You see, when a pic­ture loves another pic­ture very much, they get together and do some­thing very spe­cial. Son, I’m going to use a word I’m sure you’ve heard before — they get Photoshopped together. And this is how a dis­aster comes into the world; it’s a beau­ti­ful thing.

From Photoshop Disasters, a site which I enjoy, espe­cially since I dabble a bit in Photoshop too.

You used to have to choose. Choose between an easy, but inflex­ible, px-based lay­out or a hard to con­trol, but flex­ible, em-based layout.

Now with full-page zoom being imple­men­ted (as default!) in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3 and Opera 9*, it’s a dif­fer­ent story. Full-page zoom­ing means your easy px-based lay­out will be fully flex­ible. Even more flex­ible than most em-based lay­outs in fact, as images will scale along too.

So I’m ask­ing myself, why bother with hard-to-keep-from-breaking em-based layouts?

[update] I don’t think liquid lay­outs are rel­ev­ant any­more either.

[update 2] * And now Safari too! That’s all of the major browsers.

PS. This still leaves percentage-based lay­outs of course, but they max­im­ise screen real estate. Which is very dif­fer­ent from max­im­ising read­ab­il­ity (line-lengths and all that jazz). As far as I can see, %-based lay­outs are good for some web-apps (like gmail) but aren’t optimal for other uses.

David Pogue pon­ders a few things about the world. I decide to answer them. Wish me luck.

* Why is Wi-Fi free at cheap hotels, but $14 a night at expens­ive ones?

That’s an easy one. At the core it’s price dis­crim­in­a­tion, or the art of mak­ing people pay the max­imum of what people are will­ing to pay. The way it works is that rich people at expens­ive hotels have more than enough cash (and value their time online highly) to buy WiFi for their room. At cheap hotels you have crummy cheap people who aren’t will­ing to pay one penny extra for WiFi, but for whom it’s still a fea­ture which’ll make them choose the WiFi-hotel over the Non-WiFi-hotel.

* What hap­pens to soft­ware pro­grams when their pub­lish­ers go out of business?

Some cus­tom­ers cling on to them but in the end every­one switches over to some­thing newer and worse.

* Would the record com­pan­ies sell more music online if it weren’t copy-protected?

They’d sell more because it’d ‘work every­where’. Which is to say that if they’d sell mp3’s then yes, and if they sold (hypo­thet­ical) mp7’s (which would only play on one line of hypo­thet­ical devices), then it’d lessen that effect con­sid­er­ably, until the other device man­u­fac­tur­ers caught up.

* Do cell­phones cause brain cancer?

In sci­entific stud­ies only the people who believed it would be bad for them had (any­where near sig­ni­fic­ant) neg­at­ive effects. Pretty much a neg­at­ive placebo effect.

* What’s the real reason you have to turn off your laptop for take-off?

It ads con­fu­sion in an emer­gency and stew­ard­esses are sad­istic little creatures who want you to exper­i­ence the dis­pleas­ure of tak­ing off in all its glory. Muhahahahaha.

* Why can’t a digital S.L.R. cam­era record video?

Because they’d have to reconjig’re it to do so which would cost time and money. Given that the people who are in the mar­ket for a digital S.L.R. cam­era wouldn’t be happy with a stuck-on-video mode if they really wanted video and that the rest of the people wouldn’t want video any­way, makes that they’d have a hard time earn­ing their invest­ment back.

* Wi-Fi on air­planes. What’s tak­ing so long?

Airlines didn’t believe that Wi-Fi would be a major enough selling point to give them an edge in attract­ing cus­tom­ers up till now. I don’t think they were wrong, and I also ima­gine that 3G mobile tech (woo! inter­net!) on a plane would make many more people hap­pier in the com­ing years.

* Who are the mor­ons who respond to junk-mail offers, thereby keep­ing spam­mers in business?

Two groups: The nice naive people with time on their hands and the mor­ons who watch and order from Tell-Sell.

* I’m told that they could make a shirt-pocket digital cam­era that takes pic­tures like an S.L.R., but it would cost a lot. So why don’t they make one for people who can afford it?

Because the people who can afford it can be flogged a digital S.L.R. AND a shirt-pocket digital cam­era at the moment.

* How come there are still no vir­uses for Mac OS X? If it has 6 per­cent of the mar­ket, shouldn’t it have 6 per­cent of the viruses?

Aside from the fact that we don’t know if 6 % is big enough for it to be prof­it­able, it’s the same reason Apache has 50.48% of the web-server mar­ket (down from 70% a year or two ago) and still doesn’t get the most vir­uses or hack­ings. (Hint: It’s a Microsoft product that does!)

* Do share­ware pro­gram­mers pay taxes on all those $20 contributions?

Most would as either they’d be hon­est or it’d rep­res­ent a size­able chunk of income.

* How are we going to pre­serve all of our digital pho­tos and videos for future generations?

On YouTube.

* Why are there no fed­eral rebates or tax cred­its for solar power?

Because at this point there’s no tech on the mar­ket that’s effi­cient enough and/or you don’t live in Germany.

* Why do you have to take tape cam­cord­ers out of your carry-on at air­port secur­ity, but not the tape­less kind? Couldn’t you hide a bomb equally well in either one? (Actually, I have about 500 more logic ques­tions about the rules at air­port secur­ity, but I have a feel­ing they’ll remain answer­less for a very long time.)

Because That’s How the Rules Are.

* Laptops, cam­eras and cell­phones have improved by a thou­sand per­cent in the last ten years. Why not their batteries?

There has been ground­break­ing work with altern­at­ive meth­ods (i.e. other than Lithium-Ion) like sugar and fuel-cells. From the mouth of an HP researcher: (para­phrased) “Lithium-Ion tech is at its end, we don’t believe it can be improved much more.”

* SmartDisplay, Spot Watch, U.M.P.C., Zune… when will Microsoft real­ize that it’s not a hard­ware company?

Not until it finds another high-margin won­der to com­ple­ment (and replace) windows/office cash-flows.

* Why don’t pub­lic sinks have foot pedals?

They do in (our) trains. It’s most likely more expens­ive to install.

* Why don’t all hotels have check-in kiosks like air­lines do?

In the high-end, there’s no way the level of expec­ted ser­vice could be achieved and at the low-end it’s handy to have human eyes, ears and noses to sniff out poten­tial trouble-makers.

* Five bil­lion dol­lars a year spent on ring­tones? What the?

I know. It’s like people want to show the world they have an indi­vidual taste. Who knew?

* How come cell­phone signal-strength bars are so often wrong?

If you’re in a part of the world where it Just Works Everywhere, you stop look­ing at them.

* Do P.R. people really expect any­one to believe that the stand­ard, stil­ted, second-paragraph C.E.O. quote was really uttered by a human being?

Do P.R. people know from their train­ing that the stand­ard, stil­ted, second-paragraph C.E.O. quote will have the desired effect?

* Why aren’t there recyc­ling bins for bottles and cans where they’re most obvi­ously needed, like food courts and cafeterias?

Because that’d mean that the food courts and cafet­er­ias would have to deal with that recyc­ling for you instead of just throw­ing everything in the dumpster.

* Why doesn’t someone start a cell­phone com­pany that bills you only for what you use? That model works O.K. for the elec­tri­city, gas and water com­pan­ies —and people would beat a path to its door.

We have that. I can get a nice nor­mal mobile (cell-phone) for 35 euro, without giv­ing up any per­sonal inform­a­tion, with 10 – 15 euros of phone-credit to start me off included, free voice­mail and never-deprecating phone-credit.

Still, most people have a plan because it’s cheaper.

* Why doesn’t every­one have lights that turn off auto­mat­ic­ally when the room is empty?

In Korea you can turn the lights on and off with your mobile. WAY COOLER.

* What’s the deal with Palm?

They didn’t have a clue (any­more). People left, struc­tures got reconjig’red and stuff just kept trudging along. There are new people at the top now, who might actu­ally know what they’re doing, so don’t give up hope!

* Why are so many people rude on the Internet?

I present you with John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, as recor­ded by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik.

Phew, that’s a lot of ques­tions answered. Hope that sat­is­fies you Pogue! If you think you have bet­ter ones, or are simply deeply awed by my insights, don’t for­get to speak up!

Daring Fireball is a site I fre­quently read. John Gruber links to, and com­ments on, a lot of inter­est­ing things on Daring Fireball. Just the other day, John linked to and com­men­ted on an inter­est­ing piece in Good Magazine. The piece describes the base meas­ure­ment of the met­ric sys­tem (the meter) in a series of info graph­ics. Here is what he said:

What’s a Meter? ★
Good Magazine on the his­tory of the offi­cial defin­i­tion of the meter. Includes this humi­li­at­ing nug­get: “There are only three coun­tries that do not use the met­ric sys­tem: Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States.”
(Thanks to Rab Barari.) #

It’s con­cise, clear and even has a friendly nod to Rab Barari, who ostens­ibly mailed him the link.

For those of you who haven’t read Daring Fireball, you should know that John Gruber fol­lows Apple. He calls journ­al­ists out when they write up silly biased art­icles about Apple’s products.That’s a good thing. He does it so much in fact, that he even has a fea­ture “Jackass of the week” for very silly journ­al­ists. It can, and has been, awar­ded sev­eral times a week. But — John Gruber can be a Jackass too.

He recently wrote the following:

Adobe Adds H.264 Support to Flash Player 9 ★
My bet is that it per­forms like total crap, at least on OS X, but I’d love to be proven wrong. #

And bam! He slams a great devel­op­ment in video on the web in one sen­tence — just like that. Sure, Flash reportedly per­forms weakly on OS X. The Flash Player Beta — which includes the H.264 — is right there to down­load.

He could have, at the very least, tried it and repor­ted his find­ings before slam­ming it. Otherwise, it’s just weak con­jec­ture. Just like the con­jec­ture from the hack journ­al­ists or (shud­der) hack sci­ent­ists he so rightly calls out.

Coming up in March is the next South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive con­fer­ence. It’s one of the biggest gath­er­ings of new media people (mean­ing web folk) and it’s held in Texas. The con­fer­ence time-table is filled with talks. Who gets to talk at SXSW? That gets decided by online vote. While that seems like a neat idea at first, it has attrac­ted cri­ti­cism for not deliv­er­ing a qual­ity panel line-up.

Greg Story, over at Airbag, is quite artic­u­late on this matter:

There are six-hundred-and-eighty-three pro­posal sub­mis­sions for next year’s South by South West, and once again it’s up the the Internet to fil­ter through all of them and choose which ones are worthy of becom­ing real events.

How abso­lutely absurd.

I didn’t like the crowd­sourced vot­ing last year and with this aston­ish­ing amount of sub­mis­sions I fail to see how the qual­ity of the SXSW exper­i­ence is going to improve. I heard a lot of com­plaints about the lack of qual­ity in many of the pan­els so I don’t under­stand why the con­fer­ence lead­er­ship is extend­ing the program.

Source: Cross, Airbag.

Hugh Forrest, one of the organ­isers com­men­ted on the post and explained SXSW’s stance on the mat­ter. I still found myself agree­ing with Greg, and com­men­ted on pos­sible improve­ments for the choos­ing mechanism:

Hugh: Why not extend that idea by hav­ing the would-be pan­el­ists upload a snip­pet of their talk. That way you (and us) could rate their speak­ing abil­it­ies (fil­ter­ing out the mono­tones) and get an even bet­ter idea of the route they’re going to take their talk in.

Of course, it needn’t be lim­ited to audio…SXTube FTW

Source: Myself at Cross, Airbag.

I was hap­pily sur­prised Hugh then took the time to respond to me by email!

James,

I’ve been fol­low­ing the dia­logue on Airbag. Good stuff there — mean­ing, all dia­logue is good dialogue.

Re the sug­ges­tion of let­ting panel pro­posers add rich media to the Panel Picker, this is a good idea. And, one that we talked about last week.

Reasons we have decided not to do this for this year:

1) Still hav­ing some tech issues. So, best to try to work those out with the site as is before adding in new features.

2) Philosophically . . my con­cern is that the experts (who we most want to speak at SXSW) have the least time to put together a video for the site. So, in some ways, this might be coun­ter­pro­duct­ive to the ulti­mate goals here.

But . . again . . it’s a really good sug­ges­tion and some­thing that we are still kind of mulling about. Thanks for the feedback!

Best regards,

Hugh Forrest
(Published with his permission)

My response:

Hi Hugh,

I’m glad you’re enjoy­ing the con­ver­sa­tion on Airbag — all atten­tion is good atten­tion, right?

Thanks for get­ting back to me, I’m flattered that you took the time to respond personally.

As for your argu­ments, #1 I can sym­path­ise with, but #2, well… If the experts can take the time to
pre­pare a panel and go to a week long con­fer­ence, I ima­gine they can put in the extra 20 — 30 mins
to say some words into a micro­phone and upload it to one of the many audio/podcast sites.

The non-experts (who you’re try­ing to fil­ter out) will prob­ably have more time, and might dis­cover
in the pro­cess of record­ing some­thing good that they need to get their act together.

[..]

Again, thanks for tak­ing the time to mail me,

James

So what do you, the reader think? Is the choos­ing mech­an­ism fine? Is it com­pletely broken? Or does do the (often lack­ing) descrip­tions of pan­els just need some audio or video to give voters a bet­ter idea of what they’re vot­ing for?

(Hat tip to John Gruber who’s link I fol­lowed to Airbag in the first place.)

A place for the weird stuff, the funny stuff, the wrong stuff, the totally way-too-cool stuff and a whole lot more:

[update] We’re done with Testiculating.

See that lil’ flame in my “Inspiration” block? It used to lead to a dusty old site. But now it’s back, with a ven­geance! Yes. Design by Fire, the crit­ic­ally acclaimed journal on design, life & everything by Andrei Herasimchuk, has risen from the ashes.

Can’t wait to see what wis­dom he has to share with us!

And no, I’m not just say­ing that because it might help my chances in the (very old) DxF Recoding Challenge…