youngian

11 ms·

61.
by youngian 17y ago
I agree. It's practically a declaration of war. And someone on their PR team deserves some kudos for writing a release that makes some damning accusations very clear without ever stating them explicitly.
62.
by youngian 17y ago
Yep. Of course the security-minded (read: paranoid) people still cringe at schemes like this (the password generators mentioned above are more secure), I think this is a pretty good compromise for the average person.
63.
by youngian 17y ago
Hi, my name is Ian, and I don't always omit needless words. I'm so sorry.
64.
by youngian 17y ago
That's one of the best arguments for accessibility (and the associated host of issues like semantic HTML and Javascript). Sometimes things you do in the name of accessibility will bring other benefits. I read an interesting analogy in an ar
65.
by youngian 17y ago
Wow, color me corrected. What an impressive example to set.
66.
by youngian 17y ago
The tragic part is that our schooling system often punishes the creative, rich writing the author advocates. The good teachers may recognize it and reward it, but the bad teachers will just take points off because you are "missing an introd
67.
by youngian 17y ago
Yes, and the vast majority of web apps boil down to forms with some flashy bits added. I'm not saying the flashy bits aren't nice, but you should build your forms in such a way that they still work without Javascript. Like I said, Google Ma
68.
by youngian 17y ago
Turning off Javascript is not insane. JS opens you up to a wide range of possible security problems. Also, you can think of it ideologically - websites should still work with JS turned off. Building an accessible, semantic, well-formed we
69.
by youngian 17y ago
Either Alice on stack overflow is tying her profile there to her real-world identity, or she shouldn't be signed up for Gravatar. The whole point of Gravatar is to persist a single identity across multiple sites, so I cannot imagine why you
70.
by youngian 17y ago
I really enjoyed the UI stuff in Ironman. It was futuristic to be sure, but a lot of it struck me as interfaces that, given the technology, a brilliant inventor might actually use. And I'm pretty sure there was an implementation of tabs, pa
71.
by youngian 17y ago
The newest version of grep has --exclude-dir, which handles .svn folders just fine.
72.
by youngian 17y ago
This looks similar to the define: results, but juiced up on steroids. Maybe at some point this will be what you get when you do a define: search?
73.
by youngian 17y ago
I refused to get on FB for years because their privacy policy was so awful (I eventually relented). It's always been one of the worst privacy policies around, which is saying something. I don't want to be the pedant who says "you should hav
74.
by youngian 17y ago
Fascinating. It's interesting to see that their times aren't always the fastest, but they seem able to keep responses speedy on the sites the other two struggle with (bbc and tb4). Maybe that's the prefetching at work?
75.
by youngian 17y ago
It's funny, I was thinking just yesterday about how much Comcast's new Domain Helper "service" makes me want to strangle them ( http://blog.comcast.com/2009/08/domain-helper-national-rollo... ).
76.
by youngian 17y ago
I expected a thought-provoking read, but instead I get the impression that the author doesn't really understand prototyping, or the design process in general. Maybe the end has some brilliant revelation that makes it all worthwhile - I woul
77.
by youngian 17y ago
Do you seriously place as little faith in climate scientists as you would in an astrologer? Obviously it's not as mature a field as, say, medicine, but refusing to believe that any of the results are at all valid is just being wilfully igno
78.
by youngian 17y ago
Very well said. I commented elsewhere that the politicization is also likely the reason for the scientists doing dubious things in the first place - having their life's work under constant attack by reactionary nutjobs probably left them fe
79.
by youngian 17y ago
Is it mathematically possible to accomplish this without another party involved? I can't think of a way, but some mathematicians are pretty clever...
80.
by youngian 17y ago
Fair enough. I'm certainly willing to believe there are some hack scientists in the field. And even if they were all unimpeachable, there's the simple truth that we are very far from understanding the intricacies of the weather. So sure, it
81.
by youngian 17y ago
Please. This is not a "smoking gun." It's another comment that looks bad to the layman, but may well be legitimate science. I don't know because I'm not a climate scientist. And you don't know because you're not a climate scientist.
82.
by youngian 17y ago
I think you've made the mistake of only spending time with the intelligent skeptics. I regretfully inform you they are far from the majority.
83.
by youngian 17y ago
I agree - it would be nice to be able to talk about these things in a healthy academic environment. Sadly, I think that's quite impossible at this point (at least in the U.S.). These scientists were out of line, but I can understand how the
84.
by youngian 17y ago
http://blog.iangreenleaf.com/2009/02/pascal-and-global-warmi... I totally beat you to the punch on this one :D
85.
by youngian 17y ago
You're right - there's no doubt M$ would be happy to use these for offensive purposes. They are evil, after all. But our patent system encourages this behavior whether or not you're evil. If you aren't able to throw your weight around in
86.
by youngian 17y ago
As much as I despise Microsoft and everything they stand for, I'm having trouble faulting them for things like this. The patent system in our country is so insane and out-of-control, it's unwise for a corporation to act as if it isn't. Ther
87.
by youngian 17y ago
Wow, yeah. No one who actually uses OWA on a regular basis could say that with a straight face. Gmail was far superior, right from launch (or at least as close to launch as I got an invite).
88.
by youngian 17y ago
I have particular qualms with this in technical documentation. For example, I'll often be talking about a string or command and put it inside quotes to make clear what is part of the string or command. If that's at the end of the sentence,
89.
by youngian 17y ago
I don't know - I sure hope we get better at communicating subtlety through text, but it seems tough. I, as a fairly sarcastic person, have struggled with this issue for years. When I'd like to throw in some light sarcasm to my online commun
90.
by youngian 17y ago
And in his defense, someone who has not used BeautifulSoup might not realize how robust it is. I was deeply impressed with it when I used it for a scraping project - it's really good at handling tag soup and giving you powerful access to

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