rant

By this point, we are all more or less familiar with Adobe Software. Their format PDF, a bastardization of PostScript (which is also their invention) has become ubiquitous on the internet as a means of transferring files in a true WYSIWYG fashion. Many websites use PDF for a great deal of content because HTML is not WYSIWYG - it is displayed differently by every browser and users can apply their own styles to documents, further altering them from the designer's intent.

Over at the best page in the universe, Maddox has carefully crafted a diatribe against Sony that I feel sums up my feelings (with perhaps more profanity than I would have used here, but not in person.)

I've been using Dreamweaver off and on since version 2. When it's working, it's an amazing little product (assuming you like supposedly-WYSIWYG HTML editors) that provides all kinds of nice functionality. It's also more WYSIWYG than any other editor I've tried - although that's not saying much.

Unfortunately, this is a software package that has actually gotten worse as time has passed. The quality of HTML has been steadily degrading, and the style sheet handling is poor at best. You can apply styles to a text element that precisely match a style you have in your style sheet and you still end up with four new styles in the document itself.

One of the hottest trends on the internet today is online gambling. Chances are that you or someone you know plays or has played some game online for money - usually poker, which is by far the most popular game to play on the internet. But the USA has instituted a ban on internet gambling sites which actually operate within its borders, claiming that the sites will simply be money-laundering factories and, of course, will promote the degeneracy of the American people.

While browsing the ol' dot I saw a link to an article in the beeb about the Rockstar game Bully in which a spokesman from Beat Bullying, a british "anti-bullying" charity was reported as saying something that I personally found both offensive and downright stupid. This prompted me to write the following letter to info@beatbullying.org:

Lately, technology-related news sites have been swamped with information on the fallibility of electronic voting machines. Diebold, whose president promised to do everything in his power to "deliver" Ohio's electoral college votes to Bush Jr. in the 2004 presidental election, is capable of making ATMs that are considered some of the most secure on the market but also built a voting machine that can be compromised in less than one minute by an unobserved attacker, to the point of actually executing uploaded code.

We've all seen the poorly drawn "Chick" bible tracts lying everywhere; they're on top of the gas pump at the station, they're on bus stops, they're on tables in fast food restaurants. We see them in the supermarket parking lot, and at the car wash. And one thing they all have in common is that they are thrown on the ground, torn in half, and wind up as a blizzard of litter.