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FOX.com Apologizes to Linux Users
OnlyNou writes "found this story at Linux Today." Apparently Fox did not intentionally exclude Linux users - along with users of all operating systems other than Mac and Windows - from fox.com, and is rectifying the error. Now if they made the site worth viewing in the first place, everything would be groovy with fox.com. (Free clue for Fox: start by dumping the flashy splash page. All it adds to the site is download time.*grin*)
MURDOCH: LINUX IS THE BEST OPERATING SYSTEM EVER
"Fuck M$", Says High-Powered Executive
Note: This article subsumes a previous article posted by the United Press International.
NEW YORK, NY (UPI) - Businessman Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the immense and powerful News Corporation, sang the praises of the popular Linux operating system today at Fox News Headquarters in New York. In addition, Murdoch also announced the cancellation of a previously-planned program entitled "World's Least-Supported Operating Systems." The program was part of Fox's new fall line-up.
"What a jag-off I've been," admitted Murdoch.
"We all do things in life that we're ashamed of," explained Murdoch. "For my part, I allowed myself to be swept up by a large, domineering corporation. I allowed myself to be manipulated. I allowed the rascals in Redmond to brainwash me." Murdoch's voice cracked dramatically at several points in his speech.
"But we're past all of that now," continued Murdoch. "And I'm a better man because of it. That's why I say 'to hell with M$!' We will forge on! We will make history! The Fox network considers Linux to be the best operating system ever invented!" Murdoch spent the next several minutes explaining to reporters that the 'S' in "MS" was to be replaced with a dollar sign.
"It's important," explained Murdoch.
Candace Gorman, a public relations spokeswoman for the Fox network, made a few brief statements after Murdoch's comments. "I would like to make clear that Mr. Murdoch's statements and position reversal have absolutely nothing to do with the performance of Red Hat stock, and they certainly are unrelated to the record-setting IPO of VA Linux. Mr. Murdoch's stock portfolio is his own goddamn business."
Ms. Gorman continued. "Additionally, I must also add that Mr. Murdoch's comments are unrelated to the successful IPO of Andover.Net. It is common knowledge that supporters of Andover.Net are a bunch of complete and total assholes."
Nick Petreley contributed to this story.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
And after all this commotion, Slashdot has a right to complain that it isn't worth visiting anyway? WTF?
Yeah, get rid of the Flash intro screens. And while you're at it, get rid of those annoying animated buttons. And those blasted popup windows. And color too, because it's just a strain on my eyes. Actually, just get rid of all the images anyway; text is the way to go. Aw, fuck the text, let's just have a big array of lights on my desktop that I can use to view the contents of my CPU registers. Nah, forget that, that's a waste of lightbulbs... I'll just guess what's in the registers, because -- seriously -- it's more fun that way.
Oh wait... I guess I don't agree with you.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
"Free clue for Fox: start by dumping the flashy splash page. All it adds to the site is download time."
Sorry Rob, I've got to disagree with you on this. I'm sure the /. crowd is no fan of Flash, and there can be a multitude of reasons for it (in all honesty, there's a lot of "If it looks nice it must suck" in this community. Not everybody, but many).
Anyway, amid all the reasons, download time shouldn't be it. Sure you *could* make a Flash movie that requires the browser to download all day before it starts, but most Flash downloads very quickly. And if it's big, there's a small initial download followed by streaming.
That has been true from the earliest days of the technology, when it was called FutureSplash (before Macromedia bought it).
Many of us geeks enjoy the whole multimedia experience, even in a web browser under the right circumstances, as long as it's done right and isn't forced upon us when we don't want it. Kind of like porn, now that I think about it :)
RP
I guess the best way to add to your karma on this story is to bash roblimo, so I must play the karma whore and do:
ObKarmaWhore: Roblimo is a lewser and doesnt know jack shit about journalism! He must be roasted over the pit for all eternity!
blah. Get over it people. Slashdot is *not* journalism, and the folks that run slashdot know it. They just point us to things they think geeks might be interested in knowing about. And that's why slashdot is such a great site.
You can bitch about the article contents, but please dont bitch that this isn't journalism because by definition it is not
When I've perfected my whiny-slashdot-filter program, I'll be sure to let you all know. Maybe even that guy that puts grits down his pants will use it.
IMHO, it's not just Fox that are at fault here, it's commerical "web design" in general. Ever notice how places like PCWeek, Altavista, mp3.com, and many -- many -- others use pages replete with br and such to force the 640x480 look on people? Most of the time it's not even centred, forcing me to stare at the left 30% of my monitor.
;-)
There is no excuse why this should be. Give me my content, give it to me nicely, and, damnit, let me view it in my browser window at proper scaling. There was an artcle on some site about Slashdot long ago. I had to use Opera to magnify the page view 300% for it to show the "content" at a decent size in my 1024x768 desktop. When I started using Linux exclusively (with Windows as a glorfied Nintendo), the problem was exacerbated by the simple fact that the pages designed to look great at 640x480 also assumed a bunch of fonts (which I did later setup, thanks to the ttf font server in the Slackware contrib dir).
Why bother to take the time, spend lots of your company moola, only to come up with a hard-coded, useless, junky site?
Flash? Great -- what's the point? Slow downloads suck, and I'm on a cable modem! The only site I've seen to use Flash in a compelling way (in terms of "mainstream" sites), is After Y2K. With Cascading Style Sheets, it is trivial to implement really nice looking sites that scale well. Netscape, Opera, and (gahck) IE support CSS very well, as does Mozilla. With Lynx, it's a non-issue
If anyone doesn't understand what I mean, go look at my webserver (Thock.com) for an example of how I write my HTML (which is all hand written, and generally tested well). I'll also welcome any comments anyone has on my HTML, I am writing an HTML primer, and related, documents for the webserver.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
My biggest qualm with the intro movies is that I usually open in new window and forget about it for 10 minutes, rendering useless the animation.
If I wanted to be force fed flashy graphics, I'd watch TV.
The liberal adherence to, and application of, the Linux Advocacy HOWTO. Know it Live it Love it And you'll see more positive results like this.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Now, the first thing I do when I see a Flash Intro is look for the "skip intro" button, or hit the back button as fast as possible.
Flash can be a very usefull tool when used properly, and a time soaking intro is not a proper use. Sites start to loose eyeballs if everything isn't loaded in 5 seconds, so what on earth makes anyone thing that a 30 second intro is going to do any good.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
I just want to comment for the umpteenth time in the umpteenth place: web designers should not be using the canned Javascript code that is supposed to diagnose whether a user has Flash/Shockwave installed. It comes with the entire range of Macromedia Flash/Shockwave products and is available in various places around the web
That diagnostic code is faulty. It does not work properly. It misdiagnoses. It's wrong. It comes up with bogus download-the-plugin messages and/or shuts out zillions of users (like me) who actually have the plugin. It makes you look like a chump and your site look half-assed.
What you should do, if you're using Flash/Shockwave in your site design, is leave out the diagnostic code and let that dumb little you-don't-have-the-plugin icon show up for the tiny handful of users that don't have it. You can offer those three or four people a link nearby for a non-Flash/Shortwave version of your site. Dump the diagnostic code.
It's so strange to me that a site which spends thousands to look good doesn't test the project on every platform, every browser. Lame.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
Rather than looking to TV for an example, look to "normal" (ie: non-web) computer programs. Most have a splash screen of some sort, consisting mostly of the program name, a copyright notice, and some fancy graphic.
:-)
Most people don't complain about these. Moreover, they actually have a purpose. They are there to "hide" the program start-up. Most programs take a second or 2 (or in the case of MS' programs, a minute or 2 (sorry, couldn't resist)) to load up, into memory. Rather than sit there, loading, and doing nothing visibly, leaving the user to wonder, "did I actually click the icon? does the program actually work?", the splash screen provides some sort of feedback to inform the user that something is, indeed happening.
And this is a Good Thing (TM). One of my biggest pet peeves about XEmacs (an otherwise nice program (no flamewars, please!)) is that it doesn't do that. It just sits there and loads in the background, and I never know whether it's loading or not, for the first several minutes.
So the natural impulse to most web designers, when creating a web site, is to treat it as a standalone program. For the most part, I think this actually works. Except for a few things, like the splash screen.
Since the splash screen takes just as long to load as the normal starting page would, it becomes useless. Moreover, you can tell when the main screen loads. Even if, for whatever reason, the main page takes a while to load, you can still tell when the process has started. You can still tell when the site exists. So the splash screen becomes pointless. Redundant.
In fact, if -- as is apparently the case here (I haven't actually checked the site out myself) -- the splash screen takes a long time to load, it is counterproductive. It re-introduces the very problem it was designed to solve.
But most web designers, for whatever reason, don't realize this intuitively. The splash screen seems just as valid (especially when they are designing it on a local system) as it would have been on a standalone program.
So it becomes up to us ("us" being the web-browsing public) to inform them that their lovely splash screen is, in fact, detrimental to fluid browsing.
Just a few thoughts of mine... don't kill me over them
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- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
We shouldn't be surprised that once money makers got involved that the web became just another casualty in the war on our minds. Information is less important than image. Literacy is less important than economics. Critical reasoning is less important than feel-good emotive response. Welcome to our brave new world; we hope you like it, because you don't have any choice. Best to just lie back, close your eyes, and think of England--er--America.
Neil Postman's non-fiction book, Amusing Ourselves to the Death, is a disturbing report of this phenomenon that offers no real solution. Bruce Sterling's science fiction novel, Distraction, is not just a decent story; it's also filled with social commentary about a world in which media image is paramount. I heartily recommend both books. Huxley's Brave New World wasn't that great a read, but he was scarily on-target about a lot of this.
Here are two links to resources related to this disturbing trend. The first is to the Any Browser Campaign, a definite must-read for designers. The other is a far less ambitious work, my own short treatise on Diversity in Web Design. Both are replete with links to further resources.
There's also a subtle connection between the themes of bad keyboard strategies and bad webpage design. In both cases, we have people who think they're making things better for one portion of the populace at the cost of making things worse for another portion.
Well, as it happens, I work for a web design company (as a database guy, mind you), and if we released a website that people couldn't access without a plugin, someone would probably be fired.
I woudln't consider myself a hot-head, I just believe in professionalism. The NFB can sue because blind people are denied access to some web services, linux,Beos and other users were all denied service just the same.
Dana
Let's sieze the moment and demand that fox--web page and all--embrace open source. The community should be able to contribute diff patches to Simpsons scripts. I want to be able to download and edit my own version of the local affiliate news feeds. I want to remotely log into the freaking water cooler where the employees take breaks.
they could have just said "ah, screw it, none of those nerds ever watch TV anyways"
I think they know the demographics for shows like "The Simpsons," "Futurama," and "The X-Files."
Keeping us nerds out wouldn't be a very intelligent thing to do, and despite shows like "World's Scariest/Funniest/etc foo," they probably are somewhat intelligent.
Roblimo, Ok, so Fox did something wrong...big deal...they fixed it...and in good faith. Why do you use Slashdot.org as a soapbox to give your un-needed commentary?
Roblimo writes: Now if they made the site worth viewing in the first place, everything would be groovy with fox.com. (Free clue for Fox: start by dumping the flashy splash page. All it adds to the site is download time.)
Don't take this as a flame, just a comment. I think your opinion should be heard, just maybe in the comments section. This way, we can seperate news from opinion...an important thing for any journalist to do.
One idea that might kill two birds with one stone is to automatically give the poster the chance to do the first post. This would eliminate some first post babies...but then we would see the wrath of the "I am 31337 HaX0r, SECOND POST!!!" hehe...
Like always, just my $.02,
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
I mean, why the inflammatory phrase like "now if they made the site worth viewing..." ?
We now know that they made an honest mistake: their web programmer simply used a pre-made script to detect the OS, that unfortunately locked out linux users.
Now, they've apologized and promised to correct the situation, and even given a reasonable timeframe. I don't see why people should be angry at Fox anymore. They're trying to make a good-looking, user-friendly website.
I expect the target population of that web site to be more likely to stay on site longer if the site looks good. For many people, having a really bland site, yet full of information that is easy to access, is a turnoff.
Not everybody on the web is a geek. Not everybody likes bland webpages. Not everybody can see a site like http://www.linuxhq.com/, which is perfectly structured but even at first glance incredibly boring. Some people need graphics, animations and sounds to keep them interested.
I don't see why we should expect media companies to target their site at geeks. I'm sure many of us would like a Fox site that gives us the schedule in a nice HTML compliant table with no formatting tags, and a brief technical description of each show separated by paragraph delimiters, but that's not going to happen. That's not what the target audience wants.
And why, of all companies, continue to be angry at Fox ? Most companies wouldn't even give the courtesy of an answer, never mind giving a timeframe for the problems to be fixed.
Wouldn't it be great if front page stories could be moderated?
Now if they made the site worth viewing in the first place, everything would be groovy with fox.com.
Score: -1 (Flamebait)
Heh.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot