71–80 of 161 posts
It's great to try new formats, but the experience is completely broken on my now-slightly-aging Windows laptop. I wish web developer/designers would test their pages on regular hardware instead of 27" iMacs or rMPB... The scrolling is horribly lagging, and the gifs/videos are all black: http://prntscr.com/1gq4he http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6
I see mentions of security, but from pictures it is just few men without any (visible) weapon most of the time. Even given these men, i believe on a so long distance, there are many desert places, where nobody is present. Question - how such a valuable shipments protected against someone, who will try to disconnect few cars, crack open 'em and steal all these laptops on trucks?
First, local populace isn't used to enterpreneural crime with complex schemes. They can surely steal a few devices out of unsealed container, but huge planned robberies involving material goods is not something I've heard of.
Imagine you disconnected a few cars, they stand on one-track rails in the middle of steppe with no roads or buildings to be seen anywhere. What do you do with them? And even if you figure out how to make them disappear, what's your recipe for getting laptops (that are swiftly losing resale value) out of the country? By rail? :)
If course you can try leveraging corrupt Kazakh government, but this time it won't work because you just kicked their puppy, the country's future.
Time will come for wild train robberies if the traffic is indeed to reach millions of containers annually, but right now it's like trying to steal Mona Lisa during the open hours.
And guards, I bet they protect the train from stupid random incidents (camels, drunk tractor drivers, etc).
Great use of HTML5 video! These clips are in WebM, what is shown in browsers that don't support it?
I actually disliked this page design. The image and text always faded to black before it went off the top of the screen. I am in the habit of moving text to the top of the screen to read it. It kept vanishing as I did so meaning I'd have to move the text I wanted to read down to the middle of the screen. Did this not happen to anyone else?
You're meant to read the text alongside its picture, and the text is viewable when the picture is on screen.
It's great to try new formats, but the experience is completely broken on my now-slightly-aging Windows laptop. I wish web developer/designers would test their pages on regular hardware instead of 27" iMacs or rMPB... The scrolling is horribly lagging, and the gifs/videos are all black: http://prntscr.com/1gq4he http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6
This isn't your problem, but HTTPS-Everywhere reproducibly breaks the page for me on Firefox with the default ruleset containing nytimes.com. Once disabled, the images load fine.
Great use of HTML5 video! These clips are in WebM, what is shown in browsers that don't support it?
They have MP4 as well.
Time to trot out trivia. As the article points out, the Silk Road faded in importance in the 1400s. But it doesn't say why. There were three major reasons why it faded. The first was the final fall of Constantinople in 1453, ending the last remnant of the original Roman Empire. This made trade with Europe harder. The second was the development, initially by the Portuguese but followed by others, of direct sea routes…
> long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East It put in motion the long-term decline of the Venetian Republic, as well, which made most of its money trading with the middle east. Interestingly enough, this also led the Venetians to focus a bit more on their land conquests in northern Italy, so there are some areas that received more attention at that point: swamps drained, villas built, and…
On top of all that, the agitation of the Christian West to the Islamic East put Venice in a very tough situation -- one that engendered hatred from both sides and filed down the richness of that international trade they had labored centuries to build.
Wow, the presentation of the photos really made an impression on me -- it's just like Harry Potter. It's amazing that even after almost 10 years of YouTube, having video presented to you in a slightly different way can give you a feeling that you're experiencing the future.