The paper cited sources who say Microsoft, having already made an offer to acquire Yahoo! several months ago, is now urgently courting the web firm to re-enter formal negotiations.

Yahoo!, which is valued at around $50 billion, is reported to have aggressively rejected the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant's initial attempts to discuss a takeover.

For its part, Microsoft is said to be more determined than ever to strike a deal after Google last month snatched DoubleClick for $3.1 billion from under its nose.

"They're getting tired of being left at the altar," one banking source, who has recently had talks with Microsoft , told the Post. "They now seem more willing to extend themselves via a transaction to get into the game."

I hope this doesn't happen. Yahoo has some useful services which MS would inevitably fuck up.

AppleInsider | Microsoft eyes Yahoo! in proposed takeover

Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution.

John McCain’s MySpace Page “Enhanced”

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Go to Google News, and then past this into your URL window and hit enter

Acidus wrote:

This can be fixed, and it doesn't require you hacking around IE6 lacks of PNG transparency or Safari's crazy JavaScript. It's making smart decisions about how you define the layout of a page.

and what would that consist of?
the article seems to take a radical position
that there is a clear dichotomy between style and content
but style modifies the meaning of content
in the same way that punctuation modifies meaning in text
clearly i frequently write in note form without punctuation
years ago I read Molly's soliloquy in James Joyce's Ulysses and saw that certain elements aren't essential for meaning
but
they make it more readable, accessable and friendly
I write how I think and often will polish afterwards.
I wonder whether chasing the Blue Bird of design that fits every platform is realistic but the efforts to produce flexible UI are very important

when my mom bumbs the font size of http://www.cnn.com up 2 levels and suddenly the menu bar is going off the screen and text doesn't fit in boxes anymore, that's is a problem.

When a user enters in a bunch of text into a comment block and it appears as one long line going right over the pretty floating table of content, thats a problem.

When I have a 1400x900 screen and a blog renders as a thin vertical strip maybe 700 pixels across thats just silly.

yes
the goal is communication
flexibility is a challenge
u want a UI to be like a marine. Whom I understand from TV and Hollywood are trained to obey orders and to adapt (AIAO Adapt Improvise and Overcome).
There are too many UIs like Denholm Elliott's character in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Indiana Jones: ...he'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see him again. With any luck, he's got the grail already.
[Cut to middle of fair in the Middle East, Marcus Brody wearing bright suit and white hat, sticking out like sore thumb]
Marcus Brody: Uhhh, does anyone here speak English?

RE: Publishing on the Web Is Different!

i confess i don't get this
i know u know much more than me about this acidus but i don't see the arguments as presented in the article as self evident
i don't want all the web pages i visit to look the same
i enjoy a varied and interesting visual journey as well as one of content
i am a fundamentally visual person
idealogically i like the idea of the reader/user being in control
but the situation will evolve
you are setting out an idealogical position -- an arguably extremist and certainly presciptive position -- "things should be like this"
they may well move to that point but you're fighting 500 years of print tradition and the written tradition of the monks with their extraordinary layouts before that (in the west) calligraphy (in the east)
visual style is important
it is an element of semiotics
i'm reminded of those (who i strongly sympathise with) who rail against fashion -- high street fashion -- alternative fashion -- music fashion etc --- fine we should be individuals but we're fundamentally not -- some are more individualistic than others but fashion is an element of fitting in and being social -- we mirror the behaviour of others - that is part of the social dialogue and multi-threaded discourse -- i'm influenced a little by x and a little by y -- i identify to an extent with a particularly group, with a particular set of values, with a particular set of ideas. It is not merely a question of corporate identity. It is a statement on a fundamental level about who i'm as an individual and how I see myself fitting into society. To assert a visual style is content.
I'm not suggesting you are wrong but i do think there is more to this than technical questions.

RE: Publishing on the Web Is Different!

Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month's battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults, according to Hezbollah and Lebanese officials.

Hezbollah cracked the code

Claim: Student mistakes examples of unsolvable math problems for homework assignment and solves them.

Status: True.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: The Unsolvable Math Problem

Open Notepad and type in this phrase, without the quote marks and with no carriage return: "Bush hid the facts". Now save it and open it again.

Seriously, try this before you click through this link.

27B Stroke 6: Fun MS bug.

Congratulations to Elonka on making prime coverage in the New York Times ...

For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin, a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr. Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved text was incorrect.

Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said.

Ms. Dunin excitedly started sending instant messages ...

Another CIA leak?! Can't these people keep a secret? Shesh!

Ok. So let me see if I am following correctly. I'll translate into Rummy.. As I understand it, there are known knows, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. This was a known known intelligence, that turned out to include an unknown known error due to Sanborn. Now the full information is in the hands of hackers and terrorists everywhere, looking to break the CIA cafeteria.

Information about anything in regard to the CIA cafeteria must be heavily protected, and must not leak into the public domain.

And now, your moment of zen.

Good job Elonka. You rock.

A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery

April 17, 2006 — The recently arrested "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Mafia, Bernardo Provenzano, wrote notes using an encryption scheme similar to the one used by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago, according to a biography of Italy's most wanted man.
. . .
The letter, written in January 2001 by Angelo Provenzano to his father, was found with other documents when one of Provenzano's men, Nicola La Barbera, was arrested

"...I met 512151522 191212154 and we agreed that we will see each other after the holidays...," said the letter, which included several other cryptograms.

"The Binnu code is nothing new: each number corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. "A" is 4, "B" is 5, "C" is 6 and so on until the letter Z , which corresponds to number 24," wrote Palazzolo and Oliva.

While the classic Caesar cipher moves everything three letters later (A becomes D, B becomes E, etc.), the "Provenzano code" assigns a number to each letter by simply increasing by 3 the value given to the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet listed in order.
So, A becomes 4 (1 3), B becomes 5 (2 3), C becomes 6 (3 3), etc
"In the Provenzano code the key is the 3 shift," mathematics expert Alessandro Martignago told Discovery News.

As the code is cracked, the "512151522 191212154" person becomes "Binnu Riina." Most likely, it refers to Bernardo Riina, arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of aiding Provenzano while he was on the run.

I got a letter from someone who said that Provenzano might have done better if he would have read my book first . . . ;)

Mafia Boss's Encrypted Messages Unraveled