LSW

ROFL - If New York maybe Thelma... but in Texas, Larry the cable Guy in a G-String and cap is the best your likely to get! Course in Alaska it would likely be someone who looks like that "Mountain Man" in the TV show of the 70's with his pet Grizzley.

Microsoft's Ballmer touts 'best version of Windows ever' LAS VEGAS, Nevada (CNN) -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday with an impassioned endorsement of PCs and a sneak peek at the company's future Windows 7 operating system. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says Windows 7 will make PCs easier to use. As expected, Ballmer announced that Microsoft is releasing a beta version of Windows 7, which will be available for download beginning Friday. The news suggests the world's largest software maker may be giving up efforts to rehabilitate its often-maligned Vista operating system, which was released worldwide in January 2007. "We are on track to deliver the best version of Windows ever," Ballmer told an audience of several thousand tech professionals and journalists inside a cavernous ballroom at the Venetian hotel. "We're working hard to get it right and get it ready." Without mentioning the security and compatibility issues that have dogged Vista, Ballmer promised that Windows 7 will make PCs faster and easier to use. He didn't offer a timetable for its official release, although Windows Vista went on sale more than two years after it was issued in beta form. Early reviews of Windows 7, which was leaked to the Internet in beta form in late December, have been positive. The forthcoming operating system will have touch-screen capability, side-by-side windows for comparison shopping and a "Peek" feature that makes open windows transparent, allowing users to see the icons on their desktop. "Windows 7 makes it easier to move between the things on your desktop," said Microsoft group project manager Charlotte Jones, who gave a brief demonstration of the system on the hall's giant display screens. Jones said the new system also makes it easier to send files back and forth between home computers. Ballmer later yielded the stage to Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, who praised the explosive growth of the company's Xbox Live online gaming community. Bach also announced forthcoming releases of new versions of Microsoft's popular "Halo" game series: "Halo Wars," due Feb. 28, and "Halo 3: OSDT," which will ship in the fall. Wednesday's address marked the energetic Ballmer's debut as CES keynote pitchman, a job that had been handled for the past decade by Microsoft chairman and industry pioneer Bill Gates. Ballmer's presentation came two days after a similar, high-profile keynote at the Macworld show in San Francisco by Apple, Microsoft's chief rival, and its vice president Philip Schiller, filling in for the ailing Steve Jobs. Unlike Schiller, Ballmer tackled the struggling economy head-on in his remarks. He said that although the recession has created "a period of reduced expectations," the tech companies that push forward now with innovative research will fare better in the long-term than the companies that scale back. Ballmer said the convergence of screens on computers, TVs and mobile phones is revolutionizing how people communicate with each other. "Our digital lives will continue to get richer. There's really no turning back from the connected world," he said. "We're on the verge of the kind of technological transformation that only happens once every 10 or 15 years." As if to prove his point, Ballmer also welcomed onstage program manager Janet Galore, who gave brief demos of some Microsoft product prototypes, including a tabletop-like touch screen and a flexible, wafer-thin digital screen you can roll up like a piece of paper. In a gentle swipe at Apple, which has gained market share against Microsoft in recent years, Ballmer said the PC remains the best choice for consumers seeking "value and power" in a computer. "That's why we say, 'I'm a PC and proud of it!" he bellowed -- a reference to a new Microsoft ad campaign that play off similar ads by Apple. Ballmer also announced that Microsoft has formed a partnership with Verizon Wireless to add Live Search tools to all Verizon smart phones in the U.S. He also announced a partnership with Dell, which will soon come loaded with Microsoft's Windows Live suite of software, and links between Windows Live and the social-networking site, Facebook. Reaction to the 90-minute presentation, which also included a performance by Australian musical-comedy trio Tripod, was mixed. Attendees praised the lively pace of Ballmer's talk, but wished he had made more news. "I really loved what I heard tonight. There's definitely a lot of things to look forward to," said Sebastian Mineau, a Montreal-based blogger with MSN Canada. "It [Windows 7] wasn't a big surprise. But it was still nice to get the confirmation straight from the lion's mouth." "It was very disappointing," said Ben Sillis, a reporter with ElectricPig, a British tech site. "CES is supposed to be about new products, new stuff. And this had all already been leaked. There was nothing new." Some 2,700 exhibitors and 130,000 attendees are in Las Vegas for CES, the nation's largest consumer electronics trade show. The event runs through Sunday

Wickham is of course right... but to qualify it... Not just IE6 has problems, no version of IE supports XHTML, nor has I seen claims that IE8 will. This means you will have to use content negotiation (see my article) in order to serve XHTML to all browsers but IE and HTML to IE, otherwise IE will try to download the page. Also, if you or the owner/maintainer of the web site makes one little mistake like forgetting to encode an ampersand (&) or your editor transforms it when you update a page... the page will not load, the user will see a while sheet with a cryptic red XML error message telling them you screwed up. Of course more things can sink the site than just an "&". If it is a site page it is irritating, but if it happens on a category or worse case, the index page, your sunk. It happened often to me on LSW, a small mistake in a new feed page, well that mistake would be inserted into the index page slice of the latest articles and the index page would not open. I could not even enter to correct the problem and had to jump through hoops trying to correct it. XHTML 1.1 is not worth it because it must be served as content="application/xhtml+xml"

Just imagine... Like the James Gardner Movie "Support you local sheriff"... "Honey, I am going out for a few hours. I decided to sacrifice and go support my local prostitute who is in a financial chrisis I feel I should help her out with." "Debbie does Dallas... for food stamps" "Eastern Europeans smuggling American women into Russia as they get 'Laid off over here'" "Porn DVD's in the $5.- bin at Wall Mart" "Prostitutes going door to door to offer women their services to serve the man so the wife can have a night off!" "Husband comes home and a musculer man wearing nothing but a G-string serves dinner wearing a bow tie... husband looks confused so wife explain giggling that he is a Giggalo she found on the street and offered him some money to play man servant for a while as she is tired of doing it everyday." The possibilities are endless. But truth told, their is serious money in adult entertainment and lots of jobs from the women to the janitors and maids in such houses. I knew a German camerman who used to work in Bablesberg (German Holywood) until he was laid off and the only work he found was cameraman in pornos. They have as many crew lots of time as "Real Films." Their are thousands upon thousands of jobs supporting the adult industry that could be affected, movie staff, magazine staff... you name it. Then if the magazines fold the ink and paper makers loose money. Video stores loose money can could la off employees... it may not be the auto industry, but it is bigger than it sounds.

WASHINGTON (CNN) ? Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment industry. ?The take here is that everyone and their mother want to be bailed out from the banks to the big three,? said Owen Moogan, spokesman for Larry Flynt. ?The porn industry has been hurt by the downturn like everyone else and they are going to ask for the $5 billion. Is it the most serious thing in the world? Is it going to make the lives of Americans better if it happens? It is not for them to determine.? Francis said in a statement that ?the US government should actively support the adult industry's survival and growth, just as it feels the need to support any other industry cherished by the American people." ?We should be delivering [the request] by the end of today to our congressmen and [secretary of the Treasury Henry] Paulson asking for this $5 billion dollar bailout,? he told CNN Wednesday. Flynt and Francis concede the industry itself is in no financial danger ? DVD sales have slipped over the past year, but Web traffic has continued to grow. But the industry leaders said the issue is a nation in need. "People are too depressed to be sexually active," Flynt said in the statement. "This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex." "With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It's time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly." So far, there has been no congressional reaction to the request. Maybe in Germany, but Americans are to Prude to agree to this!

Good attitude. Tricky goal. Well you can always grab the links from my "from the mouth of the users." Not specific to your situation but will give them some ideas of the difficulties people have. Pointing to Texas and the fact that future court cases are more expensive then doing it right. Pocket Books speak really loud. Examples... would you mark documents with a color code if you knew the employee using it was colorblind? My former boss was, so always had issues with people using red to highlight things as he could not see red. then there is my old standby, what about next year? Do they want to re-do something in a year because they hire a new employee who has an issue? Do they want to re-program something because a current employee looses some of their ability due to an accident, illness etc.? No one knows what tomorrow will bring, how often do they wish to rework it and how much would that cost? Transferring a person or letting them go would be legally questionable and quite expensive compared to thinking ahead and doing it right. I guess what I mean is people rarely do what is right for the right reasons... So like food designers who use white glue on ceriel so it looks pretty in photos, we must convince them it is better to do it and the pocketbook is the best way. It is our dilemma when doing the right thing is not enough. Good luck with it.

ADA is the best place. It is a matter of Discrimination. If they have a anti-discrimination policy then they are breaking it be the sounds of it. The State of Texas was sued as well as Oracle when three Blind Texas State Employees could not work with Oracle servers due to lack of software to support them in what was part of their job description. JAN (Job Accommodation Network) is a great place to check out I found a list of Supreme Court Cases. Jan's Accommodation Information by Disability: A to Z gives you an idea of what disabilities can be problematic and leads to links about how to help people with special needs, I used it to inform my boss about my disabilities. Here is JAN for Employers But yes, they need to be aware that knowingly creating anything that can cause current or future employees not to be able to do the job could be taken to court as discrimination. It is likely cheaper to do it right than try to fight it in court, even Target gave up.

Transitional was meant to be just that, Transitional between Earlier HTML versions and later, so people could get used to the new rules. Correct HTML is Strict. XHTML in fact has done away with all others in the latest versions and I think HTML 5 does away with it to. Transitional allows for designers to use sloppy coding... for that reason it became a norm, people can do things they are not supposed to do.

The enemy never does what you want them too so you have to modify even the best plans to meet the circumstances. Same with web design. The best planned web site will change in the process of creating the site.

Other than copy, paste and search?

Only until IE8, after that all they need is the meta tag to trigger IE6 mode and your out of income again...

I assume you missed the "Validate before asking" thread stuck at the top? Validation is one of the things we do first when reviewing sites, so of they are not valid, it is a waste of our time to go further. Thank you.

Remember, IE6 is the only version available for anyone pre-XP SP1, that means it will be around for some time to come.

KS's own Webshapes, they are built to meet standards and for different CMS and blog tools.

the image tool here seems buggy, it did show in the preview. I am having a bugger of a time with these images today.

:lol: :lol:

Application Development Process http://www.lsw-webdesign.com/_blogImages/applicationDevelopmentProcess.jpg

Little Bobby Tables

There is a very interesting program out there that may be of interest to many of you. It is called Adobe Flex. The short answer to "What is Flex?" would have to be, "Flex is Flash for Programmers." Flex is a Eclipse based IDE (Integrated Development Environment). It allows you to create Flash based applications for either Web or Desktop use and utilizes ActionScript and MXML (an XML based language). Flash is usually considered a design program for the artistically minded. Many program minded people found time lines difficult to deal with for programming purposes. So with that in mind Adobe developed Flex. Rather than being time line based it uses the free Eclipse IDE as a basis to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Flex is a professional tool, so runs around US$249.-. It can build all sort of nifty interface based applications for those who wish very user interactive tools. I can talk all I wish, but to truly understand what I am talking about, just swing by the "Flex Showcase" to see some Live Applications built with Flex. There is an excellent video tutorial series called "Flex 3 in a week." You can either watch online or if you have/you can download Adobe Media Player and watch their videos offline. Just go to the favorites page and at the lower left corner paste in this RSS Feed (http://sessions.adobe.com/FlexInAWeek/feed.xml) and it will load all 47 videos and you can watch them at will. A Trial version of Flex is available.I suggest watching some of them as well just to get a good idea of what you can build with it before you decide to spend the money. They even have different Flex Learning Paths depending if you are a web designer/developer or a programmer etc. That said, this is the Flex builder which is more of a Drag and Drop interface type thing. There is also a Flex SDK (Software Development Kit) That allows you to develop and deploy Flex applications using an IDE of your choice by including the Flex framework (component class library) and Flex compiler. Nor are you limited to ActionScript and MXML, Flex supports ColdFusion, PHP, Java and .NET as well as SQL and Oracle. The final program will be published as a Flash SWF. If you choose to create a Desktop Application, you will need Adobe AIR and users for the web will need Flash Player 9. In my situation at work, I will be taking command line batch processes using Oracle and re-writing them into desktop Flex apps so the employees can do the work we programmers must do at this time. I strongly suggest you explore the "Flex in a week" videos, this may be a excellent tool for you or your business. Of course I am not a Flash fan in the normal use of Flash, but this software has impressed me so far and I look forward to working in it, it is fairly easy and with a base knowledge of programming it can create some interesting applications. I have seen some references to accessibility, I have not yet been able to really see how accessible Flex apps can be made, I will have to see when I create my first application.

Yea, Stef has a knack for doing that.

Check out the bottom section of my alternative editor page, a PHP supporting editor is always better as code colors help you spot mistakes.

I just started work, but we will be the last to ring in the year, we are one hour behind Washington and California etc., we are our own time zone.

I know, I was speaking more towards Stef's reply. Unethical behavior is rampant on the web, we have to take it back from them.

We closed the old forum recently so that is why you were unable to login probably. Otherwise the you could always let us know, Stef or I could change it for you in the old forum, guess only stef in this one. But my guess is it is simply as it was closed and this one you have to join in again.

I would doubt copyright infrindgement would count here as you can not copyright words and that is what these are. They do not make up ideas you could claim your own, just words that more or less describe a site.