Know at least one or two facts before falling for this type of stuff.
You ought to take your own advice. You cite only 1 recent event as a way to discount Bono's efforts, but conveniently ignore the fact that he's done dozens of events like this over the past ten years, and some have indeed resulted in huge amounts of debt relief. Happily, KRO has obviously done more research than you have, and found Bono's contributions substantial and real enough to warrant being on the list.
Bono has actually done a HUGE amount of work to save small countries from financial collapse. He meets with government officials in the USA (and now a few other big countries too, although I can't recall which ones), and persuades them to forgive billions upon billions of dollars in debt. Because of Bono, some small counties have been able to remain in existence.
Useability is something you add on the backend of a product to market it. What they really mean by useability is a nice GUI where you can get a mouse trail going.
Yeah. You didn't even read the article. They defined usability right at the beginning of the document: "Usability is typically described in terms of five characteristics: ease of learning, efficiency of use, memorability, error frequency and severity, and subjective satisfaction (Nielsen, 1993)."
They wrote a well-researched, seriously informative document with tons of examples, quotes from experts, and more. I find their comments far more compelling and substantial than yours.
...this is really, really, sloppy work. I'm bored of this. Can I get the URLs of some other geek-friendly news/info sites? Ones that have a bit more QA?
The cat's out of the bag and Microsoft is gonna get it. They really have pushed people too far and been, well, evil. They, not the government nor Slashdot nor the mass media, proved their nature with EULAs and pricing. Good riddiance M$.
Yes. Microsoft will watch in horror as their marketshare falls from 96% of desktop users to 95%. Soon we'll be rid of them.
Seriously, he is resigning because he thinks others aren't putting enough time in. One could assume that he was most likely putting a good amount of time in. Now he is resigning, accomplishling what? Even less time being put in.
Short term, yes. Long term, no. He's already got the President to resign. If he can embarass another one of them into resigning, then 3 of the 4 positions (including his own) can be filled with people who have far more time to dedicate to the meetings. Long term, that is only good for the organization. I think his efforts are already working. I'm impressed. I hope the other members are humiliated enough to step down.
...for my personal data, I just burn it to CDs every now & then, and then throw the CDs into the glove compartment of my car. Of course, I'm not backing up pr0n, so all my data fits onto 2 CDs, and since I've already got a few music CDs in the glove compartment, might as well drop the other CDs there too. My car is enough "off site" (I don't park in my house's garage) that the data will be fine if my house burns down. I've never had the summer heat bake the CDs into oblivion, they've always been fine. Low end, sure. But it's good enough for home use.
The problem is that M$IE is at the core of M$ Windows. It's not just the web browser, it's also the file manager. This means that it both runs scripts provided on websites, and modifies the local hard drive. Does this sound like two things that can't be combined without huge security issues? It does to me.
Uhhh, you might want to talk to the Konqueror team while you're at it.
Re:What happened to all those tribbles??
on
Ask William Shatner
·
· Score: 2
OMG -- someone moderated the parent post as "informative." That is just hilarious. Some moderator out there has an excellent sense of humor.
Well, one of my employees and/. regular, Mr. eDrugtrader, could probably comment at a developer level, and we'll see if he gets up early enough to see this post and comment. But I know that from a management perspective, while we're fairly productive with what we do, we have also had to say "no" to a massive number of projects, including projects that came from the CEO or were marked "necessary." Everyone is frustrated -- our CEO has huge plans, but he doesn't have the staff to do it. Or at least, things are getting done at a snail's pace. One of my employees has a backlog of about 2 years of projects -- great for job security, but it can be frustrating and overwhelming. Here are some bits of the fallout:
Because resources are scarce, people get nasty in their efforts to trump eachother. If two projects are "urgent" and only one can get done, I have to deal with people running to the CEO and complaining, and often using seniority to force the issue ("I'm a VP, so screw all the Directors asking for your time").
Because projects are under scrutiny, there is little tolerance for side projects. I know that one of my employees hates the project he's on, and would love to squeeze in even a few 4-hour quick-fix fun projects, but the company counts hours too tightly now. I wish I could fix this, but when you have meeting after meeting to agree on the priorities, there is a point where you make your commitments and have to do what you agreed to do.
While we may be productive short-term, long-term people get frustrated. They get jealous if they see another group gets our time, and they get jealous if they see one group getting to hire a new employee while everyone else cuts back. The employees get tired of having their time micromanaged. Inefficiencies in scheduling and production are highlighted.
Finally, although my current job hasn't gotten nasty like this (whew!), I've had experiences at other companies where the overloaded employees who miss deadlines get blamed for EVERYTHING. I've been that employee. It is NOT fun, not good, and a sure sign that it's time to leave. For instance, I can almost guarantee that the employees at Actuate Software are feeling that pressure right now -- highly competitive company, with plently of people willing to scream and blame others like mad. Which only makes a tough situation worse.
Parents need to realize that the Internet is not some evil place trying to take their children away.
Well, at the risk of losing karma for being argumentative, that has to be the most inept, dangerously naive generalization I've ever heard. I mean, fuck, why don't we just smile and shake the hands of predators everywhere while we're turning a blind eye? Look, I bet that in your heart you're reacting to the millions of news/tabloid stories about how the Internet is full of perverts. You and I know that's just not true. But to swing the pendulumn all the way over to the other side and suggest that the Internet doesn't have this element of evil, well that's just retarded. And the suggestion that it's the parents fault if a child is lured away by a molester or lured into a cult or lured into whatever -- without so much as a mention of the fault of the criminal -- is offensive.
ChristTrekker, thanks for the great response. The links were excellent. I have one response to a comment you made, veering into the philosophical.
Andreesen adding the IMG tag was a big mistake, and a very bad implementation of embedding media. The OBJECT tag is what we should have had all along.
Oh, I agree about the specific implementation: img was very short-sighted in that it presumed a specific type of media. But your comment also presumes another thing -- that all types of objects, not just images, should be embeddable. And that's where I think the img tag was so wonderful: it changed people's thinking. If you remember Mark's early posts about it, the naysayers didn't hate img because it was "only" for images, they hated the idea of non-textual display. They hated the idea that scholarly documents were moving into a realm that included visual elements they considered "fluff." And that's an argument that was lost long ago, thankfully. I'm not arguing in favor of short-sighted specific implementations (img and font) so much as the concept that visual cues matter. CSS and object tags are far better than the early days, but they advance and improve the concept, rather than beating HTML back to the stone-age. I love the img tag not for its implementation, but for the idea (which was revolutionary back then) that there can be more to the Web than Lynx.
Wow. I read through the entire comments section, and Ian basically ignored users, Web developers, and even a few Mozilla developers. I'm amazed at how poorly he handled it. Maybe we should get these guys some training in diplomacy.
I think Mozilla is in a position to really get innovation going again. Being a Web developer who started back in 1994, I remember first using Mosaic and Netscape back when features came so fast and furious that you really like progress was an everyday thing. I haven't felt that way lately (at least about Internet Explorer). So without further ado, here are some ways to innovate at a fundamental level, changing some things that should have been obvious.
First, making navigation buttons out of the link tags is great. But does Mozilla pre-fetch the "next" link, so that if I actually decide to go to the next page (likely), it comes up fast? WebTV has this feature. Makes the Web feel faster.
Second, why am I entering HTML tags into a plain text field? Where is the HTML text field? You know, a form object that comes with B, I, and U buttons, and allows me to visually format the text before sending (and which is delievered as standard, XHTML 1.0 compliant markup)? I've seen that Microsoft's new Web-based Outlook tools have this, but they use over 100k of JavaScript files to accomplish it. Shouldn't we just have something like this: <htmlarea></htmlarea>???
Finally, one of the things I've been waiting for is the ability to set images or other objects on angles. For example, if I wanted to have the slashdot logo appear as if it were on an incline, I might use CSS to specify the image display at -15 degrees. And if this were exposed to JavaScript, I could make some interesting animations. But I haven't seen this in CSS yet.
In short, I remember fondly when Netscape pushed the envelope -- I remember Andreesen adding the img tag, I remember Netscape implementing the file upload tag. I think some working demos of this stuff might help it gain acceptance, and give people a reference model to work from. Not to mention make Mozilla seem much more useful than Explorer.
What I want to know is how come no PHP advocate mentions scalability?
The biggest Web site on planet Earth is using it. I suspect it can scale.
How do you distribute sessions in PHP?????
Wow. Someone needs to mod your comment down as "uninformed." PHP sessions can be written to a shared disk, or can be written to a database server. Your server farm can easily share that data.
What happens when you want to cluster that PHP site??
...okay, so no one will read this at this late point, but for any and all software developers who are hunting for a useful product to build, why not create an EULA-distiller? Let it run in the background, and watch for installations. When it sees an EULA appear, it can display 2 or 3 bullet points that succinctly explain what the hell all the legal text means.
To get really tricky, you could create a Web site that allows users to upload the text of each EULA, and a distilled summary. Perhaps other people could even vote on the most accurate, most understandable summaries. Then your app could be constantly up-to-date. Perhaps by doing this, people who blindly click through these things will be made aware of what the real consequences will be.
The SCH-850 was a piece of crap. After a few weeks of using it, it would die. Not the battery, or screen. That would all work fine. It would show full signal strength, but would never connect to the network.
Yeah. See, the service requires you to pay a monthly bill.
The point is to work against the 'monolitic' mozilla trunk and make a browser, not a suite.
My God. You mean they want to make an app that does one job only, and does it well? But that's so... so... Unix! I thought we were supposed to be making everything the same as Windows. I mean, IE has chat and email and... oh, wait. Nevermind.
Well, I had a bunch of ideas and then I read wackybrit's comments, and, uh, I agree with those comments. So now I'm stuck wondering if I should suggest anything at all. Since I'm already here....
A common clipboard, for copy and paste, would be wonderful. If I copy text from Konq and want to paste it into Pan, that should work every time. I note SuSE appears to have done some work here -- sometimes I can copy & paste in SuSE just fine, while other distros are not so fine. Another thing that would be great: common menu system. In fact, it would be great if the menu system was actually just a directory on disk with some subdirectories in it, each populated with links to various apps. That way, if a Window Manager or desktop tool didn't want to offer a menu system, you might still be able to navigate it. If that were in common for all or even many of the WMs out there (KDE, xfce, Gnome, IceWM, and so on), that would make things far easier. Note that I'm not suggesting that Red Hat be copied and KDE apps be pulled out of the menus -- populate the menus with hundreds of apps if you wish. Just get it in a standard format. Finally, common desktop icons (again, not that there have to be specific apps that must be there, just that if I create a link to Galeon on my desktop, it'd be swell if it appeared in KDE and Gnome (and other) desktops.
These may be in LSB 1.2 -- I've got the page up now & I'm surfing through it, but you guys are slashdotting it a little, so it's slow going....
However, *maybe* (and I repeat, just maybe), if beyond any reasonable doubt the guy can prove that the people who made the first comments made them with the premeditated malicious intention of bringing down his business, then that's another matter.
Uhh, no. That's word-of-mouth. Right now there is a guy standing in front of the car dealership at the corner of Steven's Creek and Lawrence. He's got a sign that says "don't buy cars here." He is actively and deliberately attempting to put the car dealership out of business. He has made no false statements. The car dealership can do nothing about this (aside from getting him moved off their property, so he's out on the sidewalk). "Intent to damage" is not only legal in the USA, it's protected speech. Perhaps you're confusing it with libel or slander?
Slashdot Mirror
Where did I claim that?
You ought to take your own advice. You cite only 1 recent event as a way to discount Bono's efforts, but conveniently ignore the fact that he's done dozens of events like this over the past ten years, and some have indeed resulted in huge amounts of debt relief. Happily, KRO has obviously done more research than you have, and found Bono's contributions substantial and real enough to warrant being on the list.
Bono has actually done a HUGE amount of work to save small countries from financial collapse. He meets with government officials in the USA (and now a few other big countries too, although I can't recall which ones), and persuades them to forgive billions upon billions of dollars in debt. Because of Bono, some small counties have been able to remain in existence.
Yeah. Good times, good times.
Yeah. You didn't even read the article. They defined usability right at the beginning of the document: "Usability is typically described in terms of five characteristics: ease of learning, efficiency of use, memorability, error frequency and severity, and subjective satisfaction (Nielsen, 1993)."
They wrote a well-researched, seriously informative document with tons of examples, quotes from experts, and more. I find their comments far more compelling and substantial than yours.
In other words, the general population.
...this is really, really, sloppy work. I'm bored of this. Can I get the URLs of some other geek-friendly news/info sites? Ones that have a bit more QA?
Yes. Microsoft will watch in horror as their marketshare falls from 96% of desktop users to 95%. Soon we'll be rid of them.
From the article:
So what happens if your body rejects your face?!?
Short term, yes. Long term, no. He's already got the President to resign. If he can embarass another one of them into resigning, then 3 of the 4 positions (including his own) can be filled with people who have far more time to dedicate to the meetings. Long term, that is only good for the organization. I think his efforts are already working. I'm impressed. I hope the other members are humiliated enough to step down.
...for my personal data, I just burn it to CDs every now & then, and then throw the CDs into the glove compartment of my car. Of course, I'm not backing up pr0n, so all my data fits onto 2 CDs, and since I've already got a few music CDs in the glove compartment, might as well drop the other CDs there too. My car is enough "off site" (I don't park in my house's garage) that the data will be fine if my house burns down. I've never had the summer heat bake the CDs into oblivion, they've always been fine. Low end, sure. But it's good enough for home use.
Uhhh, you might want to talk to the Konqueror team while you're at it.
OMG -- someone moderated the parent post as "informative." That is just hilarious. Some moderator out there has an excellent sense of humor.
Well, one of my employees and /. regular, Mr. eDrugtrader, could probably comment at a developer level, and we'll see if he gets up early enough to see this post and comment. But I know that from a management perspective, while we're fairly productive with what we do, we have also had to say "no" to a massive number of projects, including projects that came from the CEO or were marked "necessary." Everyone is frustrated -- our CEO has huge plans, but he doesn't have the staff to do it. Or at least, things are getting done at a snail's pace. One of my employees has a backlog of about 2 years of projects -- great for job security, but it can be frustrating and overwhelming. Here are some bits of the fallout:
Well, at the risk of losing karma for being argumentative, that has to be the most inept, dangerously naive generalization I've ever heard. I mean, fuck, why don't we just smile and shake the hands of predators everywhere while we're turning a blind eye? Look, I bet that in your heart you're reacting to the millions of news/tabloid stories about how the Internet is full of perverts. You and I know that's just not true. But to swing the pendulumn all the way over to the other side and suggest that the Internet doesn't have this element of evil, well that's just retarded. And the suggestion that it's the parents fault if a child is lured away by a molester or lured into a cult or lured into whatever -- without so much as a mention of the fault of the criminal -- is offensive.
ChristTrekker, thanks for the great response. The links were excellent. I have one response to a comment you made, veering into the philosophical.
Oh, I agree about the specific implementation: img was very short-sighted in that it presumed a specific type of media. But your comment also presumes another thing -- that all types of objects, not just images, should be embeddable. And that's where I think the img tag was so wonderful: it changed people's thinking. If you remember Mark's early posts about it, the naysayers didn't hate img because it was "only" for images, they hated the idea of non-textual display. They hated the idea that scholarly documents were moving into a realm that included visual elements they considered "fluff." And that's an argument that was lost long ago, thankfully. I'm not arguing in favor of short-sighted specific implementations (img and font) so much as the concept that visual cues matter. CSS and object tags are far better than the early days, but they advance and improve the concept, rather than beating HTML back to the stone-age. I love the img tag not for its implementation, but for the idea (which was revolutionary back then) that there can be more to the Web than Lynx.
Wow. I read through the entire comments section, and Ian basically ignored users, Web developers, and even a few Mozilla developers. I'm amazed at how poorly he handled it. Maybe we should get these guys some training in diplomacy.
I think Mozilla is in a position to really get innovation going again. Being a Web developer who started back in 1994, I remember first using Mosaic and Netscape back when features came so fast and furious that you really like progress was an everyday thing. I haven't felt that way lately (at least about Internet Explorer). So without further ado, here are some ways to innovate at a fundamental level, changing some things that should have been obvious.
First, making navigation buttons out of the link tags is great. But does Mozilla pre-fetch the "next" link, so that if I actually decide to go to the next page (likely), it comes up fast? WebTV has this feature. Makes the Web feel faster.
Second, why am I entering HTML tags into a plain text field? Where is the HTML text field? You know, a form object that comes with B, I, and U buttons, and allows me to visually format the text before sending (and which is delievered as standard, XHTML 1.0 compliant markup)? I've seen that Microsoft's new Web-based Outlook tools have this, but they use over 100k of JavaScript files to accomplish it. Shouldn't we just have something like this: <htmlarea></htmlarea>???
Finally, one of the things I've been waiting for is the ability to set images or other objects on angles. For example, if I wanted to have the slashdot logo appear as if it were on an incline, I might use CSS to specify the image display at -15 degrees. And if this were exposed to JavaScript, I could make some interesting animations. But I haven't seen this in CSS yet.
In short, I remember fondly when Netscape pushed the envelope -- I remember Andreesen adding the img tag, I remember Netscape implementing the file upload tag. I think some working demos of this stuff might help it gain acceptance, and give people a reference model to work from. Not to mention make Mozilla seem much more useful than Explorer.
The biggest Web site on planet Earth is using it. I suspect it can scale.
Wow. Someone needs to mod your comment down as "uninformed." PHP sessions can be written to a shared disk, or can be written to a database server. Your server farm can easily share that data.
You mean, like Yahoo's 4,500 servers?
...okay, so no one will read this at this late point, but for any and all software developers who are hunting for a useful product to build, why not create an EULA-distiller? Let it run in the background, and watch for installations. When it sees an EULA appear, it can display 2 or 3 bullet points that succinctly explain what the hell all the legal text means.
To get really tricky, you could create a Web site that allows users to upload the text of each EULA, and a distilled summary. Perhaps other people could even vote on the most accurate, most understandable summaries. Then your app could be constantly up-to-date. Perhaps by doing this, people who blindly click through these things will be made aware of what the real consequences will be.
Yeah. See, the service requires you to pay a monthly bill.
My God. You mean they want to make an app that does one job only, and does it well? But that's so... so... Unix! I thought we were supposed to be making everything the same as Windows. I mean, IE has chat and email and... oh, wait. Nevermind.
Well, I had a bunch of ideas and then I read wackybrit's comments, and, uh, I agree with those comments. So now I'm stuck wondering if I should suggest anything at all. Since I'm already here....
A common clipboard, for copy and paste, would be wonderful. If I copy text from Konq and want to paste it into Pan, that should work every time. I note SuSE appears to have done some work here -- sometimes I can copy & paste in SuSE just fine, while other distros are not so fine. Another thing that would be great: common menu system. In fact, it would be great if the menu system was actually just a directory on disk with some subdirectories in it, each populated with links to various apps. That way, if a Window Manager or desktop tool didn't want to offer a menu system, you might still be able to navigate it. If that were in common for all or even many of the WMs out there (KDE, xfce, Gnome, IceWM, and so on), that would make things far easier. Note that I'm not suggesting that Red Hat be copied and KDE apps be pulled out of the menus -- populate the menus with hundreds of apps if you wish. Just get it in a standard format. Finally, common desktop icons (again, not that there have to be specific apps that must be there, just that if I create a link to Galeon on my desktop, it'd be swell if it appeared in KDE and Gnome (and other) desktops.
These may be in LSB 1.2 -- I've got the page up now & I'm surfing through it, but you guys are slashdotting it a little, so it's slow going....
Aerodynamical? That must be an industry term.
Uhh, no. That's word-of-mouth. Right now there is a guy standing in front of the car dealership at the corner of Steven's Creek and Lawrence. He's got a sign that says "don't buy cars here." He is actively and deliberately attempting to put the car dealership out of business. He has made no false statements. The car dealership can do nothing about this (aside from getting him moved off their property, so he's out on the sidewalk). "Intent to damage" is not only legal in the USA, it's protected speech. Perhaps you're confusing it with libel or slander?