developed, in-house, some nifty things like Launchd (replacement for cron, init, and other core boot utils) which are released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Actually I'm a re-trained graphic designer now working as a full-time web designer, and I honestly find gVIM to be much nicer than something GUI based like Dreamweaver. I do miss things like Dreamweaver's file-browser integration and tab-completion, but those are avaiable in gVIM, should I ever get off my arse and learn them.;)
Aye, the ads state "Use requires 2-year contract" (or something to that effect), not "Price based on 2-year contract". I've got a sneaking suspicion that you may be able to use this as a PDA-type device by its lonesome, but will need a 2-year contract with AT&T to actually use it as a cellphone.
That's pretty funny, because I liked the original Guild Wars as an example of what an MMO-RPG* hybrid could look like. You gather in hub locations where you can interact with other players, but the bulk of the PvE experience can be handled single-player, or in a small team. Guild Wars, and to a greater degree, MMOs have something that many single player games (regardless of genre) are adding: Co-op!
Unfortunately it's a bit "damned if you do, damned if you don't", because I have Neverwinter Nights 2, and while I could play that with my roommates, I'm losing the experience of interacting with the well written NPCs from the story.
*Yes, I know MMORPGS are RPGS, but we don't have a nifty acronym for Single Player CRPG)
The Amish refer to those who aren't of German decent as "English", regardless to race, creed, or planetary origin. Though, now that I'm thinking about it, an Amish Special Ops force would be pretty awesome.
Except that Google has a pretty good record of fighting the feds when they come knocking. Doubtless, Google is aware of the treasure trove of data that they have, and that if they violate the implied privacy of your own email account, by allowing Johnny G-Man to take a peek, they'll start hemorrhaging users (and eyes, for all those lovely ads).
Oh man, am I glad that I'm not the only guy to ever stumble through a wonderful SQL update mistake. Now, I loves me linux, but the one thing that really impressed me from what I saw of Monad/Powershell was the confirm and dry-run options build in to every freaking command.
A preview of the attempted action would be damned useful for shell scripts and the occasional database update. Mind you, with larger datasets, you'd be hammering the DB, but at least it would give newbs of the world (myself included) a hand.
Pish, the LDP is damned good, if just a bit dated. Also, Gentoo has some awesome documentation and a very dedicated doc-writing team. The distro's not so hot, but if this bloke wants to contribute, they're a good start.
If you're encountering an issue booting the system, you can (or have a phone tech tell you to) hold command-V on boot, and view the kernel output during booting.
<p>Hell of a way to diagnose any boot-time issues. Failing that, command-S to drop into single user mode and grep through the kernel/application log files to your heart's content.</p>
<p>Mind you, I've encountered one un-bootable OSX system, and that was due to some high-level retardation on my part when it came to dicking with OSX's user database.</p>
I was in a similar situation about a year ago, and I found that the best way to learn about the guts of the system, so to speak, was to pick up Gentoo, which is something of a "Roll your own" kind of Linux distribution.
Now, by no means do I recommend this for day to day use. I love Gentoo, but it breaks. Frequently. And unless you know a fair bit about how the system works, you'll end up breaking it quite often yourself. This is a good thing, and introduces you to the various configuration files, locations of critical items, how everything slots together, and how to compile your own kernel. The Gentoo documentation is excellent, and if you go about it with a certain goal in mind (web server, router, media center) you'll end up learning a fair bit about Linux in the process.
And it's only taken nearly a decade for us to get from what people really did do trivially with tables to a vaguely transparent CSS approach that gets the same result mostly reliably. Hurrah! I lay the blame for that one a few notable browsers from Microsoft. The difference between Quirks and Standards mode is daunting from the start, but the hasLayout issue is just an outright bastard to troubleshoot.
So, when I can get a two-column layout in CSS by writing "columns: 2" in the style for a DIV, plus any spacing options I want to set, then I'll accept that getting a two-column display is trivial. Until then, it's just less of a hack than it used to be, it still requires non-semantic mark-up, and it's still beyond most users. Browser support, again. CS3 handles many of these features that people like you and I have been clamoring for, but again, browser uptake is lacking. It's a bit of a chicken and egg issue, as Mozilla doesn't seem keen to implement too many CSS3 features when the dominant force in the market is only now catching up to basic CSS2.1 features like "min-width".
Table layouts may be regular, but they're certainly not terse; a virtue when dealing with a limited connection.
A standard website content cell (as you'll find on any eCommerce or Smarty Tag-esque site) looks like <table<tr><td>(content)</tr></td></table> compared to a simple <div> which could easily be used in its place. With a dozen or so include files looking like this, the overhead on your average eCommerce site starts to add up pretty quickly.
As far as the table rendering limitations being lifted as early as the first Gecko browsers emerged, I hadn't heard of that, though it does surprise me somewhat. Anecdotally however, I do see table-based sites loading more slowly, which makes me wonder if lean markup is quicker to load than I'd previously expected
Oh, I agree that it's the Unix way (not the *NIX way, as Linux is just a kernel, and the "Unix Philosophy" predates the BSD/Unix fork, I believe), but I'm not in agreement that the Unix way is the right way, at least for a modern day GUI program. As has been pointed out by many smarter people than myself, on this thread alone, some level of recovery is useful especially when you've got other files running within the same program, which are threatened by this, and while I expect a CLI app to choke and crash on bad data, I've got much different expectations for GUI apps.
Bah, it gets easier the more often you do it. Two and three column layouts are quite trivial at this point in the game (google "Opposed Floats"), and you can really get creative with absolute positioning to eschew the whole "column" thing if that's not your bag.
Honestly, the last site I built was pretty straightforward CSS-wise, and worked in IE6, Firefox, and Safari without hacks. Well, slight lie, as IE6 needed three lines of CSS to bring it into line, but that's only because it chokes in 'min-height'.
Otherwise, like with any moderately difficult persuit, practice helps.
I've seen heavy table-based websites crawl on IE7, so it's not a moot point. Tables are inherantly more complex due to the 3x increase in markup (1 DIV versus TABLE - TR - TD), and cause the browser to do more work, than with a simple stylesheet.
Also, the previously mentioned point about browsers being incapable of rendering page content until the entire markup is downloaded still stands.
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Quality programming is difficult to supply when your company is continually buffeted by the changing mass opinion. This goes especially for news channels where there's more money to be made by pandering to a specific audience than just reporting the damned news.
Personally I've always quite liked the way the BBC operates. While you can get satellite and now cable, in the UK, the 4 main BBC channels have, for the most part, been funded by the TV tax.
For each TV set you own, you pay a yearly TV tax, and a portion of that tax money is set aside for the BBC. As they don't have to pander for advertising dollars, the result is a polished, quality programming, and independent news coverage.
While this doesn't necessarily apply to cable in this country, it's a similar model that allows for greater creativity since each individual show/channel doesn't need to be marketable. Since the price of failure in a packet medium like TV can be crushing, this is a crucial way to new and interesting shows to develop.
Hey, sometimes the keys just get... well, gunky. My keyboard at work is greasy as all hell, and considering it's a spiffy cordless one, not cheap enough to trash and replace on a regular basis.
Health concerns are valid, but I'd just like a good solid hour of coding without having three coats of grease on my fingers by the end of it.
Sorry about that, actually. Actually, I meant to reply to the parent of your post.
The author point I was responding to was argued that Apple's business model is to make shiny toys for non-power users (paraphrasing, of course), hence my response about the level of power-user friendly-ness in OSX.
Inaccessible to the power user? For the last few years, you've been able to recompile the bloody kernel. Hell, you can run GNOME on top of OSX, replace the default BSD utilities with GNU ones, and install GCC.
And how on earth is that inaccessible to the power user?
KHTML (the rendering engine) is not proprietary, and is, in reality, about as open as the Gecko engine, which is what Firefox uses. Everything else is just window-dressing.
I don't know what Apple systems you're looking at, but when I boot my MacBook in single user mode, it pops up "Copyright UC Berkley board of Regents", so does that count as attribution? Now, if I were at said MacBook, I'm pretty sure I could bring up a similar statement for each and every BSD utility that comes in the default install.
No offense, mate, but this seems like a bit of a weak crack at Apple. While they are using a fair bit of the core BSD stuff, Apple has also developed, in-house, some nifty things like Launchd (replacement for cron, init, and other core boot utils) which are released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Actually I'm a re-trained graphic designer now working as a full-time web designer, and I honestly find gVIM to be much nicer than something GUI based like Dreamweaver. I do miss things like Dreamweaver's file-browser integration and tab-completion, but those are avaiable in gVIM, should I ever get off my arse and learn them. ;)
Aye, the ads state "Use requires 2-year contract" (or something to that effect), not "Price based on 2-year contract". I've got a sneaking suspicion that you may be able to use this as a PDA-type device by its lonesome, but will need a 2-year contract with AT&T to actually use it as a cellphone.
Sorry, without a matching tag, he encountered a parse error.
That's pretty funny, because I liked the original Guild Wars as an example of what an MMO-RPG* hybrid could look like. You gather in hub locations where you can interact with other players, but the bulk of the PvE experience can be handled single-player, or in a small team. Guild Wars, and to a greater degree, MMOs have something that many single player games (regardless of genre) are adding: Co-op!
Unfortunately it's a bit "damned if you do, damned if you don't", because I have Neverwinter Nights 2, and while I could play that with my roommates, I'm losing the experience of interacting with the well written NPCs from the story.
*Yes, I know MMORPGS are RPGS, but we don't have a nifty acronym for Single Player CRPG)
Hey, I don't know about you, but as a webdesigner, I consider that page to be bloody gorgeous.
The Amish refer to those who aren't of German decent as "English", regardless to race, creed, or planetary origin. Though, now that I'm thinking about it, an Amish Special Ops force would be pretty awesome.
Pfftt... what about us Amish, you insensitive clod?
Except that Google has a pretty good record of fighting the feds when they come knocking. Doubtless, Google is aware of the treasure trove of data that they have, and that if they violate the implied privacy of your own email account, by allowing Johnny G-Man to take a peek, they'll start hemorrhaging users (and eyes, for all those lovely ads).
Oh man, am I glad that I'm not the only guy to ever stumble through a wonderful SQL update mistake. Now, I loves me linux, but the one thing that really impressed me from what I saw of Monad/Powershell was the confirm and dry-run options build in to every freaking command.
A preview of the attempted action would be damned useful for shell scripts and the occasional database update. Mind you, with larger datasets, you'd be hammering the DB, but at least it would give newbs of the world (myself included) a hand.
Pish, the LDP is damned good, if just a bit dated. Also, Gentoo has some awesome documentation and a very dedicated doc-writing team. The distro's not so hot, but if this bloke wants to contribute, they're a good start.
And exactly how old is this guy? Problems in the current education system aren't going to manifest on this level for decades.
If you're encountering an issue booting the system, you can (or have a phone tech tell you to) hold command-V on boot, and view the kernel output during booting.
<p>Hell of a way to diagnose any boot-time issues. Failing that, command-S to drop into single user mode and grep through the kernel/application log files to your heart's content.</p>
<p>Mind you, I've encountered one un-bootable OSX system, and that was due to some high-level retardation on my part when it came to dicking with OSX's user database.</p>
<p>Oops!</p>
I was in a similar situation about a year ago, and I found that the best way to learn about the guts of the system, so to speak, was to pick up Gentoo, which is something of a "Roll your own" kind of Linux distribution.
Now, by no means do I recommend this for day to day use. I love Gentoo, but it breaks. Frequently. And unless you know a fair bit about how the system works, you'll end up breaking it quite often yourself. This is a good thing, and introduces you to the various configuration files, locations of critical items, how everything slots together, and how to compile your own kernel. The Gentoo documentation is excellent, and if you go about it with a certain goal in mind (web server, router, media center) you'll end up learning a fair bit about Linux in the process.
Table layouts may be regular, but they're certainly not terse; a virtue when dealing with a limited connection.
A standard website content cell (as you'll find on any eCommerce or Smarty Tag-esque site) looks like <table<tr><td>(content)</tr></td></table> compared to a simple <div> which could easily be used in its place. With a dozen or so include files looking like this, the overhead on your average eCommerce site starts to add up pretty quickly.
As far as the table rendering limitations being lifted as early as the first Gecko browsers emerged, I hadn't heard of that, though it does surprise me somewhat. Anecdotally however, I do see table-based sites loading more slowly, which makes me wonder if lean markup is quicker to load than I'd previously expected
Oh, I agree that it's the Unix way (not the *NIX way, as Linux is just a kernel, and the "Unix Philosophy" predates the BSD/Unix fork, I believe), but I'm not in agreement that the Unix way is the right way, at least for a modern day GUI program. As has been pointed out by many smarter people than myself, on this thread alone, some level of recovery is useful especially when you've got other files running within the same program, which are threatened by this, and while I expect a CLI app to choke and crash on bad data, I've got much different expectations for GUI apps.
Bah, it gets easier the more often you do it. Two and three column layouts are quite trivial at this point in the game (google "Opposed Floats"), and you can really get creative with absolute positioning to eschew the whole "column" thing if that's not your bag.
Honestly, the last site I built was pretty straightforward CSS-wise, and worked in IE6, Firefox, and Safari without hacks. Well, slight lie, as IE6 needed three lines of CSS to bring it into line, but that's only because it chokes in 'min-height'.
Otherwise, like with any moderately difficult persuit, practice helps.
I've seen heavy table-based websites crawl on IE7, so it's not a moot point. Tables are inherantly more complex due to the 3x increase in markup (1 DIV versus TABLE - TR - TD), and cause the browser to do more work, than with a simple stylesheet.
Also, the previously mentioned point about browsers being incapable of rendering page content until the entire markup is downloaded still stands.