Fake news as promotion, or even just for the heck of it (as seems to be the case here) is great when it's done well, but you usually don't need to read more than a paragraph or two to get the joke.
It's discouraging that something like this got by an organization like Reuters.:/
Apart from the cofounder's stock scam destroying any chance the company might have had at success, the article fails to mention that the writing for Stan Lee Media's "webisodes" was just awful...
If you can imagine the most hackneyed plots, stereotypical characters, and stilted dialog of comics published 30 years ago, you've pretty much got the gist of content Stan Lee Media had to offer. Which is a shame, because they had a very talented team of artists and animators.
All this time, I've been using three first-class stamps to mail my ISP, cable, and phone bills. $230 will be a small price to pay for the "convenience" of only having to use one!
Seriously, I would say I currently pay about $130/month total for cable modem/cable television (Adelphia, formerly @Home/Adelphia) and phone service... I can't think of *anything* that would justify my paying another $70-100 a month for the services I currently receive.
Use DocBook and document as you code
on
Writing Documentation
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Or document even before you start coding, as someone else already mentioned; I've found that starting documentation early on accomplishes two things:
it helps the planning process immensely by forcing you to really think about what your code is going to be doing, and
it ensures that the documentation end of the project doesn't get short shrift; once the code is done it's too easy to gloss over the documentation when the next project is breathing down your neck.
DocBook easy to author with... the pain in the neck part is setting up a processing environment with Jade/OpenJade/DSSSL, but it's well worth it. It's also possible to use XSL/XSLT to process DocBook XML, but I don't know how involved the setup is. YMMV.
I've found myself becoming gradually annoyed with Jakob Nielsen as well.
That's not to say that he doesn't have some excellent things to say about the usability of web sites, because he does... but he says them over and over again, and what bugs me is that he seems unwilling to even consider the possibility that there might be a way to incorporate post 1996 technologies into your site and keep it usable.
Check out Tipping Jakob's Ladder by Julie Meloni. She has some interesting responses to Nielsen's "Flash: 99% Bad" essay. From the article:
Flash is not bad. Flash designers are bad when they don't know any better.
The same can be said for plain old HTML designers, for that matter.
-Andy
Althought the price has fortunately come down on the Minijam, support is less than stellar for new operating systems. In fact, Innogear originally said they had no plans to support WinXP or Mac OS X. Looking at their FAQ I see they now say they're "exploring" XP and OS X support for "early 2002".
Given that Innogear still hasn't implemented the originally promised functionality to read e-books and other files directly from the Minijam's memory, I'm skeptical that they'll get around to it that soon.
Plus, the Minijam uses MMC cards with a proprietary format, so you wouldn't be able to pop your MMC card into any old desktop adapter and pull your MP3's off that way (or put new ones on).
Early Visor adopters may remember Innogear as the company that boldly announced the SixPack module early on, which was supposedly going to provide six features like a 56kmodem, 8 megs of flash memory, vibrating alarm, voice recorder, etc. They claimed it would cost $199 and that it would be available Q1 2000.
After pushing that release date back for the better part of a year, they announced the cancellation of the project. I've never bought any Innogear products, as much as I'd like an MP3 player for my Visor, because I don't trust the company to provide me with adequate support for the damn thing.
The SoundsGood MP3 player springboard seemed to be well received, but it has been discontued and didn't use external memory.
You'll find all kinds of consumer opinion about the Minijam at this site.
-Andy
P.S. You might want to check out the Sony Clie PEG-N760c for PDA/MP3 Capability. Sony seems poised to kick Handspring's ass.
...He told me that the heat problems mentioned in the article were the single biggest obstacle to making a successful mini-turban.
Actually, I've found the single biggest obstacle to be working with those tiny pieces of linen.. I'm hoping nanotech will provide me with a solution in the near future.
That's the crux of the 'dot com bubble burst'. Half me me hopes Mr. Dyroff is being facetious, but the other half appreciates his candor if he's serious... it's a lot more refreshing than the usual 'Our product was just too far ahead of its time, and nobody could see our vision, and *that's* why our stock is now worth $0.03' excuse you get from former dot com executives.
As everyone else has said, this guy wasn't a guru, just a buffoon who probably
padded his resume and somehow managed to get hired without an interview (?!)
But as for the question at hand, I would say there's still a place for 'quirky
gurus' at companies, as long as everybody is willing to meet everybody else
halfway. I'd hardly call myself quirky, or a guru, but as the youngest guy in my
department by about 20 years and the only one with a stereotypical dot com
ponytail and goatee I guess I'm something of an anomaly.
I am my own Intranet HTML/PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL development team of one at my
current job, and because my stuff works and is generally on time I'm afforded
the luxury of being left alone by my boss and department head 95% of the time.
I'm also afforded the luxury of being taken seriously and having my suggestions
listened to and often acted upon.
The trade off? I submit to the company dress code and wear a tie to work, and I
work for a lot less here (a not-for-profit company) than I would be making
somewhere else in a healthier economy. I know that last has a thing or two to
do with my being left to my own devices, too; I would be hard to replace at the
salary offered for this position.
Employees and employers alike need to understand that it's a give and take relationship... as long as each side feels like they're getting enough for what they give, everything is golden.
I was wondering the same thing when my Adelphia@home service went down for the better part of 24 hours over last weekend.
Needless to say, Excite@home has some infrastructure problems, but I think they inherited a lot of them. A couple of months ago our service bit the dust for nearly a week, and after the second day the tech support guys were allowed to explain to all the pissed off customers (like me) what was causing the problem.
Adelphia purchased TCI cable a couple of years ago here in the San Fernando Valley. Apparently they never bothered to inspect any of the switching equipment after the acquisition, and TCI had seriously overloaded some of the switches with more connections than was safe for optimal/sustained performance... kind of like a tangled octopus of extension cords plugged into a wall socket.
Anyway, the only people who had known this was going on were the old TCI people, who had either left or continued to report everything was hunky dory, right up until one of the switches blew up.
Multiply that one incident at one cable company by all of them, and it's no wonder they're in trouble.:-/
The users, operators, and programmers of distributed systems face many problems. Users of the World Wide Web are subjected to random performance and service disruptions.
... and in the next breath they say:
We believe that a distributed operating system, based on a few principles pervasively applied, could address these problems.
The Time article, Do Kids Have Too Much Power? Is not about internet savvy kids upsetting the status quo. It's about how inept parents spoil their children rotten, and its portrayal of parents who can't say 'no' as victims of mass marketing towards their spawn will make you sick.
But it doesn't have a lot of relevance as it applies to your essay. Seriously... do you expect me to bother reading the rest of your little article when the second work cited has nothing to do with your topic?
...is "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper, ISBN 0672316498. You can probably find it cheap, too... got my copy at Borders for about $4.00, hardcover even.
Read the article again - Springboard expansion is facilitated by an external adapter; same Springboard Standard as used by the earlier Visors. HS was the first to roll out a proprietary expansion slot, and they're smart enough to realize they'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they created yet another standard for the Edge... Palm & Sony jumped on the bandwagon with SD and Memorystick.
I've reached the decision to stop trying to make my personal sites Netscape compatible; now that I've stopped doing all those things the W3C is always telling us not to (Don't use tables for layout, don't use the tag), Netscape 4.x doesn't render CSS information correctly either.
I know most Linux users use Netscape, so rather than take the presumptuous and high-handed approach of sending them to a snotty 'upgrade your browser' page, I will probably add a note to the bottom of any page served to a netscape browser indicating that the page looks funny because I have given up on Netscape. Or I may redirect them to a PDA/Lynx-friendly version of the site transparently.
Professionally, writing bad code to get pages to render correctly in Netscape is still a necessary evil. These guys come across as idiots. I'm supposed to upgrade my browser so I can read their size 2 bold black text on bright orange background better? No thanks. Instead of designers worrying about people being able to view their 4-level-deep nested table/spacer.GIF layout correctly, maybe they should worry about their content and its accessibility. Lately I find my designs devolving into the web circa 1995, when it was still (mostly) about the exchange of information.
Or until somebody from HR comes in and says 'Oh, by the wayyyy - we created a new middle management position in your department. Your new boss starts today.'
It's been a while since I read the books and after the disappointing finish of the miniseries last night I'll probably be reading it again soon, but I don't think Herbert ever wrote that the fremens' eyes glow in the dark... one of the most irksome things about both the Lynch version and the miniseries was the cheesy blue eye effect.
Am I the only person who thinks it would have been much more convincing if they had merely changed the eye color without adding luminescence? Glowing eyes are great for crappy horror movies, I guess, but they're a source of constant distraction in both versions of Dune.
If all you're using scripting for is inserting a "quote of the day", maintaining your guestbook, and "You are visitor number 00000000000011 since 12/8/96" hit counter, I guess that argument could be made. (?)
It seems to me, though, that the whole point of using server-side embedded scripting is to merge data and presentation; a script pulls from a database or XML file and plugs the data into a template. Data isn't "tainted" by presentation, and changing the look of the site is simply a matter of changing the template. Why drag Java servlets and application servers into it?
Similar layoffs are happening in Chicago (admittedly not so many Dot Coms there) and Los Angeles... the last three companies I worked for are either dead or dying, and the one I currently work for is well on its way. Each time a company seems like it has a good strategy during the interview (In one case the company actually did), it either turns out to be so much bullshit or the company management manages to bollocks it up.
Each one has been fucked in its own special way, which just goes to show that there's more than one way to unsuccessfully skin a cat. It will be nice when the rubble settles, though; the companies that last will hopefully be the well managed ones that provide usable, valuable services... and people will have to know a little bit more than Dreamweaver/Fireworks to get hired as Web Designers/Developers.
Just like driving the freeways of Los Angeles, it's not myself I'd be concerned about, it's all the f@#$%ing idiots around me... I mean, if people can't drive their cars on the freeway without cutting across four lanes in 1/8 of a mile to make their exit/slowing down to 5 MPH just to rubberneck an accident/backing up on the freeway because they missed their exit, can anyone really be trusted to operate a personal aircraft, even with some sort of licensing program?
I've followed the Skycar with some interest, but also with skepticism - I wouldn't trust other people to pilot their vehicles without hitting me, and for that matter I wouldn't want to be on the ground underneath the airways these craft would travel... unlike a car accident which can usually be pulled off the road without affecting anyone but the principals involved, a Skycar/jetpack accident is going to come crashing out of the sky onto somebody who's minding their own business.
"Other than the American revolution (which was about taxes not rights) little good politics have been done with guns."
Is that to say that guns are ok for some political upheaval (read: Our Holy American Forefathers' Revolution) but not others (Yeah, rights suck in China but what are you gonna do..)?
I don't own a gun myself, but I'd be very concerned if my government suddenly told me I couldn't own a gun. The nuclear civil engineering projects wouldn't be far behind.;{)>
Slashdot Mirror
Fake news as promotion, or even just for the heck of it (as seems to be the case here) is great when it's done well, but you usually don't need to read more than a paragraph or two to get the joke.
:/
It's discouraging that something like this got by an organization like Reuters.
Apart from the cofounder's stock scam destroying any chance the company might have had at success, the article fails to mention that the writing for Stan Lee Media's "webisodes" was just awful...
If you can imagine the most hackneyed plots, stereotypical characters, and stilted dialog of comics published 30 years ago, you've pretty much got the gist of content Stan Lee Media had to offer. Which is a shame, because they had a very talented team of artists and animators.
All this time, I've been using three first-class stamps to mail my ISP, cable, and phone bills. $230 will be a small price to pay for the "convenience" of only having to use one!
Seriously, I would say I currently pay about $130/month total for cable modem/cable television (Adelphia, formerly @Home/Adelphia) and phone service... I can't think of *anything* that would justify my paying another $70-100 a month for the services I currently receive.
- it helps the planning process immensely by forcing you to really think about what your code is going to be doing, and
- it ensures that the documentation end of the project doesn't get short shrift; once the code is done it's too easy to gloss over the documentation when the next project is breathing down your neck.
DocBook easy to author with... the pain in the neck part is setting up a processing environment with Jade/OpenJade/DSSSL, but it's well worth it. It's also possible to use XSL/XSLT to process DocBook XML, but I don't know how involved the setup is. YMMV.I've found myself becoming gradually annoyed with Jakob Nielsen as well.
That's not to say that he doesn't have some excellent things to say about the usability of web sites, because he does... but he says them over and over again, and what bugs me is that he seems unwilling to even consider the possibility that there might be a way to incorporate post 1996 technologies into your site and keep it usable.
Check out Tipping Jakob's Ladder by Julie Meloni. She has some interesting responses to Nielsen's "Flash: 99% Bad" essay. From the article:
The same can be said for plain old HTML designers, for that matter. -Andy
Althought the price has fortunately come down on the Minijam, support is less than stellar for new operating systems. In fact, Innogear originally said they had no plans to support WinXP or Mac OS X. Looking at their FAQ I see they now say they're "exploring" XP and OS X support for "early 2002".
Given that Innogear still hasn't implemented the originally promised functionality to read e-books and other files directly from the Minijam's memory, I'm skeptical that they'll get around to it that soon.
Plus, the Minijam uses MMC cards with a proprietary format, so you wouldn't be able to pop your MMC card into any old desktop adapter and pull your MP3's off that way (or put new ones on).
Early Visor adopters may remember Innogear as the company that boldly announced the SixPack module early on, which was supposedly going to provide six features like a 56kmodem, 8 megs of flash memory, vibrating alarm, voice recorder, etc. They claimed it would cost $199 and that it would be available Q1 2000.
After pushing that release date back for the better part of a year, they announced the cancellation of the project. I've never bought any Innogear products, as much as I'd like an MP3 player for my Visor, because I don't trust the company to provide me with adequate support for the damn thing.
The SoundsGood MP3 player springboard seemed to be well received, but it has been discontued and didn't use external memory.
You'll find all kinds of consumer opinion about the Minijam at this site.
-Andy
P.S. You might want to check out the Sony Clie PEG-N760c for PDA/MP3 Capability. Sony seems poised to kick Handspring's ass.
Actually, I've found the single biggest obstacle to be working with those tiny pieces of linen.. I'm hoping nanotech will provide me with a solution in the near future.
Somebody finally found a fitting use for Budweiser, Coors, Miller, et al!
Two years ago, the standard business plan was:
Collect Underpants > ??? > Profit!
That's the crux of the 'dot com bubble burst'. Half me me hopes Mr. Dyroff is being facetious, but the other half appreciates his candor if he's serious... it's a lot more refreshing than the usual 'Our product was just too far ahead of its time, and nobody could see our vision, and *that's* why our stock is now worth $0.03' excuse you get from former dot com executives.
...Actually, given the host I'd say the theme ingredient is ham.
As everyone else has said, this guy wasn't a guru, just a buffoon who probably
padded his resume and somehow managed to get hired without an interview (?!)
But as for the question at hand, I would say there's still a place for 'quirky
gurus' at companies, as long as everybody is willing to meet everybody else
halfway. I'd hardly call myself quirky, or a guru, but as the youngest guy in my
department by about 20 years and the only one with a stereotypical dot com
ponytail and goatee I guess I'm something of an anomaly.
I am my own Intranet HTML/PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL development team of one at my
current job, and because my stuff works and is generally on time I'm afforded
the luxury of being left alone by my boss and department head 95% of the time.
I'm also afforded the luxury of being taken seriously and having my suggestions
listened to and often acted upon.
The trade off? I submit to the company dress code and wear a tie to work, and I
work for a lot less here (a not-for-profit company) than I would be making
somewhere else in a healthier economy. I know that last has a thing or two to
do with my being left to my own devices, too; I would be hard to replace at the
salary offered for this position.
Employees and employers alike need to understand that it's a give and take relationship... as long as each side feels like they're getting enough for what they give, everything is golden.
I was wondering the same thing when my Adelphia@home service went down for the better part of 24 hours over last weekend.
:-/
Needless to say, Excite@home has some infrastructure problems, but I think they inherited a lot of them. A couple of months ago our service bit the dust for nearly a week, and after the second day the tech support guys were allowed to explain to all the pissed off customers (like me) what was causing the problem.
Adelphia purchased TCI cable a couple of years ago here in the San Fernando Valley. Apparently they never bothered to inspect any of the switching equipment after the acquisition, and TCI had seriously overloaded some of the switches with more connections than was safe for optimal/sustained performance... kind of like a tangled octopus of extension cords plugged into a wall socket.
Anyway, the only people who had known this was going on were the old TCI people, who had either left or continued to report everything was hunky dory, right up until one of the switches blew up.
Multiply that one incident at one cable company by all of them, and it's no wonder they're in trouble.
I don't get it - they open with:
... and in the next breath they say:
???
Y'know, when I first glanced at the headline I had to scratch my head and wonder who our mystery protector was...
The Time article, Do Kids Have Too Much Power? Is not about internet savvy kids upsetting the status quo. It's about how inept parents spoil their children rotten, and its portrayal of parents who can't say 'no' as victims of mass marketing towards their spawn will make you sick.
But it doesn't have a lot of relevance as it applies to your essay. Seriously... do you expect me to bother reading the rest of your little article when the second work cited has nothing to do with your topic?
...is "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper, ISBN 0672316498. You can probably find it cheap, too... got my copy at Borders for about $4.00, hardcover even.
Read the article again - Springboard expansion is facilitated by an external adapter; same Springboard Standard as used by the earlier Visors. HS was the first to roll out a proprietary expansion slot, and they're smart enough to realize they'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they created yet another standard for the Edge... Palm & Sony jumped on the bandwagon with SD and Memorystick.
I've reached the decision to stop trying to make my personal sites Netscape compatible; now that I've stopped doing all those things the W3C is always telling us not to (Don't use tables for layout, don't use the tag), Netscape 4.x doesn't render CSS information correctly either.
.GIF layout correctly, maybe they should worry about their content and its accessibility. Lately I find my designs devolving into the web circa 1995, when it was still (mostly) about the exchange of information.
I know most Linux users use Netscape, so rather than take the presumptuous and high-handed approach of sending them to a snotty 'upgrade your browser' page, I will probably add a note to the bottom of any page served to a netscape browser indicating that the page looks funny because I have given up on Netscape. Or I may redirect them to a PDA/Lynx-friendly version of the site transparently.
Professionally, writing bad code to get pages to render correctly in Netscape is still a necessary evil. These guys come across as idiots. I'm supposed to upgrade my browser so I can read their size 2 bold black text on bright orange background better? No thanks. Instead of designers worrying about people being able to view their 4-level-deep nested table/spacer
Or until somebody from HR comes in and says 'Oh, by the wayyyy - we created a new middle management position in your department. Your new boss starts today.'
It's been a while since I read the books and after the disappointing finish of the miniseries last night I'll probably be reading it again soon, but I don't think Herbert ever wrote that the fremens' eyes glow in the dark... one of the most irksome things about both the Lynch version and the miniseries was the cheesy blue eye effect.
Am I the only person who thinks it would have been much more convincing if they had merely changed the eye color without adding luminescence? Glowing eyes are great for crappy horror movies, I guess, but they're a source of constant distraction in both versions of Dune.
If all you're using scripting for is inserting a "quote of the day", maintaining your guestbook, and "You are visitor number 00000000000011 since 12/8/96" hit counter, I guess that argument could be made. (?)
It seems to me, though, that the whole point of using server-side embedded scripting is to merge data and presentation; a script pulls from a database or XML file and plugs the data into a template. Data isn't "tainted" by presentation, and changing the look of the site is simply a matter of changing the template. Why drag Java servlets and application servers into it?
Similar layoffs are happening in Chicago (admittedly not so many Dot Coms there) and Los Angeles... the last three companies I worked for are either dead or dying, and the one I currently work for is well on its way. Each time a company seems like it has a good strategy during the interview (In one case the company actually did), it either turns out to be so much bullshit or the company management manages to bollocks it up.
Each one has been fucked in its own special way, which just goes to show that there's more than one way to unsuccessfully skin a cat. It will be nice when the rubble settles, though; the companies that last will hopefully be the well managed ones that provide usable, valuable services... and people will have to know a little bit more than Dreamweaver/Fireworks to get hired as Web Designers/Developers.
Just like driving the freeways of Los Angeles, it's not myself I'd be concerned about, it's all the f@#$%ing idiots around me... I mean, if people can't drive their cars on the freeway without cutting across four lanes in 1/8 of a mile to make their exit/slowing down to 5 MPH just to rubberneck an accident/backing up on the freeway because they missed their exit, can anyone really be trusted to operate a personal aircraft, even with some sort of licensing program? I've followed the Skycar with some interest, but also with skepticism - I wouldn't trust other people to pilot their vehicles without hitting me, and for that matter I wouldn't want to be on the ground underneath the airways these craft would travel... unlike a car accident which can usually be pulled off the road without affecting anyone but the principals involved, a Skycar/jetpack accident is going to come crashing out of the sky onto somebody who's minding their own business.
"Other than the American revolution (which was about taxes not rights) little good politics have been done with guns."
Is that to say that guns are ok for some political upheaval (read: Our Holy American Forefathers' Revolution) but not others (Yeah, rights suck in China but what are you gonna do..)?
I don't own a gun myself, but I'd be very concerned if my government suddenly told me I couldn't own a gun. The nuclear civil engineering projects wouldn't be far behind.