the dogma dvd looks pretty cool.
speaking of which, the Trooper Clerks trailer is pretty awesome as well.
man, TROOPER CLERKS is really well done.
useless telnet is pretty darn cool.
yes, this seems to be a good thing ™
big bust of the “hallucinogenic drug ecstasy.” funny that it’s not hallucinogenic, although ostensibly that’s why it was categorized as a schedule 1 (psychological effects: entactogenesis, empathogenesis, enhancement and sometimes distortion of the senses – mdma faq: “note that MDMA is not known for causing strong visual distortions”). not that i’m necessarily advocating people to roll (see neurotoxicity), but this kind of blatant misinformation (which happens all the time in the name of the public good) really gets me angry. btw, the figure they give is $19.5 million worth retail worth, with 650,000 tablets seized = $30 / tablet. interesting math.
ironic that this primer on the principles of graphic design (which received a mention in the recent id interactive media design review no less) has such vexing interaction design (the lack of feedback when it’s loading up sections for the first time is doubly bad because interactions are based on rollovers, not on clicks – except for some of the navigation which seems to be overloaded with rollover events and on clicks (haven’t quite figured out which is which. also, some of the rollovers are indistinguishable from the normal text… grr)). not that there isn’t some good stuff there if you can get past the annoyance of accidentally (and constantly) rolling over things you don’t mean to. ie i don’t think that we covered tetrad split complements in design 102 class. sounds neat, but unfortunately it doesn’t go deeper (ie, into uses of – but then again, it is a primer). the formal composition systems are also neet. i don’t think i’ve ever used a root rectangle construction when doing layout before.
just happened onto reading some stuff about the tick live action show. there’s a review of the pilot and a preview online. “Empty your bladder of that bitter black urine men call coffee!! It has its price and that price has been paid!!” … “Java Devil, you are now my bitch!”
why can’t we reverse engineer .doc? a semi pointless thread, but there are some interesting messages (not to mention flame wars) in there. jetson123 says:
I think it’s an expedient combination: using object serialization for I/O makes it both easy for Microsoft to read/write data, it makes it difficult for competitors to do anything with the format on other platforms, and it forces users to upgrade their copies of Office with every new release.
This is, in fact, at the heart of what people are complaining about Microsoft: Microsoft adopts strategies that give them a quick time-to-market, lock users into upgrade paths, and that are also effectively exclusionary. I wouldn’t necessarily call that deliberately “evil”. I’m sure many people at Microsoft view it as the natural way of doing software development, and they view everybody else in the industry who bothers with standardized or well-documented formats as people who foolishly waste time and money.
DOC isn’t going to be very important in a few years anyway, Microsoft are moving to XML based everything. Serialization of com services will be XML based rather binary based as they are today as well.
While it may help a little, serializing objects in XML format will not necessarily result in formats that are significantly more readable, accessible, or backwards compatible. To make sense of a big and complex XML model, you still need a formal definition of what it is.
This is really an issue for users and customers: users should insist that their data is in well-documented formats that remain constant and compatible across releases. That’s why many government offices have insisted on using SGML in the past.
Using serialization for document storage is simply poor engineering, whether it is done by Sun or by Microsoft or by anybody else. Skipping the step of formally defining a storage format is expedient to the company but harmful to users. In the long run, users have too much invested in their content to store it in such an ephemeral format.