I'm in the process of reading the book "Don't make me think!" by Steve Krug. It's a very easy read, very short, big pictures etc. One of the main points he brings up which I think you should keep in mind is exactly what his title suggests.. don't make the user think. If the user has to think about using your page, "Gee, where's that search button? Is that the product I want?" etc, well, who knows how long they'll stick around. Don't make the user think.
Another thing he brings up is usability tests. I admit, I haven't started doing this yet, but I agree with him. Grab a user that isn't a web programmer. Go to their machine and have them load your page. Then ask them to perform some function and watch what they do. Do they struggle when they try to add a user to the list of names? Do they search around for a help button? In some cases, have the user actually speak out loud about what they are doing. Usability tests can really help you learn where your app works well and where it just plain sucks. Hell, I forgot to add a 'save' button to one of mine because I knew how to get it to save without the button (there was a trick to it). I almost put it in to production, but we do quality checks with other people and they caught it (I believe my thoughts were, "Doh!").
Anyway, I'd suggest the book. It's something you could read while sitting in a Barnes and Nobel sipping tea or whatnot.
Evans and Sutherland has been in the flight business for years. Granted, they aren't doing so hot right now.. *shrug* They are heavily in to internships and have great college recruiting. Harmony is the lead product (http://www.es.com/products/image+generators/harmo ny/index.asp). If you can see it all decked out, it is quite amazing.
"Do you guys use this kind of method, or do you try to do everything in one program?"
Depends on the situation. In a workplace environment, which is where I do most of my coding, we code in the same language. I just attended DevDays from MS. One of the strengths of the.Net CRL that they touted was that each developer could write in whatever language they were comfortable with. mkay, that's nice. The problem is when A) programmer quits B) programmer goes on vacation C) programmers is assigned elsewhere. Just my opinion, but in a workplace environment, a standard language should be adopted. Otherwise you have another programmer who doesn't know Cobol trying to debug the app.
What you do on your own time, that's a different story. Whatever suits your fancy.
This is something that slightly pisses me off and is a little off topic. Don't get me wrong. Teaching people skills and hopefully keeping them out of trouble is a good thing. But hello? The web development area is flooded right now. Great, give them some skills so they can feel like shit about not having a job even with their skills. Which brings up the next thought..
It pisses me off that the tech schools and certificate places that I hear about on the radio are talking about how many jobs there are out there. I wonder what they tell people when they can't get a job. I know, I know.. there are jobs out there. You just need the skills. But I know a lot of people out of work right now in the web development area. It's not a fun place to be at this time.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. The article suggests:
". ..the members are engaged a dialogue [SIC] to develop a common approach to identity services on the Internet without compromising privacy controls or centralizing too much control within a handful of companies."
They basically say MS bad because the info belongs to only one person. I, however, agree with one of the previous posters.. 30+ companies is not more secure than 1.
I haven't seen this on the news pages yet, but I just read that Sun has gotten together with a bunch of other companies, 32 to be exact, to basically compete against MS and are calling themselves The Liberty Alliance:
The difference between this and MS is that the Liberty Alliance is made up of many companies and so the data will hopefully be more secure. In fact, that's one reason they formed it (so they say).. because they don't trust MS with all that personal info.
Anyway, I guess the larger sites will still support passport just because they don't want to isolate users. eBay is quoted in the article as saying just that.. they'll support any and all, even though they are part of the Liberty Alliance. Wonder who will win...
Thought I'd throw this in too... they said you can pick up the stations while driving from California to Washington DC for about 98% of the trip. I don't know about you guys, but I hate trying to find local stations when I am driving cross country. It's not that it's a pain in the ass, I just like having the tried-and-true music that I am used to.
I think I'd buy it. There was a radio station here in Salt Lake City that played for about two weeks straight with no commercials, most of which was music I liked. It was great. They will be offering 30 or so channels of no commercials... as well as some 40 more channels of music.. in addition to 20 or so news feeds. I think that's a great deal for $10 a month.
I'd love to be able to listen to CNN in my car. I don't know how many stations I can pick up here, but I don't think it's 100. And I'd bet that they add in channels later if the service was popular.
The problem with this is that sites such as ditto.com and google are making copies of the picture on their servers. Most often, if not always, it is to create a thumbnail of the image which can then be shown to the user.
This doesn't bother me. I like looking up pictures. But I am going to play devil's advocate. If we were to extend this in to the future, we may find that sites no longer reduce the image size to a thumbnail. Let's say your search results only returned a few hits. No need for a thumbnail, right? So far, all is ok. The user is happy.
All is not ok, though. The person who created that image is left out completely. What if they wanted to know how many users were viewing their images to judge whether they should release it to a major magazine? The image could be generating a lot of hits but only through the search engine. The creator of the image never sees those users.
I liken it to the TMBG issue a while back. They Might Be Giants freely gives away music via their web page. But they do it to create a community. They didn't like napster because it stole directly from that community (I am going off of memory, I hope this is correct).
What they said in the article hits the nail on the head. Their picture has been reduced to that of clip-art.
I like the idea of everything being free, but if the creator doesn't want it to be, well.. tuff luck for us, I guess.
I did the same thing. Stopped my intake of caffeine cold turkey. This was about three years ago. I also feel better and sleep better. Unfortunately, I still have cravings. It's difficult being in the IT field and not drinking caffiene. I had to request management to order Sprite for the vending machines at work since everything else was loaded with caffeine (which they happily did). I also noticed that instead of three cans of Mt. Dew a day, I had to switch to 5 or 6 cans of Sprite for the first few months. Now I'm down to 2 cans and trying to get up the nerve to stop drinking carbonation.
I use Qwest for both my DSL and ISP. I thought they were very helpful during this whole Code Red thing. Qwest called and left a message on my answering machine detailing how I could fix my DSL modem and patch my computer so that I would not be infected. They also called back to see if I had received their message and if I needed any help. I've been very happy with Qwest and was surprised by their customer support.
Anyway, point is.. I think they do a great job. Keep up the good work Qwest.
I suggest everyone read Joel on Software. He has a lot of good information for programmers and site management. One of his articles is how to interview. He lists several things, most of which are really good for any interviewer (be they in software development or not). For example, his main point, "Smart and gets things done."
Anyway, I'm rambling. Check the site out. Lots of good information.
This was actually suggested by someone on Kuro5hin, but I think it's a good idea. The idea of paying for a web site with no ads doesn't usually generate much support, unfortunately. I myself am guilty of not donating money to sites I frequent. The idea suggested was to use something similar to MS's passport site.
Why can't five or six different web sites get together that have common characteristics and charge one rate to access content on all these sites? I would gladly pay one overall bill to access five of my favorite sites rather than having to pay each one less. Say Slashdot gets X% of the total, Kuro5hin gets a slice, bluesnews, etc. Then those who do pay get the sites with no ads plus one general login account for all sites.
Granted, the company is not currently charging the monthly fee until the game is complete, but really, if they recognized that it wasn't complete, why go gold? Why ship?
I've heard that they shipped when they did because funds were starting to dry up. I can't say whether this is true or not.
But, I can see why they would ship it incomplete then. If there is no money, at least they can release and get some funds, then fix bugs and hope to survive rather than just giving up and going broke.
I couldn't ever connect when I was a beta tester, so I don't know anything about it other than what I've read.
Re:You know, this just warms my heart.
on
Fortune on Rambus
·
· Score: 2
Scion never heard from E&S again, and neither did anyone else.
This is OT, sorry.
E&S currently has ~80% of the market share in the government simulation business, IIRC, and they are focusing their sites on commercial business now as well. Just a list of some of their customers: most major airlines, NASA, some film and video studios, lots of planetariums (Digital Theater is lovely), and of course others.
And let's of course not forget their backing by Intel.
To say E&S has never been heard from again is silly considering how large of a company it is and how many contracts they have out. I haven't heard of the situation you described, but then again, that was quite a while ago.
So, instead of being like the $6 billion a year hollywood film industry, it will be more like the $10 billion a year (and extremely profitable) porn industry?
This is actually one of the arguments made in the article: that the gaming industry should be compared to the porn industry, not the film industry.
The reason being is that the film industry that they are comparing the sales to is limited to only box office receipts (I believe), whilst the gaming sales takes everything in to account associated with the game. If they were to take in to account all of the toys, gadgets, cereals, shirts, etc that movies produce, then the film industry would be much larger than the gaming industry.
I didn't care much for the article, anyway, maybe because it seemed more like a rant than anything.
I don't think I've heard anyone suggest this yet, but why not mirror the content? I mean, if the site is as popular as people say it is, couldn't you find a few people to mirror your site, then send them off to the other sites when your bandwidth use is getting high? It seems that you could cut down on bandwidth a great deal by splitting the number of people on your site by half.
A company I worked for used CPanel for their web stuff. The people there liked it a lot, but since I was the developer, I found it very annoying. I ended up calling the provider up and getting shell access so I could directly do things on the box. CPanel makes it easier to interact with a lot of things, but for those who actually know the commands and know what CPanel is doing, it isn't worth it.
I haven't used the other, so I can't comment on it. CPanel works fine though for those who don't develop and just need to tweak a few things
As someone who lives here in Utah, I can tell you that the liquor laws really suck for people who have not grown up here. No alcohol can be bought on Sunday (this is not due to the church, oh no, people need a day to get sober) and last summer the city voted not to allow micro-breweries in. I myself have lived here my whole life, so there is nothing for me to get used to, but just last week I had to watch one of my good friends leave because she was tired of dealing with the place.
She grew up back east and had a hard time adjusting to Utah (she was here for college). This has happened to many of my friends that I have made in college. They can't handle living in Utah because of how anal^H^H^H^H annoying some of the people are.
But as the common argument goes, move somewhere else if you don't like it. Most people around here have gotten used to it if they are here for very long. And as most out-of-state companies have pointed out to me on interviews, people from Utah usually return to Utah to live after a couple of years. They don't like being away from this place. When I go in to an interview, they don't see someone with skills, they see someone who is of the popular religion and will probably leave after a short time to be back among them (in which case they are incorrect).
QNX is a great OS. We've been working with it in our computer labs trying to come up with a good web browser that doesn't have to use a HD (we are using it from the CDROM). For those of you who haven't seen QNX, they have a complete OS + web browser running on a 3.5" floppy. Pretty impressive, IMHO.
It is a nice OS, also, because it doesn't create extra partitions. There is a large file that it stores under a directory (the image file) which is loaded on bootup. So if you ever decide to 'uninstall', I believe you can just delete the file.
Great OS. I hope to see more for it and its good to see that it is free now.
There's a video of the event showing some of Doom 3 (as well as other info about the new card) on Cnet. I followed the link from bluesnews.com. I'd paste it here but the URL is quite large. Anyway, very impressive.
So on the subject of the hard drives, why would people buy these hard drives? The article makes it sound like all the HD manufacturers are going to support it, but what to stop some company from springing up that doesn't support it?
For that matter, what's to stop a company outside of the US from creating non-compliant HDs that doesn't support this copy protection? I'd pay more money for one that doesn't have the copy protection on it... quite a bit more, actually. And I'm sure others would too.
I guess we'll see how it works out. From the article, it sounds like there are going to be a lot of problems in the IT field because of this. I just can't see IT people switching to it because of the herd mentality (their managers is another story).
Eventually NASA accepted Levin's idea for a biology test. But before he could participate, NASA officials told him, he had to get better credentials. He lacked a PhD.
Apparently at NASA, being smart means having a piece of paper. Either that or they are concerned about some sort of image they wish to portray. I understand that people without those credentials have a harder time, but their ideas should not be discounted because of their schooling.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the process of reading the book "Don't make me think!" by Steve Krug. It's a very easy read, very short, big pictures etc. One of the main points he brings up which I think you should keep in mind is exactly what his title suggests.. don't make the user think. If the user has to think about using your page, "Gee, where's that search button? Is that the product I want?" etc, well, who knows how long they'll stick around. Don't make the user think.
Another thing he brings up is usability tests. I admit, I haven't started doing this yet, but I agree with him. Grab a user that isn't a web programmer. Go to their machine and have them load your page. Then ask them to perform some function and watch what they do. Do they struggle when they try to add a user to the list of names? Do they search around for a help button? In some cases, have the user actually speak out loud about what they are doing. Usability tests can really help you learn where your app works well and where it just plain sucks. Hell, I forgot to add a 'save' button to one of mine because I knew how to get it to save without the button (there was a trick to it). I almost put it in to production, but we do quality checks with other people and they caught it (I believe my thoughts were, "Doh!").
Anyway, I'd suggest the book. It's something you could read while sitting in a Barnes and Nobel sipping tea or whatnot.
http://www.es.com/about_eands/careers/career+oppor tunities/index.asp
o ny/index.asp). If you can see it all decked out, it is quite amazing.
Evans and Sutherland has been in the flight business for years. Granted, they aren't doing so hot right now.. *shrug* They are heavily in to internships and have great college recruiting. Harmony is the lead product (http://www.es.com/products/image+generators/harm
Frij
*lowly IT worker for E&S
"Do you guys use this kind of method, or do you try to do everything in one program?"
.Net CRL that they touted was that each developer could write in whatever language they were comfortable with. mkay, that's nice. The problem is when A) programmer quits B) programmer goes on vacation C) programmers is assigned elsewhere. Just my opinion, but in a workplace environment, a standard language should be adopted. Otherwise you have another programmer who doesn't know Cobol trying to debug the app.
Depends on the situation. In a workplace environment, which is where I do most of my coding, we code in the same language. I just attended DevDays from MS. One of the strengths of the
What you do on your own time, that's a different story. Whatever suits your fancy.
This is something that slightly pisses me off and is a little off topic. Don't get me wrong. Teaching people skills and hopefully keeping them out of trouble is a good thing. But hello? The web development area is flooded right now. Great, give them some skills so they can feel like shit about not having a job even with their skills. Which brings up the next thought..
It pisses me off that the tech schools and certificate places that I hear about on the radio are talking about how many jobs there are out there. I wonder what they tell people when they can't get a job. I know, I know.. there are jobs out there. You just need the skills. But I know a lot of people out of work right now in the web development area. It's not a fun place to be at this time.
K, done ranting.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. The article suggests:
.the members are engaged a dialogue [SIC] to develop a common approach to identity services on the Internet without compromising privacy controls or centralizing too much control within a handful of companies."
". .
They basically say MS bad because the info belongs to only one person. I, however, agree with one of the previous posters.. 30+ companies is not more secure than 1.
I haven't seen this on the news pages yet, but I just read that Sun has gotten together with a bunch of other companies, 32 to be exact, to basically compete against MS and are calling themselves The Liberty Alliance:
o k/article/0,,10535_908411,00.html
http://ecommerce.internet.com/news/insights/outlo
The difference between this and MS is that the Liberty Alliance is made up of many companies and so the data will hopefully be more secure. In fact, that's one reason they formed it (so they say).. because they don't trust MS with all that personal info.
Anyway, I guess the larger sites will still support passport just because they don't want to isolate users. eBay is quoted in the article as saying just that.. they'll support any and all, even though they are part of the Liberty Alliance. Wonder who will win...
Thought I'd throw this in too... they said you can pick up the stations while driving from California to Washington DC for about 98% of the trip. I don't know about you guys, but I hate trying to find local stations when I am driving cross country. It's not that it's a pain in the ass, I just like having the tried-and-true music that I am used to.
I think I'd buy it. There was a radio station here in Salt Lake City that played for about two weeks straight with no commercials, most of which was music I liked. It was great. They will be offering 30 or so channels of no commercials... as well as some 40 more channels of music.. in addition to 20 or so news feeds. I think that's a great deal for $10 a month.
.02 cents.
I'd love to be able to listen to CNN in my car. I don't know how many stations I can pick up here, but I don't think it's 100. And I'd bet that they add in channels later if the service was popular.
K, that's my
Bunch of pictures of what is left.[http://www.scottrossi.com/wtc/]
I knew it would be bad, but a picture is definately worth a thousand words.
The problem with this is that sites such as ditto.com and google are making copies of the picture on their servers. Most often, if not always, it is to create a thumbnail of the image which can then be shown to the user.
This doesn't bother me. I like looking up pictures. But I am going to play devil's advocate. If we were to extend this in to the future, we may find that sites no longer reduce the image size to a thumbnail. Let's say your search results only returned a few hits. No need for a thumbnail, right? So far, all is ok. The user is happy.
All is not ok, though. The person who created that image is left out completely. What if they wanted to know how many users were viewing their images to judge whether they should release it to a major magazine? The image could be generating a lot of hits but only through the search engine. The creator of the image never sees those users.
I liken it to the TMBG issue a while back. They Might Be Giants freely gives away music via their web page. But they do it to create a community. They didn't like napster because it stole directly from that community (I am going off of memory, I hope this is correct).
What they said in the article hits the nail on the head. Their picture has been reduced to that of clip-art.
I like the idea of everything being free, but if the creator doesn't want it to be, well.. tuff luck for us, I guess.
Who said that "breaking up is hard to do..."
I did the same thing. Stopped my intake of caffeine cold turkey. This was about three years ago. I also feel better and sleep better. Unfortunately, I still have cravings. It's difficult being in the IT field and not drinking caffiene. I had to request management to order Sprite for the vending machines at work since everything else was loaded with caffeine (which they happily did). I also noticed that instead of three cans of Mt. Dew a day, I had to switch to 5 or 6 cans of Sprite for the first few months. Now I'm down to 2 cans and trying to get up the nerve to stop drinking carbonation.
Anyway, no real point. I was just rambling.
I use Qwest for both my DSL and ISP. I thought they were very helpful during this whole Code Red thing. Qwest called and left a message on my answering machine detailing how I could fix my DSL modem and patch my computer so that I would not be infected. They also called back to see if I had received their message and if I needed any help. I've been very happy with Qwest and was surprised by their customer support.
Anyway, point is.. I think they do a great job. Keep up the good work Qwest.
I suggest everyone read Joel on Software. He has a lot of good information for programmers and site management. One of his articles is how to interview. He lists several things, most of which are really good for any interviewer (be they in software development or not). For example, his main point, "Smart and gets things done."
Anyway, I'm rambling. Check the site out. Lots of good information.
This was actually suggested by someone on Kuro5hin, but I think it's a good idea. The idea of paying for a web site with no ads doesn't usually generate much support, unfortunately. I myself am guilty of not donating money to sites I frequent. The idea suggested was to use something similar to MS's passport site.
Why can't five or six different web sites get together that have common characteristics and charge one rate to access content on all these sites? I would gladly pay one overall bill to access five of my favorite sites rather than having to pay each one less. Say Slashdot gets X% of the total, Kuro5hin gets a slice, bluesnews, etc. Then those who do pay get the sites with no ads plus one general login account for all sites.
Just a thought.
Granted, the company is not currently charging the monthly fee until the game is complete, but really, if they recognized that it wasn't complete, why go gold? Why ship?
I've heard that they shipped when they did because funds were starting to dry up. I can't say whether this is true or not.
But, I can see why they would ship it incomplete then. If there is no money, at least they can release and get some funds, then fix bugs and hope to survive rather than just giving up and going broke.
I couldn't ever connect when I was a beta tester, so I don't know anything about it other than what I've read.
Scion never heard from E&S again, and neither did anyone else.
This is OT, sorry.
E&S currently has ~80% of the market share in the government simulation business, IIRC, and they are focusing their sites on commercial business now as well. Just a list of some of their customers: most major airlines, NASA, some film and video studios, lots of planetariums (Digital Theater is lovely), and of course others.
And let's of course not forget their backing by Intel.
To say E&S has never been heard from again is silly considering how large of a company it is and how many contracts they have out. I haven't heard of the situation you described, but then again, that was quite a while ago.
So, instead of being like the $6 billion a year hollywood film industry, it will be more like the $10 billion a year (and extremely profitable) porn industry?
This is actually one of the arguments made in the article: that the gaming industry should be compared to the porn industry, not the film industry.
The reason being is that the film industry that they are comparing the sales to is limited to only box office receipts (I believe), whilst the gaming sales takes everything in to account associated with the game. If they were to take in to account all of the toys, gadgets, cereals, shirts, etc that movies produce, then the film industry would be much larger than the gaming industry.
I didn't care much for the article, anyway, maybe because it seemed more like a rant than anything.
I don't think I've heard anyone suggest this yet, but why not mirror the content? I mean, if the site is as popular as people say it is, couldn't you find a few people to mirror your site, then send them off to the other sites when your bandwidth use is getting high? It seems that you could cut down on bandwidth a great deal by splitting the number of people on your site by half.
A company I worked for used CPanel for their web stuff. The people there liked it a lot, but since I was the developer, I found it very annoying. I ended up calling the provider up and getting shell access so I could directly do things on the box. CPanel makes it easier to interact with a lot of things, but for those who actually know the commands and know what CPanel is doing, it isn't worth it.
I haven't used the other, so I can't comment on it. CPanel works fine though for those who don't develop and just need to tweak a few things
As someone who lives here in Utah, I can tell you that the liquor laws really suck for people who have not grown up here. No alcohol can be bought on Sunday (this is not due to the church, oh no, people need a day to get sober) and last summer the city voted not to allow micro-breweries in. I myself have lived here my whole life, so there is nothing for me to get used to, but just last week I had to watch one of my good friends leave because she was tired of dealing with the place.
She grew up back east and had a hard time adjusting to Utah (she was here for college). This has happened to many of my friends that I have made in college. They can't handle living in Utah because of how anal^H^H^H^H annoying some of the people are.
But as the common argument goes, move somewhere else if you don't like it. Most people around here have gotten used to it if they are here for very long. And as most out-of-state companies have pointed out to me on interviews, people from Utah usually return to Utah to live after a couple of years. They don't like being away from this place. When I go in to an interview, they don't see someone with skills, they see someone who is of the popular religion and will probably leave after a short time to be back among them (in which case they are incorrect).
Fucking sucks, if you ask me. Oh well.
QNX is a great OS. We've been working with it in our computer labs trying to come up with a good web browser that doesn't have to use a HD (we are using it from the CDROM). For those of you who haven't seen QNX, they have a complete OS + web browser running on a 3.5" floppy. Pretty impressive, IMHO.
It is a nice OS, also, because it doesn't create extra partitions. There is a large file that it stores under a directory (the image file) which is loaded on bootup. So if you ever decide to 'uninstall', I believe you can just delete the file.
Great OS. I hope to see more for it and its good to see that it is free now.
There's a video of the event showing some of Doom 3 (as well as other info about the new card) on Cnet. I followed the link from bluesnews.com. I'd paste it here but the URL is quite large. Anyway, very impressive.
So on the subject of the hard drives, why would people buy these hard drives? The article makes it sound like all the HD manufacturers are going to support it, but what to stop some company from springing up that doesn't support it?
For that matter, what's to stop a company outside of the US from creating non-compliant HDs that doesn't support this copy protection? I'd pay more money for one that doesn't have the copy protection on it... quite a bit more, actually. And I'm sure others would too.
I guess we'll see how it works out. From the article, it sounds like there are going to be a lot of problems in the IT field because of this. I just can't see IT people switching to it because of the herd mentality (their managers is another story).
From the article:
Eventually NASA accepted Levin's idea for a biology test. But before he could participate, NASA officials told him, he had to get better credentials. He lacked a PhD.
Apparently at NASA, being smart means having a piece of paper. Either that or they are concerned about some sort of image they wish to portray. I understand that people without those credentials have a harder time, but their ideas should not be discounted because of their schooling.