public marks

PUBLIC MARKS with search dumb

This year

A better way to use icon fonts — yatil. Eric Eggert about web development & design.

by Spone
There are some browser and screen reader combinations that treat CSS not only as a presentational thing, but apply meaning according to the used properties. For example some won’t read a list if you use list-style: none; in your CSS. This assumes that the meaning of your HTML is overwritten by the visual style: If it doesn’t look like a dumb bullet list, it must be no list at all. I’m not sure I conclude with that assumption, but that isn’t the main point of the article here.

2011

Forrester to your IT dept: Let them use Macs — Apple News, Tips and Reviews

by night.kame

Snow Leopard clients have tons of issues with SMB shares and we had to dumb down our Windows 2008 R2 security because Mac’s cant connect to it.

We used to be able to get help from Apple, but the department we worked with is gone. Apple does not care about the Enterprise at all.

La seule entreprise qui intéresse Apple, c'est Apple.

Q: I don't understand book lengths. How can books have the same number of pages but have different word counts?

by night.kame & 1 other

Books need to be a predictable size; they have to be manufactured to a price, stored, transported and displayed. Then they have to fit on home bookshelves. People tend to like books that are easy to read, handle, and store. We generally like and need novels to be certain sizes. If you picked up a diary-sized novel in a series one day and the sequel was the size of a family bible, you'd probably find that annoying. I know many readers won't buy hardcovers and wait for mass market paperback editions simply because the regular size of "MMPBs" fits their bookcase, or is easier to carry around.

So, production editors and typographers do a very clever job of smoothing out that big variation using white space and font sizes to get more words on each page - or fewer. They're so good at doing it that a manuscript of 100,000 words can be made into a book that is identical in overall size to one up to twice the length. Don't believe me? Pick a few books at random, do a word count, and then look at the appearance of the pages. You won't notice it unless you're looking for it.

[...]

Page count doesn't mean a thing. It doesn't tell you how much book you're getting for your money. And, to be brutal, if your evaluation of any book is based on how many words you get rather than the impact it has on you and how well it's written - well, that's just dumb. Sorry, but it is. It's not like a pound of apples for 50 pence being better value than a pound for 75 pence. You're not being short-changed if you get a shorter novel. And left wanting more is not being short-changed. It's what good books are supposed to do.

[...]

So don't get hung up about counting pages. A book is as long as it needs to be to tell the story. Just open it, and enjoy.

2010

Derek Powazek - 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments

by Spone
The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better. I think that’s because Bob’s partly right: comments do suck sometimes. So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.)

The Way the Future Blogs, an online memoir by science fiction writer Frederik Pohl » Blog Archive » Isaac, Part 5 in our continuing series

by night.kame

The publishing of science fiction in book form in the U.S. had just begun, and I wanted Isaac to get in on it. The trouble was that Doubleday, the most interesting of the hardcover houses, had decided that they wanted new works, not reprinted serials taken from the pulps. (It was a dumb decision, and later, when they realized what they were missing out on and reversed it they made a fortune out of those old Foundation and robot books.)

Quand l'éditeur ne juge plus les oeuvres mais se contente de fixer une politique, il échoue dans son travail.

Some People Can’t Read URLs « Not The User’s Fault

by ghis & 1 other (via)
Reactions seem divided into two camps. One camp is having a great laugh at the stupidity of the users – after all, how could they look at a page with a red masthead, titled “ReadWriteWeb”, featuring a news article, and think they were on the Facebook login page? How could they be smart enough to figure out how to leave a comment, but too dumb to know what site they were on? The other camp, for example an article from blogger Funkatron called We’re the stupid ones is pointing the finger at the software world for assuming that everyone knows as much about computers as we do, and more specifically at Google – after all, isn’t this in some way Google’s screw-up for returning the wrong result?

2009

S.Lott-Software Architect: Privacy and Encryption

by karlcow

Without an applicable encryption standard -- and some boundaries on what's really required -- I think these legal initiatives will do more harm than good. To prevent the various risks, companies will do dumb things. Things that are probably dumber than what they've done that lead to leaks of personal information.

sqworl

by parmentierf
Sqworl is this thing that you can use to turn a bunch of long dumb website links into one single smaller link with pretty web previews.

2008

Shakespeare's Sonnet 23

by tadeufilippini (via)
SONNET 23 As an unperfect actor on the stage Who with his fear is put besides his part, Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage, Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart. So I, for fear of trust, forget to say The perfect ceremony of love's rite, And in mine own love's strength seem to decay, O'ercharged with burden of mine own love's might. O, let my books be then the eloquence And dumb presagers of my speaking breast, Who plead for love and look for recompense More than that tongue that more hath more express'd. O, learn to read what silent love hath writ: To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

2007

Boing Boing: Google Video robs customers of the videos they "own"

by mbertier (via)
This is a giant, flaming middle finger, sent by Google and the studios to the customers who were dumb trusting enough to buy DRM videos. How many of these people will trust the next DRM play from Google (no doubt coming soon from YouTube) or the studios?

IdiotBrain - Because People are Stupid

by lukeslytalker
IdiotBrain is a news blog highlighting mankinds’ stupidity. These articles show we are as dumb now as we were 5000 years ago.

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