In three quick screencasts, JD Dalton investigates Alex Russell’s poorly-backed claims about the cost of feature detection & feature testing, by doing some great research and producing actual data…
Molly Lambert, In Which We Teach You How To Be A Woman In Any Boys’ Club
There’s so much good stuff in there, I honestly couldn’t really decide what to quote. Just read it, mkay?
Stu Robson with a valid complaint regarding CSS3 Media Queries-optimized site designs showing only navigation and no content at the top.
Short URL: http://farukat.es/p532
Basil Safwat with an excellently detailed analysis of why the UI for closing tabs is superior on Chrome:
What has happened here? Well, while Safari resizes the width of the remaining tabs to fill…
Earlier today I tweeted a link to a Sitemeter page showing a massive drop in Gawker traffic. At first I thought the Sitemeter system was just incapable of accurately measuring traffic in…
The other day, Mozilla Tech Evangelist Paul Rouget explained why he doesn’t consider IE9 to be a modern browser. The IE team at Microsoft, fairly, responded to Paul’s critiques, albeit with a…
Seems the Motorola Xoom is available for pre-order at Best Buy for the insane-but-unconfirmed price of $1,199. You can buy an 11” MacBook Air with 128GB SSD drive and 2GB RAM for that money. Or,…
Horace Dediu goes over Microsoft’s previous strategic mobile partners. It’s embarrassing how utterly catastrophic the results have been with all of them, but it’s not surprising if you look at…
kubi:
I don’t necessarily agree with all the criteria listed, nor do I feel qualified to say whether those price suggestions are fair for the amount of work involved on the studios’ part, but this is…
I thoroughly disagree with the “Pricing” criteria. Pirating a movie because the legitimate avenues for obtaining the movie are too expensive is just plain theft.
This is disturbing, they’re attempting to reconcile the concept of theft by referendum. I’ll give them credit for one thing, they put their names faces and a bit of their professional credentials in the “about” page.
This is crap. The price for something is in stone, it’s value is what people will pay for that, not what consumers decide it should be sold for.
What you’re missing is two things. First the international angle, and second: actually making something available for purchase.
I think the price aspect is fair to have in such a manifest, though again, I don’t know if their suggested prices are fair. I can’t comment on that, so I won’t. What I can comment on is that in Europe, there are legal ways of “enjoying movies/TV content” the same way our American friends do, but the price is kind of steep: $1,000+ for anything. How? Why? Because it requires us to fly out to the U.S. to experience it.
There’s a huge time and money investment for people outside of the U.S., especially in Europe, to legally participate in enjoying movies and TV shows alongside our U.S-based friends. With the advent of the Internet, that geographic divide got evaporated overnight, and it makes delays for multimedia to come across the pond seem ridiculous and artificial. Especially in the face of broadband internet access, giving people the ability to download a full Blu-ray version of a new movie in half an hour, weeks before that movie opens in theaters here.
So give it some thought before calling it “crap”—they’re trying to reach out to studios in an attempt at improving the situation, in an attempt to get the studios the money that these people themselves think the studios deserve to make. The reality is just that studios have made it so difficult for huge numbers of consumers to legally and conveniently enjoy their content, that many of them have taken up the illegal-but-so-much-more-enjoyable alternative. We can’t all fly to the U.S. to go see a movie, and we don’t all want to avoid using the Internet just because a show like Lost airs its episodes four months later here.
You may say, “that’s your own problem, not a justification for theft” and while you’d be right, it omits the aspect that the studios make shows like Lost in order to make money by entertaining us, and if they air them 4 months later here and we get everything spoiled, we don’t get entertained and thus lose interest in paying money for it. This whole effort is an attempt to keep commerce going and get content creators rewarded for their work.
You see it as “attempting to reconcile the concept of theft by referendum,” I see it as people trying hard to be legitimate consumers in the face of geographical discrimination.
And to wrap up, Aaron Gustafson has a good list of reasons why JavaScript might be disabled for web developers to take into consideration.
Short URL: http://farukat.es/p522
I don’t necessarily agree with all the criteria listed, nor do I feel qualified to say whether those price suggestions are fair for the amount of work involved on the studios’ part, but this is…
If we live in a culture in which certain abuses are always, inherently, unforgivably horrible and wrong, then the responsibility for those abuses always rests upon the perpetrator, who has done something horrible and wrong.
If we live in a culture in which some people are unvalued enough that we are allowed to commit certain abuses upon their bodies without those abuses being considered horrible and wrong,
Then the responsibility lies with those unvalued people for acting/living/being in unvalued ways, and “choosing” to be unvalued becomes the thing that is horrible and wrong, because it was the existence of an unvalued person that created the abuse and the rape (instead of the existence of a perpetrator).
And if those unvalued people are not born with a birthmark that says “unvalued”, if they are not an inherent biological class, then that un-value must be acquired through behavior and appearance and activity.
And if that un-value can be acquired, then anybody may acquire it, accidentally or purposefully.
And if anybody may acquire that un-value, then anybody may be abused with abandon, provided they bear a passing resemblance to the unvalued class (note: this applies to raped and abused men, too, who will have their masculinity mocked as a way to identify them with the rapeable unvalued class).
And then you end up with “women who are ruining it for the rest of us.”
What that really means is, there are women who deserve to be raped and abused, and by their very existence, they put me in danger of being raped and abused, because somebody might mistake me for them.
These ideas — the cheapening of abuse and women who make it worse for other women — can only exist in a culture that already believes that abuse can be cheapened, and that some people deserve to be abused. If we believed that abuse was always wrong, no matter who the victim (or who the perpetrator), abuse could not possibly be cheapened, and no woman could ruin it for another.
If these ideas exist in your brain, if you have said these words, it’s because you swallowed this line completely. It’s because you believe some people deserve to be abused. That’s a dangerous and frightening belief to have. If you believe that some people deserve to be abused, if you open that door, you might find that you or somebody you love is behind it. And they totally deserved it, too.
By now I’m basically just quoting from every other piece The Girl links me to for excellent reading-ness (and because I’m researching the topic), but, yeah. So good. So true.
David DeSandro’s new Isotope plugin is a must-see thing of beauty. While it doesn’t quite give us the full richness of CoreAnimation as Cocoa developers know it, it does give us some of the UI…
I can understand the “gosh, that strip’s puerile” reaction, but I just certainly don’t understand the “those guys are making light of rape, they’re monsters!” reaction.
Again, the majority of the problem here is how they responded to the negative criticism of the strip, not the strip itself. Telling a maybe-borderline joke is one thing. When rape victims say, “Hey, maybe that wasn’t the best idea for a joke” and your response is to mock them and troll them and sell t-shirts so that you can line your pockets with money spent to mock and troll rape victims, then that is an entirely different thing. That latter is in fact a pretty good signal that you are overdue for some personal re-evaluation.
TL;DR links for the eager:
Earlier this week I was working on a project that involved one larger animation during which several…
Brown the butter in a large, high-walled frying pan. Slice the chicory in thin (5mm) little strips and add to the butter. Stir regularly until clear/transparent-ish.
Add 1 Liter of boiling water. Add mushroom bouillon (a.k.a. stock; use vegetable stock if you don’t have mushroom stock). Stir occasionally and cook through for 6-7 minutes, adding the chopped mushrooms around 4 minutes in.
Serves 3-4.
I made a jQuery plugin for doing more comprehensive animations in JavaScript. Nutshell: it allows you to execute given code at keyframes you specify, so that you can chain any sequence of code or animations in the exact order you want. Useful for interactions where you need delays between things. Links:
jQuery Runloop plugin on github Demo page Documentation Announcement post Enjoy, web devs.
As of a few weeks ago, Authentic Jobs and portions of this site have been running on Happy Cog Hosting. So far it’s been very reliable, and the customer service has been top-notch.
The doors are now open for a limited public beta. But take note, this isn’t a replacement to your $10/month host. Instead,
It’s for people who are tired of managing their own infrastructure and would rather have someone else do it. It’s for sites with impressive traffic and bandwidth requirements. It’s also not for people who want to manage every aspect of their infrastructure through a feature-saturated control panel. It’s about professionals working with professionals and delivering respectful, attentive service. It’s rock-solid, white glove hosting for people who cringe at the idea of hosting.
There’s only one plan and only one price: $799/month. If you’re running a LAMP stack implementation and fit the profile above, please get in touch with me here or on Twitter. I have some invitations I’d love to hand out.
Looks like a great offering for people who fit those needs. That’s not me by any stretch, but I know there’s a sizable audience for this out there.
Nate Silver:
Imagine that you opened an Italian restaurant across the street from Mario Batali’s Lupa. It would be one thing if you merely took inspiration from Lupa’s spaghetti carbonara — if…
Jason Cohen with a fascinating in-depth (yet concise) article on color theory and color wheels. A must-read.
(via The Girl)
Short URL: http://farukat.es/p508
Great Sitepoint tutorial by Raena Jackson Armitage, on making an interesting, progressively enhanced photo gallery. It’s a good resource to start with if you’ve not used Modernizr before.
Short…
