That's certainly an important point and the article itself draws attention to the idea that "handling" evangelist users should become a formal part of marketing. That, IMHO and I'm sure most folks here, is a bad thing for exactly the reasons you suggest. Where I'm involved in these sorts of activities it is in a way that totally distant from the company making the product. Then again... I suppose I *would* say that if I were being paid to, wouldn't I?
Lesson, I guess - accept technical help from apparently independent product evangelist users but be wary of purchase advice from them;-)
I'm one of these types of people myself. If there is a software product that I'm personally very fond of and I feel that more folks might benefit from it than do, I'll actively attempt to support the product through this type of forum activity, giving advice, tutorial writing and generally ranting about it on my travels around the web.
I enjoy it. I dare say there's an element of liking the positive feedback too. I also feel that by supporting the userbase of my chosen product I might be helping retain a few users who might otherwise flee to a competing product that I personally don't like/use. This, it seems to me, contributes towards the product's manufacturer continuing to produce and update it which IS a positive benefit to me. I'm not being paid cash - I'm being paid in the slight boost to the likeliness of my chosen product continuing to exist and remain current.
It's worth noting though that providing tools to drive attention to your most vociferous, active and evangelic users can be a double edged sword. Since folks like myself aren't being paid, we have no incentive to be anything other than completely honest in answering support requests.
If your new version is borked; if your long anticipated new feature turns out to be vapor, if your own customer service folks are crap - in short, if those evangelic users get to a point where they feel betrayed by the manufacturer - it's going to be exactly those highly visible, spotlit users with audiences of their own that are going to tell it like it is.
Does the Cassini-Huygens mission do nothing for you? That Hubble Telescope doodad not honking your horn? Spirit and Opportunity are things that make you go "meh"?
If you (or rather some notional "member of the public") would rather be watching tonight's new episode of "The Apprentice" than reading about one of these missions, then where does the lack of vision lie?
A Telegraph.co.uk article on this story suggests that this is specifically about prepaid phones. It appears that nearly all Mexican mobiles are prepaid.
Wait, exploiting software loopholes to circumvent authentication requirements and make changes to privileged (albeit pointless tatt) information is not "hacking" anymore? I must have missed that memo.
Of course yes, churn is certainly a factor in the the number of job ads shown; that occurred to me too.
But your assertion about Java-coder vs COBOL-coder churn, to me, seems very much a part of the whole "COBOL runs the world" mythology. Your statement - trotted out to me almost verbatim by countless folks over the decades of COBOL's decline that I've witnessed - that COBOL programmers are a happy band of nameless, faceless heros who all get a job for life in a Fortune 500 company and never meet another coder in their entire careers - is one of the key anecdotes that "supports" the COBOL-centric-universe theory.:-D
1. Around a third of UK companies say they have even at least one COBOL program somewhere in their enterprise.
2. Around three quarters of all UK electronic business is coded in COBOL.
I'm aware that there are allegedly pockets of COBOL here and there with some fairly significant nuclei of usage within certain business sectors but seriously... 80% of all electronic transactions?
Monster.co.uk search for single keyword in title, 11th Apr 2009:
This doesn't seem to suggest a great demand for COBOL coders at present which - one would think - suggests little use of COBOL.
I've heard this "the world secretly runs on COBOL" story countless times over my career, but seldom seen more than a few lines of COBOL actually deployed in businesses I've worked with. Is the whole thing just a weird industry myth?
"Opinions are divided" it would seem. Plenty of folks share some/all of your opinion of FC2. Others disagree. I'm more of the disagreeing crowd myself, though many of your criticisms there are - of course - entirely valid (and humorously posed to boot;-)
The reasons I'd disagree on the "sucks" evaluation there include those clearly rather whizzy graphics, the spectacularly well-released sound effects, solid fun FPS combat and the uncommon sense of time and space present in the game by virtue of its large environment, day/night cycles, weather effects and such.
Sure, it's not "realistic"; fun games aren't. And those badguys must be paid incredibly well, for sure. But it is - IMHO - a wonderfully presented, unusual and noteworthy FPS that shows a modern shooter doesn't have to be "on a rail" (like CoD, HL, many others) in order for there to be exciting and memorable scenes.
My summary one-line review of Far Cry 2 would be: "I like where you're going with this..."
I guess you kinda partly answered your own question there. Although I'd suggest that many (most? who knows?) IE6 users are not the folks who don't have a choice but the folks who don't KNOW they have a choice; folks who bought their Win98 or XP machine long long ago now, clicked the big blue "Internet" button on the start menu and have never figured out that "Explorer" was something optional (pretty much MS's intention for bunding all along).
Those folks, getting a whizzy message from one of the tiny handful of Internet brandnames that they know and trust ("Google"), might well be finally encouraged to switch to something other than IE6. And if the big flashing download button that Google provide is a download for Chrome, it'll be Chrome they pick - and most likely stick with for years.
All that NASA is good at doing these days is burning money.
Deary me - isn't that a little unfair? The only thing they can do is burn money? You don't see any value at all in the various Mars missions, the fascinating output of Cassini-Huygens, or SOHO, or...? And so on.
Check out the NASA Current Missions for a bit of an overview of some of the amazing work that NASA are doing.
Whilst I don't disagree with your main point that small, nimble, commercial outfits can often work smarter and quicker than monolithic government departments, I don't think it's fair cast NASA as nothing but a bottomless sinkhole for cash.
It might also be worth considering how many of those current projects would never even get to the drawing board stage if the only space enterprises we had were entirely commercial.
Auto-run updaters should only be added for critical components like AV.
For what it's worth, your browser is at least as critical as AV -- moreso, because if you've got a secure browser, that's one less reason you need AV at all.
Fair comment. My point was really that AV needs to be up-to-date immediately I start my box, whereas for the browser (that I might not even use in any given session) surely its acceptable to have it update on launch (a la FF) rather than having to hook an extra updater in to my - already over-extended - list of things that launch at boot time?
Plus, the not asking permission thing - bad form - smells like Quicktime;-)
Web Developer, Firebug, any number of other plugins for FF already do this and more so thats not a significant selling point for me.
I open tons of new tabs/windows in any browser I use and I hate it when one crashes and takes out a dozen pages
Fine, but really the browser shouldn't crash often enough for this to mean anything at all. Can't recall the last time I crashed FF, so hey.
When you search, it puts little marks on the scroll bar where results are. That's neat.
Granted, thats cute. And the position of the find-in-page control is better than the stupid bottom bar in FF. I still prefer (and use plugins to have) the find-in-page controls in a floating dialog though.
Create new windows from tabs, drag tabs between windows, consolidate windows into tabs.
Firefox already does this too so this is nothing new.
I really miss scroll-click and smooth scrolling
What bothers me more is that the mousewheel only scrolls the page down - up doesn't work. WinXP, Microsoft Intellimouse - couldn't be a much more generic setup and yet scrolling only goes in one direction. Clearly a bug that'll be fixed but I'dve thought a rather too obvious to make it into this release.
having the File/options/etc WIMP standards under that little button to the right of the address bar is kinda weird
Thats putting it very politely. Why destroy very long-established interface concepts like this? What was so bad about having a menu bar? What do I gain from this that makes up for no longer being able to access menu functions by keyboard? (ALT->key->cursors and such). Stupid idea - a step backwards in interface design.
Relatedly - no bookmarks menu - unless I have an entire waste-of-space toolbar turned on just to get that single button which - again - I can't initiate cursor navigation on by a keypress.
Is there any "bookmarks organizer" at all? Can't find it.
I also object to any program which overrides whatever visual theme I have selected in the OS. Blue chrome with Vista-esque dressing - thats your only choice apparently.
Auto-run updaters should only be added for critical components like AV. Plus, critical or not - its polite to at least ask during install!
Removing the status bar does indeed free up some viewport real estate. However, popping the thing up whenever the mouse crosses an anchor creates an annoying distraction. Daft.
As many others have pointed out, no adblock, dubious EULA elements, a unique ID that could bear further explanation and so on and so forth.
REN Now, listen, Cadet. I've got a JOB for you. See this button? (Stimpy reaches for the button) DON'T TOUCH IT! It's the HISTORY ERASER button, you FOOL!
STIMPY So... what'll happen?
REN That's just IT! We don't KNOW! Maayyyybeeee something bad?... Mayyyybeeee something good! I guess we'll never know! 'Cause you're going to guard it! You won't TOUCH it, will you?
(Stimpy marches back and forth, staring at the button.) ANNOUNCER Oh, how long can trusty Cadet Stimpy hold out? How can he possibly resist the diabolical urge to push the button that could erase his very existence? Will his tortured mind give in to its uncontrollable desires?
(Announcer grabs Stimpy, forces him closer to button) Can he resist the temptation to push the button that, even now, beckons him ever closer? Will he succumb to the maddening urge to eradicate history? At the MERE... PUSH... of a SINGLE... BUTTON! The beeyootiful SHINY button! The jolly CANDY-LIKE button! Will he hold out, folks? CAN he hold out?
STIMPY NO I CAN'T!!! EEEEEYAAAHHHH! (pushes button)
Slashdot Mirror
Eric Schwartz's terrific little animated music video about Amiga accompanied by the "Still Alive" song from Portal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q
Left hand... meet right hand.
Common scenario when your thumbs are stuck in a wide variety of pies.
'There's definitely a right-sizing going on,' says Michael King, research director, mobile and wireless, for Gartner.
Unfortunately, his idiotic terminology renders his words inaudible to me. :-/
That's certainly an important point and the article itself draws attention to the idea that "handling" evangelist users should become a formal part of marketing. That, IMHO and I'm sure most folks here, is a bad thing for exactly the reasons you suggest. Where I'm involved in these sorts of activities it is in a way that totally distant from the company making the product. Then again... I suppose I *would* say that if I were being paid to, wouldn't I?
Lesson, I guess - accept technical help from apparently independent product evangelist users but be wary of purchase advice from them ;-)
I'm one of these types of people myself. If there is a software product that I'm personally very fond of and I feel that more folks might benefit from it than do, I'll actively attempt to support the product through this type of forum activity, giving advice, tutorial writing and generally ranting about it on my travels around the web.
I enjoy it. I dare say there's an element of liking the positive feedback too. I also feel that by supporting the userbase of my chosen product I might be helping retain a few users who might otherwise flee to a competing product that I personally don't like/use. This, it seems to me, contributes towards the product's manufacturer continuing to produce and update it which IS a positive benefit to me. I'm not being paid cash - I'm being paid in the slight boost to the likeliness of my chosen product continuing to exist and remain current.
It's worth noting though that providing tools to drive attention to your most vociferous, active and evangelic users can be a double edged sword. Since folks like myself aren't being paid, we have no incentive to be anything other than completely honest in answering support requests.
If your new version is borked; if your long anticipated new feature turns out to be vapor, if your own customer service folks are crap - in short, if those evangelic users get to a point where they feel betrayed by the manufacturer - it's going to be exactly those highly visible, spotlit users with audiences of their own that are going to tell it like it is.
It's the public's imagination that's at fault if that really is the case. NASA continues to do spectacular, amazing things.
The NASA current missions page:
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/
Does the Cassini-Huygens mission do nothing for you?
That Hubble Telescope doodad not honking your horn?
Spirit and Opportunity are things that make you go "meh"?
If you (or rather some notional "member of the public") would rather be watching tonight's new episode of "The Apprentice" than reading about one of these missions, then where does the lack of vision lie?
A Telegraph.co.uk article on this story suggests that this is specifically about prepaid phones. It appears that nearly all Mexican mobiles are prepaid.
Hoho. I think you got to the heart of the matter there. :-D
Wait, exploiting software loopholes to circumvent authentication requirements and make changes to privileged (albeit pointless tatt) information is not "hacking" anymore? I must have missed that memo.
Two, it's "twatter". :D
Of course yes, churn is certainly a factor in the the number of job ads shown; that occurred to me too.
But your assertion about Java-coder vs COBOL-coder churn, to me, seems very much a part of the whole "COBOL runs the world" mythology. Your statement - trotted out to me almost verbatim by countless folks over the decades of COBOL's decline that I've witnessed - that COBOL programmers are a happy band of nameless, faceless heros who all get a job for life in a Fortune 500 company and never meet another coder in their entire careers - is one of the key anecdotes that "supports" the COBOL-centric-universe theory. :-D
How does this add up?
1. Around a third of UK companies say they have even at least one COBOL program somewhere in their enterprise.
2. Around three quarters of all UK electronic business is coded in COBOL.
I'm aware that there are allegedly pockets of COBOL here and there with some fairly significant nuclei of usage within certain business sectors but seriously... 80% of all electronic transactions?
Monster.co.uk search for single keyword in title, 11th Apr 2009:
Java: 173 hits
C++: 142 hits
PHP: 95 hits
Perl: 39 hits
COBOL: 1 hit
This doesn't seem to suggest a great demand for COBOL coders at present which - one would think - suggests little use of COBOL.
I've heard this "the world secretly runs on COBOL" story countless times over my career, but seldom seen more than a few lines of COBOL actually deployed in businesses I've worked with. Is the whole thing just a weird industry myth?
Sheesh. Doesn't get much clearer than that. Check those videos! Somebody with points today mod parent up pls?
http://www.oldversion.com/ have installers for a whole bunch old stuff, including Acrobat Readers right back to version 2.
"Opinions are divided" it would seem. Plenty of folks share some/all of your opinion of FC2. Others disagree. I'm more of the disagreeing crowd myself, though many of your criticisms there are - of course - entirely valid (and humorously posed to boot ;-)
The reasons I'd disagree on the "sucks" evaluation there include those clearly rather whizzy graphics, the spectacularly well-released sound effects, solid fun FPS combat and the uncommon sense of time and space present in the game by virtue of its large environment, day/night cycles, weather effects and such.
Sure, it's not "realistic"; fun games aren't. And those badguys must be paid incredibly well, for sure. But it is - IMHO - a wonderfully presented, unusual and noteworthy FPS that shows a modern shooter doesn't have to be "on a rail" (like CoD, HL, many others) in order for there to be exciting and memorable scenes.
My summary one-line review of Far Cry 2 would be: "I like where you're going with this..."
Alli
Cracking explanation. Cheers!
by allowing major media players to run their own ads on the video site for ... illegally uploaded content by other users
.
Major media players are going to be posting video advertisements for the illegally uploaded content (whatever the hell that is) of other users?
Surely the author means "on", "in", "within" or somesuch?
[tinfoil-hat]The annual free tax utility software CDs from the Revenue[/tinfoil-hat]
I guess you kinda partly answered your own question there. Although I'd suggest that many (most? who knows?) IE6 users are not the folks who don't have a choice but the folks who don't KNOW they have a choice; folks who bought their Win98 or XP machine long long ago now, clicked the big blue "Internet" button on the start menu and have never figured out that "Explorer" was something optional (pretty much MS's intention for bunding all along).
Those folks, getting a whizzy message from one of the tiny handful of Internet brandnames that they know and trust ("Google"), might well be finally encouraged to switch to something other than IE6. And if the big flashing download button that Google provide is a download for Chrome, it'll be Chrome they pick - and most likely stick with for years.
All that NASA is good at doing these days is burning money.
Deary me - isn't that a little unfair? The only thing they can do is burn money? You don't see any value at all in the various Mars missions, the fascinating output of Cassini-Huygens, or SOHO, or...? And so on.
Check out the NASA Current Missions for a bit of an overview of some of the amazing work that NASA are doing.
Whilst I don't disagree with your main point that small, nimble, commercial outfits can often work smarter and quicker than monolithic government departments, I don't think it's fair cast NASA as nothing but a bottomless sinkhole for cash.
It might also be worth considering how many of those current projects would never even get to the drawing board stage if the only space enterprises we had were entirely commercial.
Already done - Quake 3 Arena's bots routinely discuss their opponents' performance during play. From a logfile, Doom and Major both being bots:
0:32 Kill: 3 1 10: Doom killed Major by MOD_RAILGUN
0:34 say: Major: Camping AGAIN doom? Didn't your therapist tell you to stop?
TBH, where this falls down on being convincing is probably only that it's spelled and punctuated so well.
Alli
Auto-run updaters should only be added for critical components like AV.
For what it's worth, your browser is at least as critical as AV -- moreso, because if you've got a secure browser, that's one less reason you need AV at all.
Fair comment. My point was really that AV needs to be up-to-date immediately I start my box, whereas for the browser (that I might not even use in any given session) surely its acceptable to have it update on launch (a la FF) rather than having to hook an extra updater in to my - already over-extended - list of things that launch at boot time?
Plus, the not asking permission thing - bad form - smells like Quicktime ;-)
Alli
The inspect element tool
Web Developer, Firebug, any number of other plugins for FF already do this and more so thats not a significant selling point for me.
I open tons of new tabs/windows in any browser I use and I hate it when one crashes and takes out a dozen pages
Fine, but really the browser shouldn't crash often enough for this to mean anything at all. Can't recall the last time I crashed FF, so hey.
When you search, it puts little marks on the scroll bar where results are. That's neat.
Granted, thats cute. And the position of the find-in-page control is better than the stupid bottom bar in FF. I still prefer (and use plugins to have) the find-in-page controls in a floating dialog though.
Create new windows from tabs, drag tabs between windows, consolidate windows into tabs.
Firefox already does this too so this is nothing new.
I really miss scroll-click and smooth scrolling
What bothers me more is that the mousewheel only scrolls the page down - up doesn't work. WinXP, Microsoft Intellimouse - couldn't be a much more generic setup and yet scrolling only goes in one direction. Clearly a bug that'll be fixed but I'dve thought a rather too obvious to make it into this release.
having the File/options/etc WIMP standards under that little button to the right of the address bar is kinda weird
Thats putting it very politely. Why destroy very long-established interface concepts like this? What was so bad about having a menu bar? What do I gain from this that makes up for no longer being able to access menu functions by keyboard? (ALT->key->cursors and such). Stupid idea - a step backwards in interface design.
Relatedly - no bookmarks menu - unless I have an entire waste-of-space toolbar turned on just to get that single button which - again - I can't initiate cursor navigation on by a keypress.
Is there any "bookmarks organizer" at all? Can't find it.
I also object to any program which overrides whatever visual theme I have selected in the OS. Blue chrome with Vista-esque dressing - thats your only choice apparently.
Auto-run updaters should only be added for critical components like AV. Plus, critical or not - its polite to at least ask during install!
Removing the status bar does indeed free up some viewport real estate. However, popping the thing up whenever the mouse crosses an anchor creates an annoying distraction. Daft.
As many others have pointed out, no adblock, dubious EULA elements, a unique ID that could bear further explanation and so on and so forth.
Alli
The internet was always populated by dogs - just that nobody knew.
REN Now, listen, Cadet. I've got a JOB for you. See this button? (Stimpy reaches for the button) DON'T TOUCH IT! It's the HISTORY ERASER button, you FOOL!
STIMPY So... what'll happen?
REN That's just IT! We don't KNOW! Maayyyybeeee something bad?... Mayyyybeeee something good! I guess we'll never know! 'Cause you're going to guard it! You won't TOUCH it, will you?
(Stimpy salutes. Ren leaves.) REN Hehhhh... hehhhh... hehhhh... hehhhh...
(Stimpy marches back and forth, staring at the button.) ANNOUNCER Oh, how long can trusty Cadet Stimpy hold out? How can he possibly resist the diabolical urge to push the button that could erase his very existence? Will his tortured mind give in to its uncontrollable desires?
(Announcer grabs Stimpy, forces him closer to button) Can he resist the temptation to push the button that, even now, beckons him ever closer? Will he succumb to the maddening urge to eradicate history? At the MERE... PUSH... of a SINGLE... BUTTON! The beeyootiful SHINY button! The jolly CANDY-LIKE button! Will he hold out, folks? CAN he hold out?
STIMPY NO I CAN'T!!! EEEEEYAAAHHHH! (pushes button)
Barclays have been providing a device they call PIN Sentry since early 2007:
http://www.barclays.co.uk/pinsentry/
NatWest introduced their offering summer 2007:
http://www.natwest.com/microsites/general/card-reader-user-guide/index.asp?cmp=reader
I believe you're right about Lloyds not having followed suit just yet.