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I have been asking for this for five years. FINALLY. To the guys working on Firefox who made this possible: I love each and every one of you.

This article describes the CSS3 calc() value. This feature hasn’t landed yet in any Firefox tree but work to implement it is underway.

Firefox will support the CSS calc() value, which lets you compute a length value using an arithmetic expression. This means you can use it to define the sizes of divs, the values of margins, the widths of borders, and so forth.

Here is an example of a layout which would be tricky to setup without the calc() function:

/*
* Two divs aligned, split up by a 1em margin
*/
#a {
width:75%;
margin-right: 1em;
}
#b {
width: -moz-calc(25% - 1em);
}

This example makes sure an input text field won’t overlap its parent:

input {
padding:2px;
border:1px solid black;
display:block;
width: -moz-calc(100% - 2 * 3px);
}

One particularly powerful feature of the calc() function that you can combine different units in the same computation:

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BS. This is a monopoly. This is the exact same thing that caused the US Department of Justice and the EU to go after Microsoft: using their huge market share in one business to create a massive barrier to entry in another. Apple make phones, and damn good ones at that, but it's the consumers that are using them. The fact that they get to pick and choose who can release software on my phone worries me a lot, but they're not in the business of making phone applications—they're not abusing their power to make money. Now they're extending this into advertising, it's a whole different story, as they've just announced their own ad network. By artificially limiting every other advertising company out there through licence agreements, they've shown they're happy to use every trick in the book—including ones that potentially breach a whole number of existing anti-monopoly laws.

Of course, this is Apple, and Apple can do no wrong. Hail Steve.

AdMob founder Omar:

Let’s be clear. This change is not in the best interests of users or developers. In the history of technology and innovation, it’s clear that competition delivers the best outcome. Artificial barriers to competition hurt users and developers and, in the long run, stall technological progress.

Cry me a river. This is competition.

 ★ 

As if we needed more proof that the French were crazy. Camerawoman's also French, BTW.

One day, I'm gonna have to try something like this. It will probably be my last day. For now, I think I'll stick to the gadgets and the oxygen tank.

Guillaume Nery is one of the foremost freedivers in the world. Freediving is the practice of diving into water without an oxygen tank — just holding your breath. Well, Nery decided it would be a splendid idea to do some freediving into Dean’s Blue Hole, west of The Bahamas. It seems Dean’s Blue Hole is the deepest underwater sinkhole in the world, dropping to a depth of 663 feet.

With his girlfriend working the camera, Nery plunged into the sinkhole, then climbed his way out. Nery toldThe Huffington Post in an email that he never actually reached the bottom — it would be impossible to go that far down without oxygen. But over the course of four afternoons, he and his girlfriend captured these mesmerizing pictures. Nery said, “This movie is an artistic project, a fiction.”

(via source)

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And that's not even the best list. There's many, many authors, and all of them have an opinion. The Guardian asked what it was, and ended up with a brilliant article, albeit one that will destroy your scrolling finger.

Margaret Atwood

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

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I concur, with one exception: Valve will be able to continue designing their own games. Everyone else must comply.

The Internet – In a shocking turn of events this afternoon, all of the Internet unanimously voted to have Blizzard Entertainment henceforth and forever more, design, publish and distribute every PC game ever to  be made, ever.

“It was a natural decision,” said famed internet nerd Cory Hendricksen, speaking from a shoddily constructed podium in his Uncle Todd’s rumpus room, “They don’t strangle us with draconian DRM, they make great quality products and they’d never give us a garbage, shovelware port either.”

He added, “I just hope that my children’s children can look forward to Diablo 3.”

No, really, why? This is going to bug me for three days straight.

lemonlimeskull: So I'm sitting in Hardee's (Carl's JR for anyone here one the west coast)
lemonlimeskull: This huge African American dude sits across from me at the booth. Plenty of tables around, of course, since this is Hardee's.
lemonlimeskull: Since I don't usually have uninvited guests at fast food restaurants, I'm naturally a bit put off while simultaniously wondering what the deal is.
lemonlimeskull: The guy goes "Hey, man what you do for a living?"
lemonlimeskull: I must've looked really confused, but I manage to answer "Game designer... Why?"
lemonlimeskull: The guy sits there for a good thirty seconds, looking out the window over my shoulder.
lemonlimeskull: Then he finally looks me straight on and says "Good, lemme ask you a question..."
lemonlimeskull: "Why don't Pacman wanna eat eyes?"
lemonlimeskull: I just gave him this really quizzical look, then he gets up and leaves.
lemonlimeskull: After a few seconds of wondering wtf that was all about, I look out the window over my shoulder and see about five police cars slowly driving off into the distance.
lemonlimeskull: The worst part is...... WHY doesn't Pacman wanna eat eyes?!

This is fantastic. Someone just needs to put Robot Unicorn Attack through it. Adobe missed a trick: they should have made a conversion tool and built it into Flash CS5. That's the part they make their money from anyway.

Smokescreen: a Flash player written in Javascript:

Via Jim Ray:

The Strongbad demo will make you a believer. This thing reads the actual SWF binary and creates native, browser based executions.

Explanation from Simon Willison:

Chris Smoak’s Smokescreen, “a Flash player written in JavaScript”, is an incredible piece of work. It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.

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Translation: "It would be nice if you could ask us how we could be improved instead of coming up with a harebrained scheme and running with it for politics' sake, you bastards."

Outstanding schools in England will no longer face routine Ofsted inspections, the new education secretary has said.

Michael Gove said the move would allow education inspectors to focus their efforts on failing schools instead.

Under the plan, the 2,000 primary, 600 secondary and 300 special schools rated as outstanding by Ofsted would only be inspected if there were warning signs such as bad exam performance.

…

An Ofsted spokeswoman said: "Ofsted already focuses inspection on where it will have the greatest impact for children and learners. We will work with the government on what this means in practice."

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Must remember to get mum to Sky+ this shizzle. As soon as my dissertation's over, I'm going home and giving my eyes a feast.

badgerless:

5 Days! :D

Excited!

£120 million in lost productivity, apparently. And totally worth it, too. Thank you Google for this fine, fine gift.

Also, it's still playable: http://www.google.com/pacman/

The Pac-Man game Google put on its home page gobbled up almost five million hours of work time, suggests a study.

The playable version of the classic video game was put on Google's front page on 21 May to celebrate 30 years since the launch of Pac-Man in Japan.

The search giant reworked the game so the layout was arranged around letters forming its name.

The Pac-Man game proved so popular that Google has now made it permanently available on its own page.

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