Dilbert Goes Flash, Readers Revolt

spagiola writes "The Dilbert.com website just got an extreme makeover. Gone is the old, rather clunky but perfectly functional, website, replaced by a Flash-heavy website that only Mordac the Preventer of Information Services could love. Users have been pretty unanimous in condemning the changes. Among the politer comments: 'Congrats. Vista is no more lonely at the top in the Competition For The Worst Upgrade In Computing Industry, this web site upgrade being a serious contender.' You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design."

Comments

Heh

[TubeSteak]

"You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design." I know some PHBs that would consider the boom in registrations as a positive thing.

Re:Heh

[me at werk]

"some" meaning "all"

Re:Heh

[Devv]

"I know some PHBs that would consider the boom in registrations as a positive thing."

Since we changed the interface our website has become 1051% more popular. It's sticking.

Re:Heh

[Chapter80]

Pure genius!

Only Scott Adams could come up with such a great parody. That's one way to get your cartoon talked about - screw it up in a way that only a PHB would love. Get on the front page of Slashdot. Energize your audience!

Well, a good, unintended slashdotting ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ought to make them think a little more carefully about extensive use of resource-heavy options such as Flash. :-)

At Least it's not Silverlight

[BlueBoxSW.com]

At Least it's not Silverlight...

Re:Actually, much of it is accessable.

[GuidoW]

And frankly, what with all the annoying blinking animated ads on the new page, viewing this without flash is definitely the better way.

In future news...

[fahrbot-bot]

The Dilbert site managers, responding to the overwhelmingly negative reaction by users to the recent Flash makeover, just announced that the Flash enhancements will be removed and replaced with Silverlight.

Double standard...

[Kenja]

I flash MY dilbert and I get four months.

Re:No Linux?

[justthinkit]

BrianRegan.com got flashed a year or so back and I sent a complaint email (parts of it didn't work in Opera). Next thing I know, Brian used my first name for one of the dumber characters in a comic routine. So I'd suggest complaining anonymously...

Re:Actually, much of it is accessable.

[Stellian]

Ok, you non web-2.0-adopting retrograds... here's the html version:
http://www.comics.com/comics/dilbert/archive/index.html

Excuse me while I emerge myself in the synergistic experience of the new flash interface, and step into the 21st (maybe even 22nd) century, while leaving you the prisoners of the old web 1.0

Re:Dilbert stopped being funny a decade ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who thinks Dilbert stopped being funny back in the 1990s?

Yes you are. Not a single person has made that awesomely insightful comment before you struck right to the heart of the matter.

I can't wait until the thread about a TV show so you can tell us how you don't have a TV anymore and instead spend your extra time bicycling to Whole Foods and making ethanol in the earthen basement of your eco-hut.

Re:Damn I'm good

[_KiTA_]

"Well, they do have this cool user-submitted "Mashup" system, where you can click on a Dilbert strip and re-write the punchline -- it's then put on a voting site where people can vote and comment on it. I thought that was brilliant, myself..."

We should use that to make a cute cartoon about how much it sucks.

Trust me, having gone through the Mashup Archives over at Dilbert.com, you'd be preaching to the choir.

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[Z34107]

Great Grandparent: How can I get the old Slashdot back?

Grandparent: Disable Javascript. All the old behaviour comes back.

Parent AC: Somehow your attempt to be helpful is "blatently obvious" and irrelevant.

Re:Actually, much of it is accessable.

[alx5000]

I actually enjoyed those ads.

'brb, seizure'

Shoulda Used Quicksilver

[STrinity]

Everybody prefers Quicksilver over stodgy ol' Flash.

Re:uhhh hello...

[jcr]

Since when is "scrape the sand out of your vagina" informative?

When it's directed at you, obviously.

-jcr

Re:No Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think I will have a problem with that.

Re:Actually, much of it is accessable.

[netringer]

Where I work flash is blocked from installing, my morning routine used to be to open Dilbert and have a read while some of the other apps I use slowly load... At my work Dilbert is blocked.

I think the PHBs suspected the Dilbert site was a security breach because all of their latest and greatest ideas showed up in Dilbert.

Re:No Linux?

[Adambomb]

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetent malice.

Re:uhhh hello...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and zeolots who believe whatever George Bush tells them are the funniest of them all.

"There is not global warming! Saddam has weapons of mass destruction! George told me I would meet god when I die if I just do what he tells me!"

Cracks me up every time.

Eve and Goatse

[tepples]

I don't know of any protocol described with the participants being called Pete, Eve and Steve. Eve == eavesdropper. I haven't read the entire book, so I just made an ass^W educated guess based on the presence of Eve.

Plus, what's wrong with calling them, say, "sender" and "receiver"? Because you never know when your code might be reviewed by someone wiht Goatse on the brain. If you're at work, don't look at the giver and especially the receiver.

Re:Eve and Goatse

[Moraelin]

Actually, Eve for this guy was the event received from another component. Seriously, I understand what you're trying to say, there may be situations like what you describe, etc. But trust me, in this case it had nothing to do with cryptography or with any protocol described like that.

Plus, heck, the guy was at _this_ competence level:

He wrote a method

public static void nuller(String x) {
    x = null;
}

And called it like this:

someDataObject.name = "test";
nuller(someDataObject.name);
System.out.println(someDataObject.name);

And was genuinely surprised that it still prints "test". He debugged that for a couple of days and tried a few... innovative variations, before coming over and asking.

Another incident involving him, was his going, "Arrgh! Java's Hashtable is broken! I added a new value with a different key and it replaced the old one!" I go over and look, he's looking at the bucket array of the Hashtable with the debugger. "Look," he goes, "my old value was here, and now it's the other value."

"Ah, we had that bug too in a program at the previous company I worked for!" chimes in Wally #2 from the next desk. "We had to manually set the capacity to avoid it!"

I try hard not to scream.

"Ok," I say, "expand that 'next' element please. I want to see what's in it."

"Oh... there it is..." goes Wally.

"Well, set the capacity anyway," Wally #2 doesn't give up, "at the old company it really replaced the old value."

What had happened? Ok, you know already, but for the benefit of other Wallies reading this: it's a linked list. The new element with a different key didn't replace the old one, it was simply added to the front of the list for that bucket.

(And if you think that's bad, another team actually went and implemented a new key class with a surrealistically-inefficient custom hashCode(), to avoid the same "bug in Java." They went and changed the whole program, from one end to another, with that stupidity. Kinda funny because it was provable that it didn't really "solve" anything. There's mathematically no way to hash a long string into a 32 bit number, and then pack it into only 31 buckets or whatever, without the possibility of collisions.)

Anyway, I'm just saying, don't think that that guy was some crypto-guru who had memorized all the little sketches with Alice and Bob. He didn't know how calling by value works, nor what a linked list is, so advanced stuff like crypto was sadly way out of his grasp anyway.

Re:Actually, much of it is accessable.

[Pig Hogger]

I stopped thinking Dilbert was funny a 100 years ago.

This is normal. It happens when you get promoted to phb.