Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
nevermind freezing my head, just upload my soul!
by Franz
I’m reading Ray Kurzweil who says the the Singularity is Near. While nay-sayers claim his science is questionable, I say he sounds pretty bright to me. The basic gist is because of exponential growth in technology (ie Moore’s law) we’re on the cusp of revolutionary changes in what it means to be human. We will transcend our bodies through technologies ranging from advanced medical DNA engineering to nano technology and the internet itself. We will become immortal within 20 years. (…says Ray)
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Concrete5 Says Goodbye to Internet Explorer 6
by Andrew Embler
…For editing, at least. Sites built with Concrete5 will work in any browser, if they’re coded for it. But the editing interface and the dashboard, both of which feature some pretty complex interface work, are only supported in:
- Safari 2+
- Internet Explorer 7+
- Firefox 2
Other browsers, like Camino and Opera, will likely support Concrete5 just fine. But IE 6 will not. Not even close. As I was mulling over this blog post I caught another one on the same topic. It seems that Apple is doing exactly the same thing with their forthcoming suite of web applications, MobileMe.
Not bad company to be in, and necessary. The sheer amount of time that goes into debugging things for one specific, eight-year-old browser is mind-boggling. However, dropping IE 6 support is not without its pitfalls: the sheer amount of time saved might overwhelm the typical developer, as she finds herself with much less to do and much less stress about the web in general. The key is to fill this time with something productive. Try tending a garden; read a lengthy Russian novel; teach yourself Spanish; take a cooking class.
(Oh, and install that IE 8 beta in some of your free time - it’ll be released before you know it. And Firefox 3 just came out, so you’d better download that. And Opera 9.5. And Safari 4 is on the horizon.)
Maybe you’d better read a shorter novel after all.
Developers are Human, too
by Andrew Embler
From the beginning, Concrete has been designed as a system that makes the creation of pages easy, with a flexible “block” system available for placing items of content within these pages. As Concrete has matured, new data types have been created for different types of tasks. In Concrete5, for example, we have all sorts of these: single pages, page types, themes, blocks, elements, user attributes, page attributes, email templates, and more.
Back from the Yucatan
by ttrupp
So, after a bit too much sun and tequilla, I’m back at work after a couple of weeks on the Yucatan. Back to the “real world”. It’s a bit of an adventure emersing yourself in a foriegn country where you barely speak the language. The strange thing is that first week I was surrounded by not spanish speakers, but chain smoking germans. I was studying at a small spanish school down there where most of the residents were from northern europe. Fortunately for me, most of the europeans knew about 4 or 5 languages, so english became the spoken language when I was in the room. I was staying in Playa Del Carmen, which is a cool little beach town that has become the fastest growing city in North America. It’s a lot cheaper & more laid back than the spring-break-partier destination of Cancun to the north. After refreshing my poor Spanish skills in Playa I rented a car (driving in Mexico is insane btw. One-way streets and individual lanes are sort of arbitrary concepts there). I headed south to spend a few days in these primitive cabana-bungalows in Tulum, which turned out to be on a nude beach. Then ventured inland to explore the various mayan ruin sites around the peninsula. Uxmal was probably the highlight. A good trip all and all. It definity served its intended purpose of giving some time to reflect and to momentarily re-evaluate this strange american culture we live in.
The Business of Bullshit.
by Andrew Embler
Hey all, this is Andrew. I’m Director of Technology here at Concrete Websites, and I’m going to take the reins from Franz for a second.
I’ve been making websites for more than ten years – first as a production/HTML guy, then a web and database programmer, and now as a director of some very talented programmers. Through it all, a number of things have remained constant. One of those is the impressive amount of bullshit involved when talking about the web. For example, in preparing for this post I took a trip to The Web Economy Bullshit Generator, and while its layout is dated, its content is as hilarious and spot-on today as it was when it debuted. And as the web changes, new sites have arisen to chronicle its changing lexicon. Everyone, it seems, is hatin’ on buzzwords.
out of print - the death of the newspaper.
by Franz
Just catching up on my New Yorker articles and read this interesting one by Eric Alterman about the death of the newspaper.
Yes, newspapers are dying, in fact - they predict the last one will be delivered to the last door on 2043 (not sure how they came to that, but yay for trees.)
The real point I took from the article was “good God! this is horrid, because original reporting is HARD and EXPENSIVE… Blogging is all well and good, but all bloggers do is pontificate and comment on other original sources”… which to a great degree is true.. (omg, is that me admitting to being full of bs?)