VNV define themselves as a Futurepop band. Whatever the hell that means.
I define them, and bands like them (Icon of Coil, Apoptygma Berzerk) with a term coined by the keyboardist for the band Epsilon Minus - "Oontzpop." Try saying it a few times; oontz oontz oontz oontz...
Interstingly enough (or not), the guy who played "Lamar" went on to play gangsta rapper "Tasty Taste" in the excellent mockumentary "Fear of a Black Hat."
Plusses: Good club scene Clean Little air pollution (even with gas vehicles) No shortage of hot water Gorgeous women Decent exchange rate for tourists Nearly unlimited supply of cod Cheap airfare
Minuses: Crappy beer Awful native food Expensive everything No trees
Theivery Corp's "Mirror Conspiracy" is even better than "Hi-Fi." Also just about anything on their Eighteenth Street Lounge Label is gunna be good stuff.
For those into more experimental stuff, I highly recommend the works of Uwe Schmidt. He's recorded under a zillion different pseudonyms, from the kraftwerkian "Lassigue Bendthaus", the jazzy "Flanger" (with Bernd Friedman), the glitchy "Bund Deutscher Programmieren", to the classical latin dance "Senor Coconut." Some is better than others, but most of it is at least worth checking out. A lot of his work is a sort of "invisible influence" to many more popular artists.
If you're interested in creating any of this stuff, buy yourself NI Reaktor and you'll pretty much be set. It's a great geek-music program. It's not free, or open, or ported to linux, but it's a damn lot of fun to twiddle with.
Re:TECHNO is not the same as electronica.
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 1
I think it's an american thing.
In europe, Techno is a subgenre, usually of the detroit variety.
In the US, thanks to some annoying marketing of compilation CDs early on (they were trying to look "harder" than "Rave Til Dawn") "techno" came to represent all of the instrumental electronic dance music. It entered common parlance and once something like that's bitten into the american pop consicousness, forget about ever trying to get rid of it.
It's still a better term than "electronica" though.:)
I do wish there was a better term than "IDM". There's little "dance" to most of it.
Re:huge diff between downtempo and lowercase...
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 1
I think it's more of a subgenre of ambient. Ambient != lowercase. There's plenty of ambient music that you can actually hear, that has maybe even melody and such.
lowercase is...sort of a hybrid beween musique concrete, ambient, and microsound. As far as I can tell. I admit to finding a lot of it terribly uninteresting.
I thought it was called 4:33 just because that's how long the first performance of it was. I don't think Cage actually titled it that.
The point of 4:33 wasn't as a joke, it was as a statement on audience reaction. A guy sitting at a piano for 4 and a half minutes will eventually cause the audience to stir a little bit. And then more. It's sort of interactive found sound.
As far as I can tell, lowercase and glitch are subsets of microsound. Or maybe not.
Pan Sonic has been categorized as Microsound for a while and they don't sound much like any of the artists featured. Their arrangements are sparse, yes, but not always quiet. Uwe Schmidt/Atom Heart has been called microsound too and he's almost listenable sometimes.:)
If you need to be redesigning a UI in order to get the job done, then you're probably missing something in your app design. You want your users to presented with something they immediately recognize - you don't want them to have to figure out where they have to click and what each funky abstract blinky thing does. It's a bit different with games - those are supposed to be playful, not necessarily usable. But if you're doing stuff for a non-entertainment purpose - stick to the standard widget sets.
Let's face it: a scrollbar is a scrollbar for a reason, and a bunch of graphic designers workign independently aren't especially likely to come up with a better replacement.
Flash: good for some things. Animation? Yep. AV syncing? Yep. Designing widgets for navigating your website? Nope.
The interesting thing is, it wasn't even a corporate-sanctioned server. Some developers set one up to swap mp3's, and apparently someone squealed to RIAA. IIS has to pay $1M for their mistake.
Actually, RIAA was going for more money. Much more. But they shaved it down to $1M in exchange for allowing IIS to be used as a "deterrent example."
I've been playing with.NET apps - simple ASP.NET ones, so far - on my PIII 500 laptop. I can field a little of your question...
Okay, running IIS5, WIn2000, Visual STudio.NET and the app all at the same time - the first time an ASP.NET app runs it takes an absolute age - but it's compiling, much like a JSP-Servlet compile.
After that it's surprisingly zippy, considering how I'm abusing this poor laptop at the same time with a gazillion other apps. It's much faster, at any rate, than old-fashioned ASP.
There's some anecdotal evidence for you. I haven't hit it with VeloMeter or anything so I haven't seen how well it scales yet.
I'm thinking the real big primary advantage of.NET is with strong typing and a fairly rigorous object model, it's going to force a lot of hack VB programmers to get their sh!t together and start writing code that doens't look like the top-down crap I wrote in Apple Basic in 4th grade. Wow, maintainable code, what a concept.
Yes, yes I have. And it sounds fine. But I don't have the $15k to spend on a good turntable.
Now, have you ever listened to a record on a good pair of flat-frequency reference monitors? Sounds like crap, frankly.
The fallacy of the vinyl-vs-digital debate is that there's the assumption that you're using the same material for comparison.
Not even close. When a track is mastered to vinyl, it goes through a LOT of compression (the audio kind, not the data kind) and EQ'ing, especially in the low-mids (IIRC). A CD has an entirely different mastering process and technique-set (more work with the highs and high-mids, less compression).
If you listened to a linear source on a CD player, it'd sund a lot better than a linear source on vinyl. And a vinyl source on CD would sound terrible, and vice versa. In the end, a good mastering engineer can make soething sound good on any medium. That's where the serious audio is, not in the output format.
The Hot Topic/ZIM problem wasn't Nick's fault. HT bought the 6-month exclusive license to the franchise almost as soon as the show hit the air (it's Jhonen, after all). It took them forever to get any merch out, though. My "Doom!" T-shirt wasn't available until right before Xmas. They've bungled stuff like that before.
JMS is decent at the tv-show big-picture type stuff. He should NEVER be allowed near dialogue again in his life. There's a time when a creator needs to back off and let other writers take control. JMS finally did for the 5th season, letting us have Neil Gaiman's "Day of the Dead", but after 30 or so straight episodes of JMS-hacked dialogue...yikes.
Use subtext, man, subtext! You don't always need to have a metaphor-talking alien!
I've been watching the shadow war reruns and the dialogue just lays there like a dead animal. Even Trek knew how to use subtext in a conversation - characters could be obviously talking about something different than what they were talking about. B5, Crusade - they were always speaking exposition, except for Kosh who just used heavy-handed metaphor.
While I religiously watched the show, it was very obvious to me that this was not going to be the vehicle to "save" sci-fi TV and bring it to the masses. It was too hackneyed in too many ways to be anything other than a cult show.
Light can't escape once it's passed a certain point, the Schwarzchild radius, IIRC. But the hole still exerts force beyond the "edge."
You could slingshot a spaceship around the otuside at a certain distance, although I'd hate to think what the tidal forces exerted by a black hole would do to your pilot.
1) Gibson's track record with technology has been awful They acquired Opcode Systems, makers of the excellent Vision sequencer and Galaxy editor and the indispensible OMS MIDI routing software. They then killed Opcode, and when petitions were submitted asking them to open source or even sell off OMS, they refused. They bought out Steinberger guitars long ago, basically forced Ned Steinberger out, and now seel much cheaper wood knockoffs of his composite designs (they're still great instruments, but not nearly as cool and groundbreaking as the old ones).
2) So what do you plug this into? You'll need effects and amps that speak this protocol. Who's going to make these? Gibson, probably. And Gibson is not known as well for its effects and amps as for its guitars. And all those wonderful vintage tube amps form the 60's, and those old pedal wahs and such are going to be useless with the new standard.
3) Will the quality be any better? This is digital, after all, so the crucial bit is the A->D converter. A good ADC, like a Lucid, is NOT cheap. Are you going to pay $5000 for a digital guitar that needs an outlet? A crappy ADC will just mean you get about the same signal as you would from an analog guitar, except with more hassle. Plus you'll need a DAC on the other end. Then there's bit depth, sampling rate, all that...pros don't use 16-bit anymore, so a cheap 16-bit ADC would be pointless.
4) Why develop a new standard? There's already existing and accepted digital standards for audio, like S/PDIF. Sure, it's not 100-channel or whatever, but it's digital, lotsa people use it, there's plenty of existing hardware, and it's pretty prevalent.
All in all, this seems like another gizmo from Gibson that's not going to go anywhere.
Part of the analysis stage that most websites overlook is Information Architecture.
If I had a nickel for every website that just had everything grouped randomly, had all its pages in the root dir, and had things crosslinked in stange and unituitive ways...well, I'd be a wealthy man.
The ORA "Information Architecture for the WWW" book is a basic text, but it's an absolute must-read for anyone who's going to put together a website.
Things you need to take into account:
1) Does the site's structure make sense to users outside your company? Sure, your product groupings may make sense to the guys who are making them, but do the people who buy them understand your divisions?
2) Does your site's structure make sense to internal people? The flipside - if someone in tech writing wants to update document #24601 on how to Improve Flozbit Capacity, will he or she know where to look for the file (or the database?)
3) Site maps are more than just pictures of your pages. A good site map lays out information, not web pages. A site map should be done before a site is put together, even if it's only on a high-level. I've seen far too many that retrofit a site map to match a pre-existing site.
4) Everyone involved should understand the architecture. Artists, Marketroids, Developers, Sysadmins - everyone should know why the info is broken down the way it is and why the files/data is put where it is. Sounds like a lot of work, but it will save TONS of communication errors later.
Basic steps that many places, even the big web-houses (er, especially the big web-houses) tend to forget. Sometimes it's carelessness or ignorance, sometimes it's hubris (we don't need no stinking IA!), sometimes it's just not a perceived need ("our site only has 15 pages" the CIO said in 1996. Now it has 15,000 and the intertia behind the old clunky IA makes it tough to change).
Most people just don't seem to know where that is.
Find an artist. Any artist who used to do print and now does "Web-stuff." Ask them to design a site with Flash.
90% of the time you'll get something that's absolutely gorgeous, but makes no sense as far as a UI goes - links aren't obvious, you need to hover over things to figure out what they are, the fonts are these hip-and-beautiful-but-illegible grunge types. Find a few links and click forward. Then hit your back button...ooops, you just left your site.
THAT'S why Neilsen says "Flash is 99%" bad. I've seen some excellent use of flash as a tool for visualization and delivery of media, and for games and such. But I never want to see flash as the main navigation of a site. It's usually slower than raw HTML, and most Flash designers have a tendency to override the standard navigational paradigms (like the back button, or link appearance). Yes, the world is in need of better and more interesting navigational standards, but your corporate artist shouldn't be the one to come up with them on their own.
Flash - not implicitly bad, but usually used terribly.
Not really focused for techies
on
Homepage Usability
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· Score: 5, Informative
Yeah, Neilsen tends to be a blowhard. He goes overboard in his practice of simplicity - but I think his extremism has a point - he's using his ranting to gain a reputation - to drag sites away from the all-flash everything-lights-up approach. Nobody is going to implement his methodology 100% except him. But if someone implements just 5% of it on a site that was bogglingly unusable, then it's a victory for users overall.
As for this book...it's pretty, but it's not aimed for developers and professionals. It is, as many have pointed out, very common-sense. This however makes it perfect for Marketing people who make a big deal out of lots of pretty pictures and gratuitous animation. Internet common sense is often lacking in those who grew up designing for paper and print. For better guides for techies, try Neilen's other books: Designing Web Usability and Usability Engineering (a very technical guide to designing interfaces). Both of those show that while he's an extremist, he knows what he's talking about. Additonally, the book Don't Make Me Think! is an excellent reference for designing usable web sites and applications (and it's a damn amusing read).
On the other end of the spectrum is the book Fresh Styles for Web Designers which is basically some guy collecting a bunch of pretty websites and telling you that they're cool and don't sacrifice usability (he's lying - 90% of them are almost totally unnavigable). Pretty pictures, though.
Reality is somewhere in the middle.
It's a tough field right now. On one hand you've got Joe Corporate-User who believes that if he's got MS Word's "Save as HTML" feature, he's as good a web developer as you are. You've got software engineers who would, given the chance, make every web interface beveled and battleship grey. You've got web designers who are still stuck in the 1996 mode of "if the website looks cool that will be enough to bring in users." The real challenge in web development is juggling these people and producing something that satisfies users and manages not to be mind-bogglingly dull.
Slashdot Mirror
"It must've fallen through what they used to call a black hole!"
Possibly the most awkward bit of dialogue in the movie.
I'm going to drive what they used to call a horseless cariage to work tomorrow.
Huh. So that database-driven app I wrote in C# last week must not really exist.
I almost can say that with a straight face.
VNV define themselves as a Futurepop band. Whatever the hell that means.
I define them, and bands like them (Icon of Coil, Apoptygma Berzerk) with a term coined by the keyboardist for the band Epsilon Minus - "Oontzpop." Try saying it a few times; oontz oontz oontz oontz...
That's the other Terry that wrote Starship Titanic - Terry Jones.
Interstingly enough (or not), the guy who played "Lamar" went on to play gangsta rapper "Tasty Taste" in the excellent mockumentary "Fear of a Black Hat."
I live there too:
:)
Plusses:
>>Decent exchange rate for tourists
> Depends on what you're gonna buy... We are
> little bit cheaper country than Swiss, but not
> inexpensive by far
True. But the ~100kr to the dollar + the VAT refund is better for tourists than it is for those who actually live there.
>> Nearly unlimited supply of cod
> Icelanders do not eat cod!
I didn't say you *ate* the cod. I just said you *had* the cod. It's where most american-sold cod comes from.
>> Cheap airfare
>Yeah right!
It's cheaper to fly Icelandair to europe than Lufthansa.
>> Crappy beer
> Given that imported beer cost the same as the
> local beer, this isn't quite right. 1/2
> pint/liter of beer costs between $5 - $7 in
> bars!
Let me amend that. Crappy *domestic* beer. Egils Gull is akin to coors light - on a good day.
>> Awful native food
> Well, yes... don't go to Iceland in march.
Yep. Although the hot dogs are good. As is the coffee.
>> No trees
> Dead wrong false.
Well, compared to where I live, anyway...I think I have more trees in my backyard than I saw on the entire Reykjanes.
...I like Iceland so much.
Plusses:
Good club scene
Clean
Little air pollution (even with gas vehicles)
No shortage of hot water
Gorgeous women
Decent exchange rate for tourists
Nearly unlimited supply of cod
Cheap airfare
Minuses:
Crappy beer
Awful native food
Expensive everything
No trees
Theivery Corp's "Mirror Conspiracy" is even better than "Hi-Fi." Also just about anything on their Eighteenth Street Lounge Label is gunna be good stuff.
For those into more experimental stuff, I highly recommend the works of Uwe Schmidt. He's recorded under a zillion different pseudonyms, from the kraftwerkian "Lassigue Bendthaus", the jazzy "Flanger" (with Bernd Friedman), the glitchy "Bund Deutscher Programmieren", to the classical latin dance "Senor Coconut." Some is better than others, but most of it is at least worth checking out. A lot of his work is a sort of "invisible influence" to many more popular artists.
If you're interested in creating any of this stuff, buy yourself NI Reaktor and you'll pretty much be set. It's a great geek-music program. It's not free, or open, or ported to linux, but it's a damn lot of fun to twiddle with.
I think it's an american thing.
:)
In europe, Techno is a subgenre, usually of the detroit variety.
In the US, thanks to some annoying marketing of compilation CDs early on (they were trying to look "harder" than "Rave Til Dawn") "techno" came to represent all of the instrumental electronic dance music. It entered common parlance and once something like that's bitten into the american pop consicousness, forget about ever trying to get rid of it.
It's still a better term than "electronica"
though.
I do wish there was a better term than "IDM". There's little "dance" to most of it.
I think it's more of a subgenre of ambient. Ambient != lowercase. There's plenty of ambient music that you can actually hear, that has maybe even melody and such.
lowercase is...sort of a hybrid beween musique concrete, ambient, and microsound. As far as I can tell. I admit to finding a lot of it terribly uninteresting.
I thought it was called 4:33 just because that's how long the first performance of it was. I don't think Cage actually titled it that.
The point of 4:33 wasn't as a joke, it was as a statement on audience reaction. A guy sitting at a piano for 4 and a half minutes will eventually cause the audience to stir a little bit. And then more. It's sort of interactive found sound.
lowercase and microsound aren't synonymous.
:)
As far as I can tell, lowercase and glitch are subsets of microsound. Or maybe not.
Pan Sonic has been categorized as Microsound for a while and they don't sound much like any of the artists featured. Their arrangements are sparse, yes, but not always quiet. Uwe Schmidt/Atom Heart has been called microsound too and he's almost listenable sometimes.
Flash is not a good user interface design tool.
There's really no such thing.
If you need to be redesigning a UI in order to get the job done, then you're probably missing something in your app design. You want your users to presented with something they immediately recognize - you don't want them to have to figure out where they have to click and what each funky abstract blinky thing does. It's a bit different with games - those are supposed to be playful, not necessarily usable. But if you're doing stuff for a non-entertainment purpose - stick to the standard widget sets.
Let's face it: a scrollbar is a scrollbar for a reason, and a bunch of graphic designers workign independently aren't especially likely to come up with a better replacement.
Flash: good for some things. Animation? Yep. AV syncing? Yep. Designing widgets for navigating your website? Nope.
Interesting - as I do currently work there, and that was not in The Big Official Story they sent to all employees the other day.
:)
Hmmmm! Duplicity from management? Couldn't be!
The interesting thing is, it wasn't even a corporate-sanctioned server. Some developers set one up to swap mp3's, and apparently someone squealed to RIAA. IIS has to pay $1M for their mistake.
Actually, RIAA was going for more money. Much more. But they shaved it down to $1M in exchange for allowing IIS to be used as a "deterrent example."
Even Harrison Ford used to complain that "no one can say these lines."
That is so true. The best lines in the series, i.e. "I love you!" "I know." were ad-libbed. Apparently the original shooting scripts were appalling.
I've been playing with .NET apps - simple ASP.NET ones, so far - on my PIII 500 laptop. I can field a little of your question...
.NET and the app all at the same time - the first time an ASP.NET app runs it takes an absolute age - but it's compiling, much like a JSP-Servlet compile.
.NET is with strong typing and a fairly rigorous object model, it's going to force a lot of hack VB programmers to get their sh!t together and start writing code that doens't look like the top-down crap I wrote in Apple Basic in 4th grade. Wow, maintainable code, what a concept.
Okay, running IIS5, WIn2000, Visual STudio
After that it's surprisingly zippy, considering how I'm abusing this poor laptop at the same time with a gazillion other apps. It's much faster, at any rate, than old-fashioned ASP.
There's some anecdotal evidence for you. I haven't hit it with VeloMeter or anything so I haven't seen how well it scales yet.
I'm thinking the real big primary advantage of
Yes, yes I have. And it sounds fine. But I don't have the $15k to spend on a good turntable.
Now, have you ever listened to a record on a good pair of flat-frequency reference monitors? Sounds like crap, frankly.
The fallacy of the vinyl-vs-digital debate is that there's the assumption that you're using the same material for comparison.
Not even close. When a track is mastered to vinyl, it goes through a LOT of compression (the audio kind, not the data kind) and EQ'ing, especially in the low-mids (IIRC). A CD has an entirely different mastering process and technique-set (more work with the highs and high-mids, less compression).
If you listened to a linear source on a CD player, it'd sund a lot better than a linear source on vinyl. And a vinyl source on CD would sound terrible, and vice versa. In the end, a good mastering engineer can make soething sound good on any medium. That's where the serious audio is, not in the output format.
The Hot Topic/ZIM problem wasn't Nick's fault. HT bought the 6-month exclusive license to the franchise almost as soon as the show hit the air (it's Jhonen, after all). It took them forever to get any merch out, though. My "Doom!" T-shirt wasn't available until right before Xmas. They've bungled stuff like that before.
JMS is decent at the tv-show big-picture type stuff. He should NEVER be allowed near dialogue again in his life. There's a time when a creator needs to back off and let other writers take control. JMS finally did for the 5th season, letting us have Neil Gaiman's "Day of the Dead", but after 30 or so straight episodes of JMS-hacked dialogue...yikes.
Use subtext, man, subtext! You don't always need to have a metaphor-talking alien!
I've been watching the shadow war reruns and the dialogue just lays there like a dead animal. Even Trek knew how to use subtext in a conversation - characters could be obviously talking about something different than what they were talking about. B5, Crusade - they were always speaking exposition, except for Kosh who just used heavy-handed metaphor.
While I religiously watched the show, it was very obvious to me that this was not going to be the vehicle to "save" sci-fi TV and bring it to the masses. It was too hackneyed in too many ways to be anything other than a cult show.
Light can't escape once it's passed a certain point, the Schwarzchild radius, IIRC. But the hole still exerts force beyond the "edge."
You could slingshot a spaceship around the otuside at a certain distance, although I'd hate to think what the tidal forces exerted by a black hole would do to your pilot.
1) Gibson's track record with technology has been awful They acquired Opcode Systems, makers of the excellent Vision sequencer and Galaxy editor and the indispensible OMS MIDI routing software. They then killed Opcode, and when petitions were submitted asking them to open source or even sell off OMS, they refused. They bought out Steinberger guitars long ago, basically forced Ned Steinberger out, and now seel much cheaper wood knockoffs of his composite designs (they're still great instruments, but not nearly as cool and groundbreaking as the old ones).
2) So what do you plug this into? You'll need effects and amps that speak this protocol. Who's going to make these? Gibson, probably. And Gibson is not known as well for its effects and amps as for its guitars. And all those wonderful vintage tube amps form the 60's, and those old pedal wahs and such are going to be useless with the new standard.
3) Will the quality be any better? This is digital, after all, so the crucial bit is the A->D converter. A good ADC, like a Lucid, is NOT cheap. Are you going to pay $5000 for a digital guitar that needs an outlet? A crappy ADC will just mean you get about the same signal as you would from an analog guitar, except with more hassle. Plus you'll need a DAC on the other end. Then there's bit depth, sampling rate, all that...pros don't use 16-bit anymore, so a cheap 16-bit ADC would be pointless.
4) Why develop a new standard? There's already existing and accepted digital standards for audio, like S/PDIF. Sure, it's not 100-channel or whatever, but it's digital, lotsa people use it, there's plenty of existing hardware, and it's pretty prevalent.
All in all, this seems like another gizmo from Gibson that's not going to go anywhere.
And I'm still pissed about the OMS thing.
Part of the analysis stage that most websites overlook is Information Architecture.
If I had a nickel for every website that just had everything grouped randomly, had all its pages in the root dir, and had things crosslinked in stange and unituitive ways...well, I'd be a wealthy man.
The ORA "Information Architecture for the WWW" book is a basic text, but it's an absolute must-read for anyone who's going to put together a website.
Things you need to take into account:
1) Does the site's structure make sense to users outside your company? Sure, your product groupings may make sense to the guys who are making them, but do the people who buy them understand your divisions?
2) Does your site's structure make sense to internal people? The flipside - if someone in tech writing wants to update document #24601 on how to Improve Flozbit Capacity, will he or she know where to look for the file (or the database?)
3) Site maps are more than just pictures of your pages. A good site map lays out information, not web pages. A site map should be done before a site is put together, even if it's only on a high-level. I've seen far too many that retrofit a site map to match a pre-existing site.
4) Everyone involved should understand the architecture. Artists, Marketroids, Developers, Sysadmins - everyone should know why the info is broken down the way it is and why the files/data is put where it is. Sounds like a lot of work, but it will save TONS of communication errors later.
Basic steps that many places, even the big web-houses (er, especially the big web-houses) tend to forget. Sometimes it's carelessness or ignorance, sometimes it's hubris (we don't need no stinking IA!), sometimes it's just not a perceived need ("our site only has 15 pages" the CIO said in 1996. Now it has 15,000 and the intertia behind the old clunky IA makes it tough to change).
Most people just don't seem to know where that is.
Find an artist. Any artist who used to do print and now does "Web-stuff." Ask them to design a site with Flash.
90% of the time you'll get something that's absolutely gorgeous, but makes no sense as far as a UI goes - links aren't obvious, you need to hover over things to figure out what they are, the fonts are these hip-and-beautiful-but-illegible grunge types. Find a few links and click forward. Then hit your back button...ooops, you just left your site.
THAT'S why Neilsen says "Flash is 99%" bad. I've seen some excellent use of flash as a tool for visualization and delivery of media, and for games and such. But I never want to see flash as the main navigation of a site. It's usually slower than raw HTML, and most Flash designers have a tendency to override the standard navigational paradigms (like the back button, or link appearance). Yes, the world is in need of better and more interesting navigational standards, but your corporate artist shouldn't be the one to come up with them on their own.
Flash - not implicitly bad, but usually used terribly.
As for this book...it's pretty, but it's not aimed for developers and professionals. It is, as many have pointed out, very common-sense. This however makes it perfect for Marketing people who make a big deal out of lots of pretty pictures and gratuitous animation. Internet common sense is often lacking in those who grew up designing for paper and print. For better guides for techies, try Neilen's other books: Designing Web Usability and Usability Engineering (a very technical guide to designing interfaces). Both of those show that while he's an extremist, he knows what he's talking about. Additonally, the book Don't Make Me Think! is an excellent reference for designing usable web sites and applications (and it's a damn amusing read).
On the other end of the spectrum is the book Fresh Styles for Web Designers which is basically some guy collecting a bunch of pretty websites and telling you that they're cool and don't sacrifice usability (he's lying - 90% of them are almost totally unnavigable). Pretty pictures, though.
Reality is somewhere in the middle.
It's a tough field right now. On one hand you've got Joe Corporate-User who believes that if he's got MS Word's "Save as HTML" feature, he's as good a web developer as you are. You've got software engineers who would, given the chance, make every web interface beveled and battleship grey. You've got web designers who are still stuck in the 1996 mode of "if the website looks cool that will be enough to bring in users." The real challenge in web development is juggling these people and producing something that satisfies users and manages not to be mind-bogglingly dull.