For basic websites, I highly recommend Universal IE6 CSS.

I've decided that I will never design a website that supports IE6, but instead will only server up this rudimentary (if nice-looking) style sheet. As long as your website is standards-based, compliant, and content-oriented, this CSS file works great. You do, however, have to include some of those annoying <!-- [if lt IE 7]>...<![endif]--> tags.

For web apps, which are more complex, then I use a browser sniff and redirect IE6 users away. I don't care how "bad" or "evil" it is. It's better, to me, for users to know why a page doesn't work, than see a partially loaded page or pile of garbage.

I would ask, why would you even allow password-based logins to your server?

Step ONE for me when setting up a new server is to configure SSH keys for a user account, and disable any kind of login other than key-based.

(Step two is moving SSH off of port 22 to some other port, but that's more to keep script kiddies from trying to brute force their way in even when passwords are disabled!)

It's funny to me that everytime someone posts a whoosh retort, they bottom post.

If the joke or sarcasm is going over their head, shouldn't you, just this once, top post?

Not to support Comcast, or anything, but the easy solution has always been: if you need business-connection quality, buy a business connection!

I have Charter. Some people have trouble with them. However, I never have. I've always had a business connection through them. I get 10Mbps up, 1Mbps down, with excellent customer support, and a static IP; I pay just under $100/month for this connection.

I'm sure you can get faster or cheaper connections elsewhere, but here's the kicker: they don't care if I saturate my bandwidth 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They've told me so, I believe it's part of the contract I signed to get the service. I've never had a problem saturating my connection, any time of day or night. (Note, this connection is in a residential neighborhood.)

The real issue, as many have said, is that they just should not be able to lie about "unlimited" service when they are not providing it. They should be required to provide a minimum up and down speed, state the maximum up and down speed, and explicitly define the total data transfer allotted per month. Then, if the cheap-o plan doesn't work for you, you can upgrade to the next level.

And if you want unlimited data transfer, or the ability to host a server, then you need a business connection. Because that's what a business connection is for!

Worse than talk, supposedly they are planning on making a single movie out of both Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. There are at least 6 or 7 tales told in those two books, each one would almost be capable of filling 2 hours.

I think the only way the Hyperion Cantos could make out of book form would be a long-running serial. Something with a really decent production team, that allowed each character time to build up the story.

Of course, one major problem with that is these stories are fairly depressing. Especially the 5 framed stories in Hyperion. Nothing good happens to anyone, really.*

(And then they are apparently planning on making a single movie out of Illium and Olympos, probably two of the most confusing [and amazing] stories I have ever read. I truly don't understand how that book could be made into a movie.)

-----
* I just received Hyperion and Fall for Christmas, and I'm currently re-reading Fall of Hyperion. I had completely forgotten how the end of the first book just hangs there!

Well, it's alittle overdone, but I think you put alot more thought into your post than was necessary. I mean, he probably started just alittle bit at a time, then added alittle more, then alittle more.

Eventually, well, there was just alot going on, but it really is alot cooler than the original.

:-)

I'm not trying to pick a fight, but I disagree (a little).

I recently was replaying Shadow of the Colossus. To me, there is a game that exemplifies art. It was beautiful to watch, immersive, playing it was unlike anything I had played before, and the story was deep and dramatic. (It even ended on a sad note for those who believe that anything that makes you happy can't be art.)

Forcing someone to play through an hour of boring, everyday tasks is less than art. It's not even very creative (in my opinion). How many movies and books and other things have been made that focus on everyday things?

Or, for that matter, how many games already been made where the user gets to choose between decisions (Black-and-White, Fate [I think], that one with the biological superhero)? Every time, while the game is interesting, the decision making process is hampered by the vary fact that a game is limited to what the designers have already though up. Currently, decision-based games are more like choose-your-own-adventure books. The decisions are more thrown in to add "replay value" than to truly give the user choices. (Save the baby, or let it die? Play it twice, to see the different cut-scenes! Yay, more hours of gameplay...)

The gaming medium as art has to be more than just taking a movie or book and slapping lame controls on it. That's like doing a crayon drawing in oils, and calling it art. It needs to incorporate what makes games different than the other mediums.

When I read the (mostly vague) descriptions of the game in the article, all I could think of was that the author summed up the game early on:

(Emphasis Mine)

I'm aware that there is more to the game than this, but I think what makes a video game interesting is the way it abstracts you from the real world. How is this game going to abstract mundane details of everyday life in a way that isn't just boring? It's too bad the author didn't expand on any more details.

There really isn't anything in this review that makes me think the game shows promise, despite the Slashvertisment's summary.

Actually, a lot of FOSS tell you what you can and can't do, just as well. For example: with GPL, you can't modify the application, and release the new version under a different license.

As pointed out above, copyright is a large part of the reason the current FOSS software community currently works.

Even BSD licensed software requires that you include a copy of the license, and you can't use the original developer(s) names to endorse the new ones.

Who else read that as:

Yahoo !== Bing

Which, technically is still true, but is kind of the opposite of the intended comment!

While I agree with the need for this for desktop applications, there are some real issues with it for web sites. Namely, lining up graphics.

Anyone who develops intelligently already tries to define all measurements in ems. Ems are resolution independent, and have great accuracy (3 decimal places).

However, if you want to develop any relatively complex visual design, you will end up with slices, and those slices must line up perfectly. Except, when using relative measurements and scaled graphics, it doesn't always work out. Many sites when scaled end up having weird graphic glitches, especially when using CSS sprites.

The solution is several-fold:

• We need to get the CSS border-image working in every browser. This single-handedly could change the ability for designers to work with more advanced layouts. (We wouldn't even need box-shadow anymore, since an all-black alpha-transparent PNG is very, very small, even if it is huge pixel-wise.)
• We also need better layout components in (X)HTML. Currently, the only way to build a web app is with tons of JavaScript manually performing layout. It feels like I am developing code for the late 1990s. We need boxes we can layout using relative positioning, that takes into account both width and height of the parent component. The box model has some incredibly frustrating choices — like basing the width of a box on the contents, excluding border, padding, and margin — that make pure CSS solutions effectively impossible.
• Another big issue, for now, is the size of alpha-transparent PNG images. If these were more reasonable, it would be easier to design in a res-independent manner. Bug as of now, any image that has color often ends up in the 25K+ range. Add a handful of these in, and you can make a page load very slowly. The only solution for this, sadly, is ensuring that everyone has access to true high-speed internet.

Sometimes I get the most frustrated because the W3C specs are always so overcomplicated. Look at border-radius, for example. I would guess that 99% of the use of this would be to simply specify a single radius. Usually the designer just wants to soften the corner of a box. However, the spec includes elliptical corners, which has to significantly complicate the design of it. It also doesn't specify (I believe) that the content inside should be clipped automatically, leading to useless designs where interior components stick out past the radius. (At least, that's what happens in FF, which isn't 100% compatible.) Of course, with border-image, we once again don't need border-radius as much.

Of course, with IE9 only just now supporting border-radius, and Opera not supporting it yet at all, we'll probably not see more advanced CSS+HTML-only interfaces for another 5-10 years. By then, who knows what we'll be working on!

I completely agree, but I have two comments:

1. For those who don't know, removing the "/index.cfm/*", "/index.aspx/*", "index.php/*", etc is a simple mod_rewrite rule on any Apache server, and I'm certain there are easy fixes on other servers.

   Any decent web dev should be setting that up first, before even thinking about developing a website. Then you can easily change technologies later while maintaining your URLs.

   You should never be able to see the technology of a website in the URL. At a minimum, rewrite blah.html to your actual server technology.

2. As far as Twitter is concerned, the limit on number of characters is due to phone texting — not just their own system.

<rant>Of course, I can't stand Twitter or the twats that use it, but at least I can usually just ignore it.</rant>

Also, as a joke, this is the current URL I am at:
tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/14/184256/URL-Shorteners-Get-Some-Backup?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

niiice... :-)

I doubt very much they made more with this experiment than before.

Based on the charts / average price paid from the article, they made about $115,129 (probably about a hundred more, I skipped really low data points) on 56,714 sales. They admitted that they lost money on every sale below $0.30, and they had to pay up to 13% to PayPal in fees even when they made money.

I think for any game to have made 56,000 sales (which implies as many as 56,000 new customers to support), but only bring in a little over $100K, that's not a great revenue, unless you are using the iPhone / other app store model.

To look at it another way, at $20 per copy, they only had to sell around 5700 copies, and the profit margin should be significantly higher without Paypal fees.