Home

Design

Microsoft Formally Confesses: Windows was Crap

Posted by garym on Tue, 06/13/2006 - 11:35

For over a decade I had told people that the Windows operating system was never intended to be used on a network computer, that it was dangerous and irresponsible to do so. I was told this first in 1989 by a Microsoft engineer sent to school us about Windows 3.x, and again beta-testing Win95; I've seen the quote in print several times since then, clearly saying "Not recommended for Untrusted Connections" -- Did anyone listen to me?

Not to my knowledge, no. And here now today, believe it or not, Microsoft is coming clean about the whole thing, confessing their incompetence and finally formally retracting that code base which has seduced and frauded us into our virus laden reality of modern computing. Or maybe it's just a money-grab stunt to scaremonger the tardy into dropping another grand or two to upgrade into the newest bestest next pot of similarly 'expert-crafted' OS wares. Am I making this up? Nope, sorry:

Microsoft said it wasn't feasible to make extensive changes to eliminate a security vulnerability since the underlying architecture of Windows Explorer for older versions of Windows is much less robust, wrote Christopher Budd, a program manager with Microsoft's security response center.

"Due to these fundamental differences, these changes would require reengineering a significant amount of a critical core component of the operating system," Budd said.
[ via PCWorld.com - Users of Aged Windows Face Risk ]

read it again. louder. and as of July 11, Microsoft says they wash their hands of the whole scam, no fixes, no apologies, no reimbursements, just cut it loose, wave goodbye, so long suckers, and move on to new game.

Understanding Drupal Themes

Posted by garym on Tue, 08/03/2004 - 11:22

For those new to Drupal, you usually just want to get started with a site that doesn't look like Drupal.org. Here's a quickie guide to getting the site you want out of the code we all share.

To start off, a Drupal distribution contains many alternative _themes_ but this is really a misnomer: the 'themes' listed in the admin pages really means _theme engines_ -- Drupal's modular design has led to many different alternative ways of producing output, each with it's own pet ways of page production. Some themes involve template files loaded and then populated with data values, others just render the page directly. This guide will show you how to wrap your head around this multi-layer approach and hopefully get you on your way to full drupality.  read more »

Wired on eXtreme Programming

Posted by garym on Sat, 08/23/2003 - 08:37

The New X-Men is a tale of two programmers and the new revolution in escaping from the Priests of Process into actually getting things done through binding developers like a pair of Vonnegut twins:

Traditional coding devotes a huge amount of time to up-front planning, then demands rigid adherence to that plan. XP is different. Programmers spend relatively little time planning and instead dive into the writing, making course corrections as needed and allowing better ideas to emerge after snippets of code are tested and assessed. The result is a speedy loop: plan, code, test, release, plan, code, test.

Does it work? Just ask the people who use it.

[ Source: Wired 11.09: The New X-Men ]

Beauty in CSS Design

Posted by garym on Wed, 08/06/2003 - 09:22

Teledynamics advocates CSS based, table-less webpage design in all our webprojects, and the interactive CSS Zen Garden is a graphic illustration of why stylesheets are the only reasonable way to manage website layout, and why graphic designers should take CSS very seriously.

What do you buy when you go CSS? The freedom to re-invent yourself and the complete separation of the church of technology from the state of design. For example, unlike the bare, haphazard and ad-hoc page design you'd get on sites like this one, when your website HTML is coded for stylesheets, you can still get all the benefit of a top-notch technology guru and yet be free to engage other aesthetic talents to give your websites that added flair.

And, as the interactive selection through dozens of alternate CSS swaps in the Zen Garden show, building your websites to stylesheets also means you can dramatically re-groove your design without re-engaging the expensive code guru!

[ Source: css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design ]

12next ›last »