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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."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Clearly, there is some flash on the site, but I can still view all the comics without it.
I have flashblock and noscript up. I tried temporarily allowing just a few things to let me view the site, but when that didn't work, I gave up and deleted Dilbert from my bookmarks.
It's funny, but it's not worth it. He also has an irrational love of Microsoft at times, such as when he thought that Bill Gates would make a good president.
Because, you know, it's not like the rest of the world minds having the USA push them around. And it's not like Bill is known for being good at that kind of business, or anything like that...
Suffice it to say, I didn't feel like it was worth the bother to continue reading it.
My award for "sticking with what works" goes to craigslist.org.
Am I the only one who thinks Dilbert stopped being funny back in the 1990s? The last collection I enjoyed was Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy . Since then, Adams has just been going over and over the same handful of gags. And even though corporate culture in America may have changed to some extent, the Dilbert office seems the same early '90s environment that inspired him to turn the strip towards a parody of office life.
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Here's what I sent them earlier on when discovering that part of the site even does not support Linux:
And that's just one of my gripes. The new UI is clunky; the site is slow; ...
Linux user since early January 1992.
Ought to make them think a little more carefully about extensive use of resource-heavy options such as Flash. :-)
It's a freaking static cartoon! What possible asinine reason could there be to screw up such a simple concept? I saw this the other day and so, like Doonesbury, won't be visiting it any more due to their use of Flash.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Don't these PHB clowns realize that it's content that draws people to a site, and excessive bandwidth, insecure plug-ins required, inane registration requirements, and slow downloads that drive them away again.
Scott Adam's personal e-mail address is well-known (remember to put 'Dilbert' in the subject line to slip past his spam filter). One can still complain to him directly.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Good thing you can still get your dilbert fix at http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/
At Least it's not Silverlight...
That's OK, it's just a genreational change.
Each generation is arrogant enough to ignore the collected wisdom of what's gone before, so it makes the same old mistakes. Hence Dilbert is just as popular with the new "breed" of readers as it was with the last lot. The reason is they get just as frustrated with the same bosses making the same mistakes as their forebears. No doubt in 100 years time, people will still be grousing about the incompetence of their superiors and Scott Adams, or his grandchildren, will still be making money out of it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
SO, this website redesign proves that Dilbert has become the PHB. A design not help the customers or users, but to help the bottom line. How does it hep. Well, for one, it put Dilbert on the front page of /. after I don't know how long. It is an marketing gimmick, nothing more. Dilbert is irrelevant, and when one is irrelevent, there is little else to do but employ gimmicks. OTOH, I am sure it will work. Admas will sell some of his collected blog entries, people will reminisce about the good old days, and many will complain simply because they cannot understand that a business must generate a good profit.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You've got to be signed in to use the save button, and to email it you have to give them the email address.
It would've been easier to just leave it a gif as before.
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.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I flash MY dilbert and I get four months.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It is fairly common for people who have no clue about how to design with standards complient html/css to use flash to make a wiz-bang menu that doesn't work with many browsers, takes longer to load, and is completely hostile to the sight impaired.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The site is still perfectly functional and showing the strips using plain old .GIFs... *if* you use NoScript.
Allow JavaScript to run and the whole thing blows up in your face and splatters flash everywhere.
Quite amazingly, it seems no one has pointed out that there is now an official RSS feed (in colour) for Dilbert at http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip
The only element of the design I think is short sighted is the layout -- narrow and long. Most modern LCD displays' aspect ratio is wider than it is long.
Welcome to year 2000.
Those of us with more modern widescreen monitors prefer content that doesn't require a 1600 pixel wide screen. Because we like to multi-task and have multiple windows open without one crowding the screen. There are very few applications that I run full-screen, especially browsers or other text display programs. The text lines get too long and too difficult to read.
(A good target width - if you MUST, foolishly, design your site for a particular pixel width is between 900 and 1000 px. Better designers simply insert expansion areas and design for a minimum width of 750px but allow for content to get as wide as 1500px before it goes screwy.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Its not that we hate new technology. Its more that we hate when simple technology that is accepted as a standard is replaced by complex buggy technology that isn't as widely available yet performs the exact same function. With the exception of the animated strips, there is absolutely no need for Flash to be used on this site--all Flash does in this case is make the page load slower and increase the chances that the page will not render correctly (ie, if the client doesn't have Flash).
Now, that being said, the Dilbert Archive is, of yet, unchanged.
``(It's not like I am still expecting it to work in Netscape 3!)''
On the other hand, why shouldn't it?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If you are into RSS grab: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip?format=xml
Actually, in a lot of places the office life is much the same. And, trust me, not only in the USA.
As a consultant, I can tell you that some of the projects I'm dragged into, the things I see, and the things I piece together, often make Dilbert look tame. At any rate, I see everything from Dilbert:
- Wally clones? Check. Armies of them.
One managed to work for 3 years to make a trivial module, that later someone else rewrote in 6 hours from scratch. The rewrite was also 40 times faster, when benchmarked on a large-ish data set. And that's just one of them. He also heavily obfuscated his code, with over half the techniques from "How To Write Unmaintainable Code." (If you can believe that variable names like Pete, Eve and Steve are anything else, I have a bridge in Sahara to sell. And that's just one of the dozens of sins of that code.)
I've also seen people whose day consists at least half, of doing the grand tour of all floors where they know someone, to find people to talk to. Probably the saddest case was one whose morning, from 9 to 12 consisted of making a list of what pizza each team member wants to order for noon. Now you're probably going, "wtf, that doesn't take 3 hours even for 100 people." Well, let me explain: not just going around and quickly noting what they want. He went and started a whole debate on the pros and contras of ordering a Calzone, or maybe a Quatro Stagioni this time. And, hey, did you see that today they have a special price for Pizza Margarita? With each and every person individually.
- Evil secretaries? Check. E.g., in one project they lost their best programmer, a contractor, when the secretary at the company that supplied him, cancelled his medical insurance just before his wife went into labour. Apparently, for no reason whatsoever, she just called the insurance company and said that he's getting a private insurance somewhere else. The guy understandably went "fuck you very much" and quit.
From what I hear, it was also quite the uphill battle to get her to do anything, including actually get the overtime paid that the client had already paid for.
Last I've heard, she got a promotion.
- Mordac The Preventer Of IT Services? Check. At times it feels like one in 3 guys in IT make it their goal in life to prevent everyone else from getting their job done.
A particular one, well, wasn't even consistent about what he wanted, except that it's the opposite of what you want. To one team and project it was "you're not getting queues unless they're all on the same queue manager", to another one in the same time interval it was "you're not getting queues unless they're on different queue managers". To one it was "you're not getting anything if you work with message timeouts, because it defeats the whole idea behind reliable messaging!", while to another one it was "you're not getting queues from me unless you set timeouts on the messages! I don't want you to fill the whole partition with old messages!" Etc.
One DBA argued that it's not his job to tune the production database.
And it doesn't seem to be entirely unheard of, that some company's internal IT department sets such outrageous prices for any service, that it would be cheaper to burn a large file on a CD and send it by _taxi_ to the other end of the country, than to use their network and their servers. In one place management was actually proud that their IT department is the most productive department in the company and makes the biggest profits. As if that's something positive, and not an undue burden on the other departments.
- Incompetent managers and incompetent management decisions? Oooer. I could fill a tome with those alone. But let's just say: some managers were keeping the above parasites employed. It's not even the biggest management sin I've seen, but it's enough to make me wonder, you know?
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically I'm talking a guess that all that changed there is that you got a new job sometime in the 90's, where that doesn't happen any more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
They may have switched to Flash to make it a little harder to link to their content and to copy the images.
New content? That's exactly what they are providing. Most of the changes implement rich media (mainly animated cartoons) and user mashups. The results are pretty lame (corny voice acting and user-written punchlines are not my cup of tea), but it is new content. And it probably will grab a few new users from the Garfield crowd.
Excessive bandwidth? They're not doing HD video, they're just doing a few simple flash applications. It's 2008, for crisakes. Next you'll be complaining that lynx isn't supported.
Plugins? They require flash, period. Flash is almost as basic these days as HTML. If your browser doesn't support flash, than half the leading web sites are already inaccessible to you.
The reaction to this change is chidish. "Worst design since Vista?" Please. Yes, the web site is feeble, but so was the old one. The old one was easier to use if all you wanted to do was catch up on the strip, but you can still do that on the new site. Though I find it easier to just subscribe to the RSS feed, and haven't been to the site in months. Of course, they don't get a lot of revenue from the RSS feed, so they decided they needed a way to drive more traffic. Curse them for their evil greed!
I'm truly shocked by your scientific acumen.
The Climate Crisis is not that the environment is changing. It's that it's changing far, far too fast.
Everybody prefers Quicksilver over stodgy ol' Flash.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
FYI, the whole site works on Linux, just use the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox and spoof yourself as IE7 on Windows. The animations portion works fine.
On a side note, this is what is extremely frustrating about this really, the fact that they didn't limit it to Windows and Mac because of technical reasons, they ARTIFICIALLY limited it. This is actually worse in my opinion.
There is humor in everything in life.
One of the funniest things in life is watching believers get all bent out of shape when you laugh at them. Creationists, Scientologits, Vegan proselytizers, the Global Warming crowd, the 9/11 troofers, many kinds of new-age woo-woos, radical feminists, anti-feminists, and the list goes on and on.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Try here. Not flash and he apparently has every Dilbert ever since the beginning of time.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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Global warming has a sound scientific basis.
Wether or not G.W. is the bane of human existence has no bearing on the sensibility of striving for minimal environmental impact and increase in efficiency and effectiveness of using energy.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
So does global cooling. They both happen, again and again.
Just because the earth warms and cools naturally doesn't mean that human beings can't frig with the same mechanisms, and make it warm unnaturally.
The global cooling scare of the 70s was based on a few concerned scientific papers, and a lot of imaginative reporting. The press knows a good story when they see one. There was no scientific agreement on the issue - just a few papers.
The evidence for anthropogenic warming is there for anybody to look up. I spent some time trying to find the basis for the claims on "skeptic" websites. I have not found a single sound skeptic website, which actually backs its claims up, and is not full of sh1t.
Furthermore, key websites on the skeptic side of things, are run by industry lobbyists and shills who were involved in the tobacco industry mis-information campaign.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"Now consider that it takes at least ten times as much energy to make a car than the car will use during its entire lifetime."
Uhm, wrong way around. It uses about ten times as much energy during its life-time than by manufacturing...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...