...you can bet I'm not going to recommend going to them.
I've seen this argument come up a few times. Best Buy probably reasons that if 5% of the people they demarket are referrers, that is acceptable collateral for unloading the other 95% bad customers. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that I can see how it might make good business sense... depending on how the numbers work out in the end. Actually, I expect this trend will continue until it overshoots some kind of customer backlash equilibrium or until these companies run afowl consumer rights laws in a major $$ way.
In defense of the grandparent, I think I heard later the other day that Franklin may have been the only county in Ohio using these particular machines. So this would lead you to believe that the Cuyahoga numbers do not suffer the same problem. Even with a large young population and a large gay population, I doubt Franklin would vote more liberally than Cuyhahoga (67%). We'd have to in order to change the election... so the granparent's argument that we'd have to vote an unrealistically high percentage for Kerry stands.
They are the only real newspaper in Columbus and they endorsed Bush during the election. I live in Columbus but don't read the dispatch often enough to vouch for its integrity. I imagine it is more or less on par with other big city papers.
These errors do not change the election result! Bush won by too big of a margin in Ohio and Florida, any assumption that the machines threw it for Bush would mean that those counties would have had to vote in tremendous numbers for Kerry (like 70%)
I don't follow. First off, several counties recorded over 70% in favor of Kerry. For instance, Chicago was 81% (802K) Kerry and only 18% (180K) Bush. Admitedly, none of the metropolitan areas in Ohio hit more than 67% (Cleveland area), but then, the validity of these very numbers is what is at question. Franklin county (Columbus area) had over 500,000 votes so even if the problem was restricted to this county, then we're still dealing with some very large numbers.
All that said, it does seem very unlikely that several instances of this problem could change the results... but I don't see why it is not a possibility.
Many people like to talk about Ethanol based biofuels. The problem is that Ethanol has certain properties that make it unattractive. It is not very energy efficient to produce, it is corrosive, etc.
Anyways, there's a company called Environmental Energy Inc that has found a new way of producing butanol for biofuels. They claim their process is much more energy efficient than current methods for producing ethanol based biofuels. Also butanol has certain characteristics that make it more appealing than ethanol based fuels.
I don't work for these people or anything, but I am stuck analyzing their business in a technology commercialization class. If half of what they say is true, their technology would revolutionize the biofuels industry and potentially make it a legitimate competitor to petroleum based fuels. On the other hand, the company has this weird don't-exchange-control-for-anything strategy that will probably leave them bankrupt.
I'm a tech guy that's taken a couple of business courses (Ohio State's Fischer college), but I'm not exactly what you might call business savy. Anyways, if you simply want to go some place with MBAs, consider checking out the college scene. For instance, I'm taking a class in technology commercialization right now and 80% of the people in it are MBA students. And contrary to popular opinion, the MBAs in the class seem fairly bright and are experienced.
That said, if you're actually trying to start a business around some kind of technology idea, and if you don't know the business end, you should be looking to partner up with someone experienced in business within the particular sector of the particular industry you are trying to break into. Preferably someone with connections.
Me too. I really really really want to like 3rd party candidates, especially a guy that's for civil liberties, but when he opens his interview with such an obvious/condescending/manipulative lie, it's not possible.
Baseball fans will note that this is the first time a lunar eclipse will have happened during the course of the World Series."
Ah crap, this is going to open up a whole new set of meaningless statistics. I can just see the announcers now.
Well Bob, this should be an interesting match up because Ramirez has never given up a hit in post season play on Tuesday night games against left handed batters during a lunar eclipse.
In a word, yes. Intellectual property concerns are one of the biggest issues facing the world, developed nations in particular. We have experienced an ever increasing decline in the power placed in the hands of consumers.
However, even more importantly, how a candidate approaches intellectual property issues let's you know whose side he is on when it comes to a larger set of issues involving consumer rights. Simply being able to speak intelligently on the topic is a great indicator in and of itself these days.
That said, these guys are both a couple of monkeys. I don't remotely trust either of them. One is a complete unknown and the other is an all too well known. They are both liars.
I think programmers tend to be "smarter" about the kinds of things that make them good programmers. For example, we tend to be better at reasoning about complex systems, in particular the kind of complex systems we design and implement on a day to day basis. It comes from experience identifying and anticipating the consequences of design decisions. But even more, it comes from cultivating the ability to evaluate complicated conditional logic statements in our heads and track the state of a system (or program) as various events (or statements) affect it.
Anyways, I think the tendency is for engineers, perhaps programmers in particular to focus in on these nurtured skills that make them what htey are and believe it implies a greater intelligence. For example, it's not uncommon for a programmer to work with a domain expert while designing a system. During such a scenario, the programmer, who is used to designing complex systems, will often pick up on many things the domain expert missed or might not even fully understand. These things may be mind numbingly obvious to the programmer, but beyond the comprehension of the client. This re-enforces the programmers sense of intellectual superiority.
In reality, the notion of comparative intelligence as it is generally used is more or less a sham. People's intellectual capabilities tend to be optimized for the environment they operate in. Programmers operate in a world of logic. This makes us better at certain modes of thought than other people. But are we smarter than someone who has optimized themselves for a role as a business analyst, a graphic designer, or a teacher? Not particularly.
I have dual at home and single at work. At first I found it very difficult to be productive at work. Ironically, now I mostly just run with one on at home.
What I've found is that one large monitor is usually ok for most computer activity. However, the problem comes when you are using certain kinds of heavyweight applications like the gimp, photoshop, or visual studio. VS takes up a lot of space with auxillary information like a file navigator, debug window, build window, and usually when you have visual studio open you have several other web site references open at the same time. Graphics editors like photoshop also use up a lot of realestate with controls and multiple images spread out all over the place. I still find it pretty painful to work with these kinds of applications with just one monitor.
On the other hand, after I first got two monitors, I loved it so much I picked up a third CRT. There were two problems. I felt like I was getting a sunburn (it was too bright), and with three monitors, the information was just too spread out (having to swivel neck sucked).
I agree with you completely and would even go a step further and say that the jobs of software engineering and programming are inherently intertwined. A software engineer needs to spend some time programming within their design in order to understand it, improve it, and move things along with the team of implementers. If they just sit back with pencil and don't spend a decent amount of time getting their hands dirty, they are designing with a large number of blind spots.
This is not to say that there aren't some design issues that can be addressed at a high level, but most of software engineering does not occur at that high level.
I've worked at companies where the game was structured in such a manner that it was impossible to give quality service. There was simply too much to do and we were already working 60 hour weeks without extra pay.
Some of the people outside the IT department understood the problem very well. They treated us with sympathy and did a reasonably good job of structuring and prioritizing their requests.
Others simply did not get it. We would get requests to create reports which might sit in the queue for a week or two. When we finally got around to it, we would see the text of the request and it would say something like "create monthly sales report". You could go talk to the person to try to figure out what this meant. They would give you some details. You'd work on it a little and come back the next day with a few questions. They'd refer you to someone else, and then the other person (who should have been the primary contact anyway) would say, "oh no, that's not what we wanted, and we solved that problem two weeks ago anyway."
Still others would not get it and take an extremely hostile view towards us. The color printer is jammed and you're all going to hell!!! Where's my report?!?
As you might imagine, we had a lot of turnover. Anyways, what I'm saying is that with an IT department that can't provide quality service, you're going to have a certain number of people that don't appreciate the work and another large group of people that think you are a bunch of lazy incompetent jerks conspiring against them.
I'll admit that some of these problems can be solved through better commication, but that can be problematic. For example, we had so much work to do that we were only supposed to go through department managers. This decreased the amount of commication between end users and us. It also sometimes forced us to deal directly with some exceptionally daft or selfish individuals.
I can appreciate the fact that a computer science degree is not supposed to produce a software developer or a system administrator. The problem is that at my university (Ohio State), we only have one big Computer Science program and everyone who wants to be a software developer or a system administrator goes through this program. Very few people in the program actually want to be computer scientists, a fact recognized by faculty.
The numero uno objective of the computer science program at Ohio State is the following: Graduates will have a thorough grounding in the key principles and practices of computing, and will have applied their software development skills and knowledge of foundational principles to the design and implementation of practical systems consisting of software and/or hardware components to meet customer requirements.more...
So part of the argument you and I are having may be one of semantics, but perhaps it only serves to underscore my particular complaint about many of the academics I have dealt with. You see, they are teaching computer science and believing that they are doing a good job of preparing students for real world software development.
In all honesty, the real problem at my university is probably that many of the faculty are a bunch of old farts with a strong industry disconnect that haven't stayed current with anything past fortran 77 and the waterfall model. In recent years, as we've added new younger faculty, the problem has begun to solve itself but I think we are still a long way away from creating satisfied graduates. Particularly, the old farts still outnumber and outtenure the reformers.
and please do not complain when I write shitty assembler.
heh, yeah, personally I haven't written a lick of assembler since that class. It was a required course, but probably represents something that should be an elective/restructured for people in both computer science and software dev tracks. The old farts seem to think it is important for everyone to know, just like they think everyone needs to know how to design an ALU at the gate level.
But, for the really satisfying and interesting jobs that both pay well and allow you to stretch your mind, yes, you need a PhD.
I would argue that you are expressing a very strong bias on multiple points here. What do you consider satisfying and interesting? Personally, I derive satisfaction in pursuing a breadth of knowledge, not just in different computer related topics like administration and development, but in areas like design, business, marketting, and relationships. Many small businesses allow you to branch off like this and actually make a difference. Someone with a PhD spends much more time focused in a particular area, a style of work I would find tedious and mind numbing. As for streching one's mind, I would argue that my kind of work is just as good at opening and expanding the capabilities of one's mind as anything a phd might be doing.
If you're eventual plan is to go into industry, just do that now. After a few years, re-evaluate whether or not you want to go back to academia and for what purpose.
My experience with academics is that they are generally very disconnected from reality. During my undergrad (97-01), most every major software development project was an interpretter or a compiler for some simple language. During the peak of the internet boom, we didn't even have a class on web development. I'm not sure if we have one geared towards computer science students yet though a few of the more sane professors have tried to feed web development into existing curriculum.
To this day, there has been very little push in the department to address core development issues such as interface design. We have no usability/design/human factors courses offered through the computer science department or (last I checked) whitelisted as electives in our programs.
The party line within the program has always been that they teach fundamentals of computer science, that they give students a strong foundation, that they teach them how to think. People say, the language that people use is not important, it's the underlying concepts.
The end result is that we crank out hundreds of graduates who only have experience working with C++ (and a week or two of lisp plus a quarter with a few assembler labs) and we call them software developers. Most of them have probably never used a debugger anywhere in their academic work.
But I'm ranting now. My point was that, at least in my experience, there are a lot of inequities in the world of academia. If your eventual goal is industry, you will be better served by immersing yourself in the culture of industry before starting another round in the insular world of academics. In addition, practicing your art in the real world will give you a better idea of what you want to get out of your graduate experience.
I agree with you mostly about Flash and JavaScript taking as minimal a role as possible (although I have seen some nice content driven sites using flash). However, I know many designers feel like someone's just knocked their kneecaps out.
You have some sympathy from me about the users of DreamWeaver and FrontPage, but since you are getting paid for it, not that much.
Yeah, it is part of my job, and technically I do get paid (though it's a miniscule amount). On the other hand, it used to be only a very very small portion of my job. It's not so much that I don't want to make pages accessible, it's that I know that, in a world without regulatory pressures, there are far more valuable uses of my time. There's a todo list a mile long and growing. It's also important to note that the primary content providers (ppl using dreamweaver/fp) also have many other things to do.
All that said and modesty aside, my group is extremely lucky to have me. I imagine most of the little departments around don't have anyone with an understanding beyond Dreamweaver which probably means that they don't even realize how screwed they are.
Your argument was that 100% accessibility (especially in your strict, academic environment) is prohibitively difficult. My argument was that the bar is so much lower than that in the "real" world, that even minor accomodation of accessibility (such as well-formed, valid markup including alt attributes and form labels) would be an improvement.
There are really two parts to the argument which probably weren't expressed too clearly in my post. First, the cost is very high, and no one seems willing to address that. Second, even with our "high" standards, I believe that our standards and methods will not result in accessible sites. In particular, I think the infrastructure of web content publishers is not competent to adequately address the issue of accessibility and even if they were, they are not being provided with the tools to do so. In other words, my opinion is that the bar is still so low that all it can do is trip people that don't keep an eye out for it.
Contrary to my rant and for purely selfish reasons, I'm kinda glad the university decided to make a fuss over ADA issues because if nothing else, it is forcing a redesign of our website, something that was sorely needed... something that I probably wouldn't have had the chance to work on otherwise due to higher priority items. Still, keeping track of all the ADA rules and guidelines, some of which I'm sure can have a detrimental effect for normal users, gives me a big headache.
I've been wondering something for a while...
JAWS, one of the leading screen readers, costs $1100 for pro and $900 for standard. Is this a scam? Are they actually charging the blind this much? Does disability pick it up? I have this weird probably unjustified feeling that this company is making all of their money selling to government institutions that are being forced by regulations to buy their product.
the comparatively inexpensive addition of alt attributes to images and clearly defined form elements
As someone who has been dealing with ADA compliance issues off and on all summer and will continue to deal with them for the next four or five months (please let it be done by then) let me just say that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Before I continue on my rant, let me just say that 90% of the web sites where I work are made by an average office worker with frontpage or dreamweaver. That is to say, they don't really have a clue what they are doing, however they are capable of publishing a whole lot of content and it's generally usable by normal people.
However, now the ADA police are requiring everything be compliant.
Here are some of the official rules (I've found there are unofficial ones as well). Incidentally, that link I just made is against the rules because the only text in the link is "here" and the rules require the text of the link to make sense when taken out of context.
Usage of flashy web development tools is more or less forbidden because it is difficult to impossible to make many Flash and Javascript things "equally" (whatever the hell that means) accessible. Multimedia projects are on hold until we can figure out how to do close captioning and then find the time and resources to do it. Now there is a new emphasis on making things extra simple because we know simple is accessible even if it looks like crap and is therefore more difficult to use for most people. New content is being published while old content is being revised.... etc.
The best part is I'm sure we're not even creating accessible web pages. To do that we'd need to be testing the pages in the top two or three screen readers (Jaws, Home page reader, ?), but Jaws costs more than Visual Studio and the people making the web pages don't have the authority to make that purchase and the people demanding accessibility aren't supplying the merchandise. Furthermore, I don't think they people making the demands or the people making the sites realize their pages have no chance of being accessible unless they can check them regularly with screen readers.
It's like doing web development without checking your output in a browser and yet everyone just pats themselves on the back for a job well done. The sites still aren't usable and developers and end users experience crippled and reduced sites as a result.
Good point with the infrastructure comparison. Since part of my job is support, it's hard for me to think of a successful isp offering without accompanying support. However, I guess someone could try it. There would be nothing to stop third parties from offering limited support in terms of helping people get connected. Also, people are becomming more and more tech savy. The idea of a public information infrastructure without direct support might be a lot more plausible in a world where broadband is as common as electricity or owning a car. The infrastructure maintainers would still be responsible for certain problems, but the same is true with other infrastructure systems like the highways.
I still think it would stifle competition, but you're making me think about it... so thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
977 Bam! The future of modern rock.
...you can bet I'm not going to recommend going to them.
I've seen this argument come up a few times. Best Buy probably reasons that if 5% of the people they demarket are referrers, that is acceptable collateral for unloading the other 95% bad customers. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that I can see how it might make good business sense... depending on how the numbers work out in the end. Actually, I expect this trend will continue until it overshoots some kind of customer backlash equilibrium or until these companies run afowl consumer rights laws in a major $$ way.
It seems like it could be an undergrad CSci assignment.
[sarcastro voice]
Amazing. That's exactly what Diebold said!
[/sarcastro voice]
In defense of the grandparent, I think I heard later the other day that Franklin may have been the only county in Ohio using these particular machines. So this would lead you to believe that the Cuyahoga numbers do not suffer the same problem. Even with a large young population and a large gay population, I doubt Franklin would vote more liberally than Cuyhahoga (67%). We'd have to in order to change the election... so the granparent's argument that we'd have to vote an unrealistically high percentage for Kerry stands.
I've never heard of the Columbus Dispatch.
They are the only real newspaper in Columbus and they endorsed Bush during the election. I live in Columbus but don't read the dispatch often enough to vouch for its integrity. I imagine it is more or less on par with other big city papers.
These errors do not change the election result! Bush won by too big of a margin in Ohio and Florida, any assumption that the machines threw it for Bush would mean that those counties would have had to vote in tremendous numbers for Kerry (like 70%)
I don't follow. First off, several counties recorded over 70% in favor of Kerry. For instance, Chicago was 81% (802K) Kerry and only 18% (180K) Bush. Admitedly, none of the metropolitan areas in Ohio hit more than 67% (Cleveland area), but then, the validity of these very numbers is what is at question. Franklin county (Columbus area) had over 500,000 votes so even if the problem was restricted to this county, then we're still dealing with some very large numbers.
All that said, it does seem very unlikely that several instances of this problem could change the results... but I don't see why it is not a possibility.
Many people like to talk about Ethanol based biofuels. The problem is that Ethanol has certain properties that make it unattractive. It is not very energy efficient to produce, it is corrosive, etc.
Anyways, there's a company called Environmental Energy Inc that has found a new way of producing butanol for biofuels. They claim their process is much more energy efficient than current methods for producing ethanol based biofuels. Also butanol has certain characteristics that make it more appealing than ethanol based fuels.
I don't work for these people or anything, but I am stuck analyzing their business in a technology commercialization class. If half of what they say is true, their technology would revolutionize the biofuels industry and potentially make it a legitimate competitor to petroleum based fuels. On the other hand, the company has this weird don't-exchange-control-for-anything strategy that will probably leave them bankrupt.
I'm a tech guy that's taken a couple of business courses (Ohio State's Fischer college), but I'm not exactly what you might call business savy. Anyways, if you simply want to go some place with MBAs, consider checking out the college scene. For instance, I'm taking a class in technology commercialization right now and 80% of the people in it are MBA students. And contrary to popular opinion, the MBAs in the class seem fairly bright and are experienced.
That said, if you're actually trying to start a business around some kind of technology idea, and if you don't know the business end, you should be looking to partner up with someone experienced in business within the particular sector of the particular industry you are trying to break into. Preferably someone with connections.
You've made your decision, then?
Not remotely! Because iocaine comes from Australia...
Me too. I really really really want to like 3rd party candidates, especially a guy that's for civil liberties, but when he opens his interview with such an obvious/condescending/manipulative lie, it's not possible.
Baseball fans will note that this is the first time a lunar eclipse will have happened during the course of the World Series."
Ah crap, this is going to open up a whole new set of meaningless statistics. I can just see the announcers now.
Well Bob, this should be an interesting match up because Ramirez has never given up a hit in post season play on Tuesday night games against left handed batters during a lunar eclipse.
In a word, yes. Intellectual property concerns are one of the biggest issues facing the world, developed nations in particular. We have experienced an ever increasing decline in the power placed in the hands of consumers.
However, even more importantly, how a candidate approaches intellectual property issues let's you know whose side he is on when it comes to a larger set of issues involving consumer rights. Simply being able to speak intelligently on the topic is a great indicator in and of itself these days.
That said, these guys are both a couple of monkeys. I don't remotely trust either of them. One is a complete unknown and the other is an all too well known. They are both liars.
I think programmers tend to be "smarter" about the kinds of things that make them good programmers. For example, we tend to be better at reasoning about complex systems, in particular the kind of complex systems we design and implement on a day to day basis. It comes from experience identifying and anticipating the consequences of design decisions. But even more, it comes from cultivating the ability to evaluate complicated conditional logic statements in our heads and track the state of a system (or program) as various events (or statements) affect it.
Anyways, I think the tendency is for engineers, perhaps programmers in particular to focus in on these nurtured skills that make them what htey are and believe it implies a greater intelligence. For example, it's not uncommon for a programmer to work with a domain expert while designing a system. During such a scenario, the programmer, who is used to designing complex systems, will often pick up on many things the domain expert missed or might not even fully understand. These things may be mind numbingly obvious to the programmer, but beyond the comprehension of the client. This re-enforces the programmers sense of intellectual superiority.
In reality, the notion of comparative intelligence as it is generally used is more or less a sham. People's intellectual capabilities tend to be optimized for the environment they operate in. Programmers operate in a world of logic. This makes us better at certain modes of thought than other people. But are we smarter than someone who has optimized themselves for a role as a business analyst, a graphic designer, or a teacher? Not particularly.
Hopefully, adaware is free only for personal use. Spybot is free for at least some organizational use.
I have dual at home and single at work. At first I found it very difficult to be productive at work. Ironically, now I mostly just run with one on at home.
What I've found is that one large monitor is usually ok for most computer activity. However, the problem comes when you are using certain kinds of heavyweight applications like the gimp, photoshop, or visual studio. VS takes up a lot of space with auxillary information like a file navigator, debug window, build window, and usually when you have visual studio open you have several other web site references open at the same time. Graphics editors like photoshop also use up a lot of realestate with controls and multiple images spread out all over the place. I still find it pretty painful to work with these kinds of applications with just one monitor.
On the other hand, after I first got two monitors, I loved it so much I picked up a third CRT. There were two problems. I felt like I was getting a sunburn (it was too bright), and with three monitors, the information was just too spread out (having to swivel neck sucked).
That's a good point to make. I suppose only time will tell. As for me, I don't really think of it as engineering.
I agree with you completely and would even go a step further and say that the jobs of software engineering and programming are inherently intertwined. A software engineer needs to spend some time programming within their design in order to understand it, improve it, and move things along with the team of implementers. If they just sit back with pencil and don't spend a decent amount of time getting their hands dirty, they are designing with a large number of blind spots.
This is not to say that there aren't some design issues that can be addressed at a high level, but most of software engineering does not occur at that high level.
I've worked at companies where the game was structured in such a manner that it was impossible to give quality service. There was simply too much to do and we were already working 60 hour weeks without extra pay.
Some of the people outside the IT department understood the problem very well. They treated us with sympathy and did a reasonably good job of structuring and prioritizing their requests.
Others simply did not get it. We would get requests to create reports which might sit in the queue for a week or two. When we finally got around to it, we would see the text of the request and it would say something like "create monthly sales report". You could go talk to the person to try to figure out what this meant. They would give you some details. You'd work on it a little and come back the next day with a few questions. They'd refer you to someone else, and then the other person (who should have been the primary contact anyway) would say, "oh no, that's not what we wanted, and we solved that problem two weeks ago anyway."
Still others would not get it and take an extremely hostile view towards us. The color printer is jammed and you're all going to hell!!! Where's my report?!?
As you might imagine, we had a lot of turnover. Anyways, what I'm saying is that with an IT department that can't provide quality service, you're going to have a certain number of people that don't appreciate the work and another large group of people that think you are a bunch of lazy incompetent jerks conspiring against them.
I'll admit that some of these problems can be solved through better commication, but that can be problematic. For example, we had so much work to do that we were only supposed to go through department managers. This decreased the amount of commication between end users and us. It also sometimes forced us to deal directly with some exceptionally daft or selfish individuals.
I can appreciate the fact that a computer science degree is not supposed to produce a software developer or a system administrator. The problem is that at my university (Ohio State), we only have one big Computer Science program and everyone who wants to be a software developer or a system administrator goes through this program. Very few people in the program actually want to be computer scientists, a fact recognized by faculty.
The numero uno objective of the computer science program at Ohio State is the following:
Graduates will have a thorough grounding in the key principles and practices of computing, and will have applied their software development skills and knowledge of foundational principles to the design and implementation of practical systems consisting of software and/or hardware components to meet customer requirements. more...
So part of the argument you and I are having may be one of semantics, but perhaps it only serves to underscore my particular complaint about many of the academics I have dealt with. You see, they are teaching computer science and believing that they are doing a good job of preparing students for real world software development.
In all honesty, the real problem at my university is probably that many of the faculty are a bunch of old farts with a strong industry disconnect that haven't stayed current with anything past fortran 77 and the waterfall model. In recent years, as we've added new younger faculty, the problem has begun to solve itself but I think we are still a long way away from creating satisfied graduates. Particularly, the old farts still outnumber and outtenure the reformers.
and please do not complain when I write shitty assembler.
heh, yeah, personally I haven't written a lick of assembler since that class. It was a required course, but probably represents something that should be an elective/restructured for people in both computer science and software dev tracks. The old farts seem to think it is important for everyone to know, just like they think everyone needs to know how to design an ALU at the gate level.
But, for the really satisfying and interesting jobs that both pay well and allow you to stretch your mind, yes, you need a PhD.
I would argue that you are expressing a very strong bias on multiple points here. What do you consider satisfying and interesting? Personally, I derive satisfaction in pursuing a breadth of knowledge, not just in different computer related topics like administration and development, but in areas like design, business, marketting, and relationships. Many small businesses allow you to branch off like this and actually make a difference. Someone with a PhD spends much more time focused in a particular area, a style of work I would find tedious and mind numbing. As for streching one's mind, I would argue that my kind of work is just as good at opening and expanding the capabilities of one's mind as anything a phd might be doing.
If you're eventual plan is to go into industry, just do that now. After a few years, re-evaluate whether or not you want to go back to academia and for what purpose.
My experience with academics is that they are generally very disconnected from reality. During my undergrad (97-01), most every major software development project was an interpretter or a compiler for some simple language. During the peak of the internet boom, we didn't even have a class on web development. I'm not sure if we have one geared towards computer science students yet though a few of the more sane professors have tried to feed web development into existing curriculum.
To this day, there has been very little push in the department to address core development issues such as interface design. We have no usability/design/human factors courses offered through the computer science department or (last I checked) whitelisted as electives in our programs.
The party line within the program has always been that they teach fundamentals of computer science, that they give students a strong foundation, that they teach them how to think. People say, the language that people use is not important, it's the underlying concepts.
The end result is that we crank out hundreds of graduates who only have experience working with C++ (and a week or two of lisp plus a quarter with a few assembler labs) and we call them software developers. Most of them have probably never used a debugger anywhere in their academic work.
But I'm ranting now. My point was that, at least in my experience, there are a lot of inequities in the world of academia. If your eventual goal is industry, you will be better served by immersing yourself in the culture of industry before starting another round in the insular world of academics. In addition, practicing your art in the real world will give you a better idea of what you want to get out of your graduate experience.
I agree with you mostly about Flash and JavaScript taking as minimal a role as possible (although I have seen some nice content driven sites using flash). However, I know many designers feel like someone's just knocked their kneecaps out.
You have some sympathy from me about the users of DreamWeaver and FrontPage, but since you are getting paid for it, not that much.
Yeah, it is part of my job, and technically I do get paid (though it's a miniscule amount). On the other hand, it used to be only a very very small portion of my job. It's not so much that I don't want to make pages accessible, it's that I know that, in a world without regulatory pressures, there are far more valuable uses of my time. There's a todo list a mile long and growing. It's also important to note that the primary content providers (ppl using dreamweaver/fp) also have many other things to do.
All that said and modesty aside, my group is extremely lucky to have me. I imagine most of the little departments around don't have anyone with an understanding beyond Dreamweaver which probably means that they don't even realize how screwed they are.
Your argument was that 100% accessibility (especially in your strict, academic environment) is prohibitively difficult. My argument was that the bar is so much lower than that in the "real" world, that even minor accomodation of accessibility (such as well-formed, valid markup including alt attributes and form labels) would be an improvement.
There are really two parts to the argument which probably weren't expressed too clearly in my post. First, the cost is very high, and no one seems willing to address that. Second, even with our "high" standards, I believe that our standards and methods will not result in accessible sites. In particular, I think the infrastructure of web content publishers is not competent to adequately address the issue of accessibility and even if they were, they are not being provided with the tools to do so. In other words, my opinion is that the bar is still so low that all it can do is trip people that don't keep an eye out for it.
Contrary to my rant and for purely selfish reasons, I'm kinda glad the university decided to make a fuss over ADA issues because if nothing else, it is forcing a redesign of our website, something that was sorely needed... something that I probably wouldn't have had the chance to work on otherwise due to higher priority items. Still, keeping track of all the ADA rules and guidelines, some of which I'm sure can have a detrimental effect for normal users, gives me a big headache.
I've been wondering something for a while... JAWS, one of the leading screen readers, costs $1100 for pro and $900 for standard. Is this a scam? Are they actually charging the blind this much? Does disability pick it up? I have this weird probably unjustified feeling that this company is making all of their money selling to government institutions that are being forced by regulations to buy their product.
the comparatively inexpensive addition of alt attributes to images and clearly defined form elements
As someone who has been dealing with ADA compliance issues off and on all summer and will continue to deal with them for the next four or five months (please let it be done by then) let me just say that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Before I continue on my rant, let me just say that 90% of the web sites where I work are made by an average office worker with frontpage or dreamweaver. That is to say, they don't really have a clue what they are doing, however they are capable of publishing a whole lot of content and it's generally usable by normal people.
However, now the ADA police are requiring everything be compliant. Here are some of the official rules (I've found there are unofficial ones as well). Incidentally, that link I just made is against the rules because the only text in the link is "here" and the rules require the text of the link to make sense when taken out of context.
Usage of flashy web development tools is more or less forbidden because it is difficult to impossible to make many Flash and Javascript things "equally" (whatever the hell that means) accessible. Multimedia projects are on hold until we can figure out how to do close captioning and then find the time and resources to do it. Now there is a new emphasis on making things extra simple because we know simple is accessible even if it looks like crap and is therefore more difficult to use for most people. New content is being published while old content is being revised.... etc.
The best part is I'm sure we're not even creating accessible web pages. To do that we'd need to be testing the pages in the top two or three screen readers (Jaws, Home page reader, ?), but Jaws costs more than Visual Studio and the people making the web pages don't have the authority to make that purchase and the people demanding accessibility aren't supplying the merchandise. Furthermore, I don't think they people making the demands or the people making the sites realize their pages have no chance of being accessible unless they can check them regularly with screen readers.
It's like doing web development without checking your output in a browser and yet everyone just pats themselves on the back for a job well done. The sites still aren't usable and developers and end users experience crippled and reduced sites as a result.
Good point with the infrastructure comparison. Since part of my job is support, it's hard for me to think of a successful isp offering without accompanying support. However, I guess someone could try it. There would be nothing to stop third parties from offering limited support in terms of helping people get connected. Also, people are becomming more and more tech savy. The idea of a public information infrastructure without direct support might be a lot more plausible in a world where broadband is as common as electricity or owning a car. The infrastructure maintainers would still be responsible for certain problems, but the same is true with other infrastructure systems like the highways.
I still think it would stifle competition, but you're making me think about it... so thanks.