Until you click "shop", and then its not responsive anymore.

Fiattech.com is a VERY small mobile-centric site, with very little content and some presentation logic to optimize its mobile presentation on desktops.

The articles page for example shows 5 one-line article summaries at a time even on a 1920x1200 desktop. To see all 25 articles I need to page through 5 pages.

  Its usable at this tiny content scale, but its hardly a good desktop design; and if there were much more content its usability limitations would become increasingly apparent.

Likewise, the home page, on desktop, is reflowing to a single 8-10 screen tall vertical column anything but gratuitous? Practically nobody on a desktop is going to want to USE the site like that.

Is horizontal scrolling really better?

On this site, yes. I think it would have been. If the user makes their window that small they probably are trying to just keep one piece of the page in the window, and reflowing forces them to have to re-locate that piece in a 10 page tall stack after they've resized the window, instead of it just staying put.

Additionally, they get rid of the menu button as the screen widens? Why do that? I don't object to them adding the menu to the title bar when it fits, but why lose the one element of common navigation between the two modes?

To sum up... yeah this isn't a bad site... but its barely more than a toy project. It does a decent job because there's almost nothing to it.

And I bet it cost then fortune.

" But those are fixable problems if only Mashable management had the sense to correct the design."

Yes.

"You're not claiming that the very opportunity to do width transitions wrong justifies removing the media queries feature entirely, are you?"

I'm claiming that proposing a responsive design using media queries as a solution to designing a site for desktop and mobile users is generally more work and harder to get right than just building two separate sites.

To make a (flying) car analogy:

"Responsive design" is to the problem of wanting a single website for mobile and desktop websites what "roadable aircraft" are to the problem of wanting a flying hover car. They are not simpler, or easier. They are a 'solution' only in the loosest sense of the word.

That's not to say that its not possible to build a decent one, but when you are working with a web developer on a site, and you say "ok, what about mobile?" and if he says "No problem, I'll use a responsive design" that's a HUGE red flag to run away screaming.

"Responsive designs", are called the "solution" to the problem of mobile and desktop design, but its a solution the same way roadable aircraft are a solution -- they're clumsy, they're fragile, they are vastly more expensive to produce and maintain, and most people don't really want to use one.

Should we take away the ability of people to produce them? Of course not, but web designers should pull their heads of out their collective asses and stop promising flying hovercars and then delivering poorly conceived roadable aircraft.

Anyway, badly done viewport width transitions are consistent with other problems I see on Mashable, such as that damn "infinite scrolling"

Agreed 100%. Although I contend that its not even all that good on mobiles either.

by they way, *their* fix for your problem would be eradicating desktop design versions completely.

As bad as that is, that would actually be an improvement over the mess that "responsive web design" has made.

At least then the design would be relatively simple, and it would be easier to maintain. The problem with responsive web designs is that they are inherently complicated and things break or go missing or become inaccessible between the mobile and desktop transitions. Maintenance cycles tend to make them worse as every modification and feature has to be considered in a "responsive context" ... you get tasked with adding this to this column here and that menu item there, and it works on the desktop, but doesn't make any sense on mobile without a complete costly redesign.

There are several, but site I was referring to in particular was mashable.com. It came up at work as an example of "good responsive design" to which I argued that it was in fact abysmal.

These were some of my notes taken at the time (I don't know if they all still apply, but a click glance confirms at least most of them still do)

Completely tangential...

The link you gave, to your site, contains "Disproof of Turing completeness"

That's a joke right?

I mean first up, you don't have any actual evidence that "pick-a-winner" would even be rejected. The prohibition on Russian Roulette is clearly a prohibition on the "suicide game".

For example, there are plenty of minigames on the Wii that are mechanically equivalent to Russian roulette. Where players take turns, doing something (cutting a rope in a tangled knot for example) which is essentially random, until one of them is eliminated. I would be very surprised to see them rejected from the apple app store due to being "russian roulette"... I'd be very surprised if they weren't ALREADY on the ios app store.

" Responsive web design provides a solution: "develop once, works in every device."

Name one good responsive web design that isn't shit on at least one of desktop or mobile. (And an awful lot of them are shit on both.)

Anything actually good just builds them separately, and lets you switch between them; and selects as default the right one based on screen size (screen not window) Nothing sucks worse than making a desktop window smaller because you just want to keep one part visible while you work with something else and having the site spontaneously implode into a mobile version -- just one of the countless forms of SUCK thanks to "responsive web design".

No, actually they just leave a hole in the ground that they can come back to any time they want to

And all the equipment parked next to it, fueled up, maintained and ready to go. And the miners, and management are just sitting there too on unemployment just waiting for the call to go back to work.

No. Restarting a closed mine is less work than starting a new one, but its still a big project and it takes time.

Consider the situation of mining REEs in the USA. There is no shortage of them here, but the mines were all closed due to price depression, and China had a virtual monopoly on them.

The Mountain Pass mine in California for example, was one of the large REE mines in the USA which closed in 2002. In 2007 thru 2009 China tightened its grip on REEs, and they decided to reopen it. The project cost around half a billion. It took a year to get permits*, and 2 more to resume operations on a "start-up basis" (well below "full production").

Does that sound like "come back to any time they want to" to you?

* - re Permits: And this was in a HIGHLY favorable political climate where the defense industry manufacturing supply chains were concerned about the nearly complete reliance on China and backing the need to open the mine.

Mines aren't popular with environmentalists, uranium mines even less so. I'd expect it to be extra time consuming and challenging to open one, or reopen one especially without an overriding "its for national security" argument expediting the process.

No, because as soon as prices recover, the mines will reopen.

Of course they will. But but there will be a lag time.

Yes. A glut of unranium putting uranium producers out of business, closing mines, etc. The glut today may well lead to a shortage a few years out from now.

In my experience, it's because high school math is taught equally terribly. No... more terribly, because the subject matter is more complex. Useless busywork and rote memorization abound.

See, on this point we actually agree. I was appalled at Physics 11 and 12 for example; once I hit first year calculus and all the stupid formulas we were applying and memorizing v=1/2at^2 for velocity of an accelerating object etc.. just fell out of simple calculus cases. But Organic Chemistry and balancing reactions, that needed to be exactly what it was.

The paper you linked had a musical example... and berated the fixation on music theory, and was a good read. But at the same time, theory is good too, and the history of music too. It is not bad to teach and test those, its bad to ONLY teach those.

But elementary school math? I'm just NOT seeing the issue you have. They are drawing things, and piling them up, and working with sequences, nearly everything they do at the beginning is based around patterns and symmetry. All the times tables are introduced gradually, and as sequences, and visually. The relationships established between numbers, grids of squares, piles of beads. It doesn't seem bad to me at all.

Yes, memorization of basic arithmetic facts kicks in grade 3 and 4 but I just can't get upset by that. Its a small but important piece. And even if they "fixed" the latter years education, I'm hard pressed to imagine a curriculum that wouldn't be facilitated by having single digit arithmetic as a basis skill to draw from. Just as I can't imagine a written language course that didn't require you to have at some early point memorized the alphabet and their canonical sounds. (Or in the case of a language like Mandarin, the basic set and the rules that govern the alphabet..)

Just as your document mocked painting in terms of theory, and rightly so, there is a need to be able to name colours taught alongside the freeform expression of fingerpainting. Does a child need to know that colour they smeared from here to there in a pleasing squiggle is blue to make that blue squiggle? No all they need is paint and imagination. But they still DO need to be taught that the color is blue to be able to communicate. And that has to be memorized. There is no deeper understanding of the names of colours -- you just have to remember which are called blue and which are called green, etc.

Your linked paper went into detail talking about the joy of discovering analytic geometry by drawing a rectangle around a triangle, but how would you teach this if your students hadn't previously memorized what a rectangle and triangle actually were? And how would you teach the names of shapes? They are occasionally descriptive... quadrilateral, triangle, parallelogram... but why is it canonically called a triangle and rarely a trilateral? And what the fuck is a rhombus or a trapezoid or a hexagon? And usually what is meant by a hexagon is a regular hexagon, god help the kid who tries to bisect an irregular hexagon into 6 equilateral triangles...

"A similar problem occurs when teachers or textbooks succumb to âoecutesyness.â This is
where, in an attempt to combat so-called âoemath anxietyâ (one of the panoply of diseases which
are actually caused by school), math is made to seem âoefriendly.â To help your students
memorize formulas for the area and circumference of a circle, for example, you might invent this
whole story about âoeMr. C,â who drives around âoeMrs. Aâ and tells her how nice his âoetwo pies
areâ (C = 2Ïr) and how her âoepies are squareâ (A = Ïr2) or some such nonsense"

Yikes. I've never seen something so banal in my own or my kids education. We can agree that's terrible. But I can also stipulate that my kids weren't exposed to it either... has anybody actually been taught that? Was it ever more than a failed experiment? Tried for a few years, found wanting, and then abandoned?

The upshot, in my opinion is that something like the area of a circle, just like my physics 11/12 formulas really SHOULDN'T be taught until after the kids have learned trigonometry, periodic functions, and calculus... because those are necessary to really understand the answer.

There's no reason to memorize the forumula though. Ever. And I'm not sure they are expected to now.

Your linked article also writes:

"Mathematics is the purest of the arts,"

I'd argue that philosophy (logic) is purer still. Mathematics itself is a construct of logic. (And for truly fun mind games, take meta-logic.)

-cheers

Because not everyone needs to do that as much as others.

Well, everyone needs to do it several days a week in math class for the remaining 8 years of school left after they start learning arithmetic, as they learn algebra, analytic geometry, polynomials, pre-calculus... you know, grade school math classes that everyone does.... so there's THAT. Not to mention where it shows up in science ... chemistry and physics.

Arguably you need it more in school, FOR school, than you do as an adult. Although it's pretty valuable too if you want to do any STEM post high school, and STEM is something school SHOULD be preparing kids for, even if most of them don't go that route.

Further in my experience, the kids that have trouble with high school math are frequently hobbled because they can't manipulate basic arithmetic efficiently, and too much of their time and concentration is spent adding, multipliying and dividing coefficients that they don't have anything left to do the actual math. They can't keep up. Homework is a huge chore -- because they are spending hours on arithmetic... 8x - 4= - 4x; they spend their time not on the simple algebra manipulations... but 8+4 = ?, and then 12/3 = ?

Because not everyone who does it 'manually' does it at the same speed. Because some people use tools.

And either way 15 minutes of homework turns into 2 hour marathons and they don't even learn anything because too much time and energy was diverted from learning algebra that it becomes like learning chop wood, but having to carry each log for 20 minutes before you can swing at it. 2 hours of practice, and you've only actually swung at the log 6 times.

You can just memorize a few and then observe simple, basic patterns.

So now your argument isn't that we need to rote memorize the entire multiplication tables, we just need to rote memorize part of the multiplication tables? No shit sherlock.

Pretty much nobody would memorize 100 separate multiplication facts.

The 0, 1, and 10x tables... nobody "memorizes those" as they are just:

0x? = 0
1x? = ?
10x? = ?0

Then 11x? = ?? (not even in the single digit tables, but its so easy you might as well remember this too)

The 2x table is 100% overlapped with addition. If you know 4+4 you know 2x4. So nothing new to remember there either.

Then you can reduce what is left to a diagnonal matrix. Nobody has to remember 9x3 if they know 3x9, etc. The only 9x table fact that need to know is 9x9. The only 8x facts they need are 8x8 and 8x9. The only 7x facts they need are 7x7, 7x8, and 7x9, etc.

The size of the remaining diagnonal matrix is 1+2+3+4+5+6+7 = 28 lousy multiplication facts should be memorized along with a handful of trivial rules. That's the most anyone needs to even TRY to commit to memory to have instant recall of the complete set.

The names of the letters of the alphabet are just as "arbitrary" and there's 26 of those.

Sure if you forget 7x8 one day, recalling 7x5 and counting by 7s to get to 7x8 is perfectly fine, but if your having to do stuff like that all in high school, your seriously handicapping yourself.

You want to graduate and forget everything you knew about history, arithmetic, physics, and chemistry that's fine. You can probably "get along fine" with grade 5 literacy, and the ability to use a calculator for basic arithmetic. Millions do. But that's hardly a good thing.

They think maple syrup grows on trees!

No they don't. It grows IN trees not on them; that's why you need to install a tap.

I've found otherwise.

I don't know what that means. If you need to calculate 7 x 7 how is not being able to recall it, not a significant drawback.

Why do you think that what works for you must work for everyone else, or what doesn't work for you must not work for everyone else?

Because there is no method of arithmetic that doesn't require memorization of at least a significant subset of basic single digit math facts.

I'm going to say something truly outrageous: Different individuals are different.

Different sure. But your claim amounts to them being magical.

I'm trying to be open minded here... but just how do you calculate 7x7 ? Or 9x22 ? How do you simplify 35/56? How do you divide 4/61 to get a decimal?

What technique do you use that allows you to do this easily without being able to recall basic arithmetic facts about single digit addition and multiplication?

You just happen to be super vigilant with your security and if Chrome had implemented a Firefox style password protected password manager it most certainly would not have met your needs either.

It could potentially replace the lowest value vault.

the most worthwhile measure you take above Firefox and Chrome, is that you compartmentalise your passwords

Yes, and its a major failing of all systems out there that compartmentalization isn't better supported at the system level. Not only does the OS fail to guide users to compartmentalizing, it abjectly fails to support it at all.

Some random piece of software I download from the internet shouldn't get read access to my documents folders or be able to root through (on windows) the programdata folders of OTHER installed software by default. It should get access to its OWN programdata folder, it should get access to its own documents. If I want to grant it access to other things, that should be explicit.

As for your argument about key loggers being "harder" to develop than other malware

I didn't make that argument.

I made the argument that it was easier to *detect* keyboard hooks. And that hooking into the keyboard takes longer to compromise the passwords because it has to wait until passwords are typed in -- vs just being able to read them out.

then it stands to reason they could also log attempts to read the password management API.

That's a good point. However, the number of apps that have a legitimate reason to call the password management API is very high. The number of apps that legitimately need to hook into the keyboard apis necessary for keylogging the foreground app is pretty low. You could almost block that by default and require per-app authorization.

The password management API should also default to an app only being able to read its own data out without escalation. There's really no reason for App A being able to read credentials for App B.

Thinking about how app identity would actually be established, I think the on disk filesystem folder path of the running process should be sufficient, assuming that can't be easily spoofed (?)

That would allow updated versions of legitimate software to retrieve credentials stored with the previous version, but still prevent random drive-by processes from doing anything with them.

And that goes back to my complaint that OSes don't do compartmentalization well yet.