Farlops Industries

• A nice simple article about what I mean when I say “semantic HTML“.
• Macromedia, responding to ongoing pressure from Web accessibility advocates, continues to improve the accessibility of it’s products. Good. If people insist on using it, at least make it accessible.
• Ooh! Really, really, really big iron! I am envious!
• Google’s effectiveness as search tool can be exploited maliciously.
• A web site that helps you plot a route past the security cameras of NYC.
• Is room tempurature superconductivity possible by way of carbon nanotubes?

I installed XP Pro on my laptop the day before yesterday. Spent today tweaking it for my taste and to increase performance. Having Win2K, I saw no need to upgrade to XP (I left the unstable world of Win9x behind forever, save for legacy games, more than three years ago.) but, someone gave me a copy as a gift so, I had to see what it was like.

Ugh! They Macified it! (By the way, nothing against Apple, it’s just that my interface habits are not Mac interface habits.)

So the first things I did was to revert everything to the bland, Win2K interface and to remove all the useless fades, sounds, slides and dancing baloney. I kept Cleartype.

Cleartype is one of the few really useful things that MS has done in a few years aside from getting rid of that paperclip. If you have XP, or whatever new thing MS assaults us with in 2 years, install it. It really makes a difference.

Went into MMC and turned off a lot of useless daemons like bandwidth reserving, error notification, wireless support and music player support.

I also highly recommend turing off telenet, if you have it installed. Telenet is totally insecure and utterly useless on an NT box. Use a Windows port of secure shell for talking to UNIX flavored boxes instead.

Another bit of advice: Do not get XP Home. XP Home is a crippled version of the NT kernal for the dubious purpose of keeping things simple for the greenhorns. Don’t get it. You can hack XP Home a bit to restore some of the security and functionality left out by MS but why bother? Save a little more money and get XP Pro.

It’s been a while since I’ve said anything so, before I go to sleep tonight, I’d like to provide a statement about why I remain mostly closed mouth about Microsoft or other religious disputes.

I will only state the following:

• The command line is always best but only in the hands of someone who really knows how to use it. Most people don’t have the time or inclination to gain the experience and expertise, hence the need for the desktop metaphor or whatever new interface supplants it.
• Which graphical user interface, barring obvious mistakes that anyone can agree on (Like dragging a disk to trash to eject it or using the start button to shutdown your computer.), has the best usability will always remain a matter of dispute. Is Mac, X, Windows, BeOS or some other the best design? We’ll never settle this because different people use the same tools in different ways.
• Commodity hardware is cheaper but having closed hardware is cheaper too because there is less variation to support. Apple is occasionally just a tad more expensive but this gap tends to vanish or grow depending on which thing you are measuring. Thus this issue will never be settled.
• Open source is in many ways better than closed source but as long as closed source remains more profitable it will continue to exist. Proprietary secrets are as old as tools themselves.
• When 90% of all the hardware in all the consumer electronics are Intel chips and running Microsoft software, then the governments will crack down. This hasn’t happened yet. It may never happen. The Internet, at least according to Netcraft, is still mostly some flavor of unix.