Bet you wouldn't say that if Bennet had posted this story. But the again it would have been a philosophical piece about how while he likes the color blue, its not his favorite color blue, and how he wished that all error display screens should be *his* favorite blue color...
Awesome. Thanks for that. It almost makes having to suffer through Bennet's use of slashdot as his personal blog worth it, just to see it satirized like this.
She slept with this guy and "coincidentally" her game floated to the top of his list. At the very least it is a conflict of interest.
Whose conflict of interest? I can see how it would be a conflict of interest for the journalist to single out the game like that. I'm not sure what the developers conflict of interest is though.
So lets jump off the deepend straight to accusations that she is a manipulative woman willing to have sex with a journalist to get exposure. Even if that were true, so what? She's not the one required to maintain journalistic integrity. That's on the journalist.
Or maybe the journalist was using his position in the industry to try and get laid. Why aren't we calling him out as a total creep, with no integrity, selling female indie developers exposure for sex? Perhaps he initiated the offer by hinting he'd plug her work if they hooked up?
Or maybe its neither? Maybe two people got together out of some sort of mutual attraction. And the journalist, clearly holding her and her work in some regard makes a bad judgement call to make favorable mention of her work without disclosing the relationship. End of story? Why do we know its not that?
Is there any evidence this was a deliberate attempt to get a favorable review, as opposed to being merely a deliberate attempt by both parties to get laid with the subsequent favorable mention as nothing more than a poor judgement call by the journalist?
Security questions do not work for public figures.
Security questions do not work for ANYONE.
Most attackers know you, and have better than even odds of guessing your security questions. Your ex-girlfriend... She knows your birthday (duh), your mothers maiden name? (she was even at grandma's funeral), she knows all about your first gerbil Roscoe, and she knows your youngest siblings name, your favorite colour, what city you were born in, your first car, your likely answer to favorite food...
Most of your friends can probably do better than 50% on the list above.
And if you are on facebook, good odds a random stranger can get most of what they need to. Even if you don't announce it all or put fake info in your profile. Your mom send you "Happy Birthday" message anyway and you are sunk.
Use one very strong password for the password manager.
Actually, I recommend using multiple safes/vaults/etc with different passwords; make the passwords appropriate to the contents of the safe; and treat the safes appropriate relative to their contents.
My safe with my passwords for throwaway email accounts and forum accounts, club memberships, etc is fairly simple. (It still counts as strong by all usual metrics, but its easy for me to remember and type in, which is good because I have to type it several times a day on average -- sometimes via a smartphone keyboard. Its sync'd via cloud to my smart phone, laptop, work computer, etc.
My safe with passwords for my life savings, domain registrar, email account and other assets which would be quite devastating to lose is MUCH longer and stronger, and it isn't synchronized with my devices. (Actually I have 4 - 5 safes with different groups of passwords in them.)
If you use a strong enough password then you'll be fine.
Unless you get hit with a keylogger. Then you lose everything. Does it really even make sense to have your online pay-parking app passwords and your numbered offshore banking in the same vault? All protected by the same password?
Its just silly.
And its another reason why I've split things up. If the phone gets compromised, my high value passwords aren't even in it. My higher value password safes get opened less frequently and on fewer systems, so a keylogger will have to be in the right system and wait longer to get into them -- giving me better odds of dodging the bullet, and more time to detect and remove them.
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"
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)
Chunks of the site can't be reached from mobile at all - how do I get to "Jobs" or "Advertising" from a smartphone?
And on the desktop, parts of the site can't be reached depending on the size of the browser window and we're not talking perversely small either: that "more" popup menu on the desktop starts losing sections outright at around 1100px). 1100px is too narrow! Want a job at mashable? They don't have a section for that unless your on a widescreen.
Worse, if you shrink the page below 1000px wide, you start losing content columns off the home page too -- they're just gone. You can't scroll horizontally to get to them, and unlike the mobile version which displays one column at a time with a column selector to switch, that selector doesn't appear on the desktop. If you shrink your window, you just lose columns. No selector, no scrolling, the content is just gone.
Additionally the column selector names are different from the desktop column headers... "What's new" is renamed "New" for space and that's fine as the translation is preserved. But "The Next Big Thing" is renamed "Rising" for space -- that's a navigation cue that got lost in translation. If I were to say, 'Look for the article under "The Next Big Thing", ' nobody is going to make that connection.
Completely tangential...
The link you gave, to your site, contains "Disproof of Turing completeness"
However, the process of Pick-a-Winner is equivalent to Russian roulette. As stated above, Apple Inc. refuses to digitally sign a program implementing the rules of Russian roulette. But any universal Turing machine can run Pick-a-Winner. Therefore, a machine that refuses to execute a program that Apple has not signed cannot be Turing complete because Pick-a-Winner is excluded from programs that it can run. This makes an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad without a developer license or jailbreak not a general-purpose computer, QED.
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
Adding features does not necessarily increase functionality -- it just makes the manuals thicker.
