To get this right out of the way: I have no problem what-so-ever donating FOSS time for ux. I'm in the lucky position to be both usefully good at programming and UI/UX design, with arts and design diplomas and certs to emphasize that.
The big problem is that good UX is hard. Like 'finding that right asynchronous model' hard or 'finding that obscure USB bug' hard. Plus, people doing UX for free want to do UX well - they have to compromise enough on their day jobs (sounds familiar doesn't it?) - rarely get appreciation for how long it takes and how hard it is. Besides, it's usually functionality that's lacking.
Point in case: are the leaving shortcuts for cropping in Gimp a UX problem or a programming problem? Not sure, you tell me. It's only now starting to bug me so much in going to file a feature request this week.
There are enough perfectly good UX people out there. Just don't think that someone who takes pride in his UX work can deliver on the drop of a hat. UX has to be a key concern, just like supporting API XYZ or something. With the whole team. Do that and your UX will be just fine. KDE seems to have UX pretty nearly covered, as does elementary os and quite a few other GUI related projects.
Blender ist a fulll-blown professional 3D kit. Those are hard to use. They are operating systems by themselves and people good in then usually have years of experience and can't operate any other kit beyond basic functionality.
That being said, blender has some quirks in the details. But on the plus side blender has a huge community, many on the design side of things and quite a few 3D UX industry professionals who maintain laundry lists of blender shortcomings and push for changes in that area. So hiring isn't really necessary for the blender camp. They are working on things and recent major updates have always come with ux overhauls.
On the other side blender has stuff that appears to be quirky but actually is absolute genius when it comes to UI stuff. Window and workplace management in blender is unmatched by any other piece of software I've come across. So what may appear as bad ux may just be extremely innovative.
That aside, yes, FOSS crews shouldn't forget ux. But I don't think there is need to hire someone. There are enough ux experts out there that are perfectly willing to help out a FOSS crew if they are willing to listen.
This isn't all that new an insight. Anecdotal point-in-case: I just went surfing for a week (first time, lessons). Surfing meaning - for beginners - swallowing 10-20 liters of seawater and lugging a triple-e class freighter into the ocean while big waves keep coming at you and the huge surfboard you're trying to control only to paddle like your life depends on it and then be so exchausted you can't even stand up for the remaining 1.5 seconds of whitewater when the instructor says so.... I lost 4 kg of weight in less than a week, maxed my cardio-vascular system out and learned about new muscles I never felt before. They're still hurting.
On the plus side I feel as awesome as I haven't felt in years and coding is easyer and more fun than it has been in a long time.
Going to pick up Yoga again. And I'm not quite done with the surfing thing either.:-)
Bottom line: If you want to perform as a computer person, regular physical excersize (at least 3x a week!) is a must.
At first. Qwerty is a historically green mess, just one we've all gotten used to. An alphabetical keyboard would be objectively better.
Given enough time, you can get used to cord keyboards and other devices and learn to type super fast on them. Often times even faster than with regular keyboards. It just takes time and breaks the norm we all agreed on. That's why it's very difficult to replace Qwerty.
I fully understand human nature. But that won't be the problem of UBI. Society will have to deal with human nature one way or the other, regardless of UBI. We are close to this already. That's why we have people looking pittyful at my Moto G5 plus while holding an iPhone, even though I can do more with my Moto than they will ever be able to do with their iPhone. That's also why people rant about all kinds of things while their biggest problems are overweight, bad habits and drug abuse.
Given, UBi won't change this directly, but that's not what it's supposed to. UBI will replace income by jobs now done by robots. Plain and simple.
The premise is nonsense. UBI is a means of distributing wealth in a economy where the marginal cost of producing goods and services approaches zero. It's a means to offer a transition into post-scarcity economy and a means to keep the ones at the lowest position in the pyramid at bay, because any other option would be more expensive. Rather having people who's jobs have been taken by robots grab kalashnikovs and start taking what they want society will chose to give them UBI. Those societies that will not do so when time is due will fail. UBI raises the bottom to which one can sick to something resembling a frugal but dignified life.
Uber and other shared economy services is just a transition from "private owned cars" to "robot cars used as a commodity" by transition over something that resembles taxis but really is nothing other than people doing lowly work that will be replaced by robots within 10 years. The main part about Uber is nothing but a piece of software anyway. I expect something like Waymo cars becoming attached to the Uber API or something like that within the next 5 years.
The Uber drivers of today will then get UBI. Where they don't, they will cause trouble, understandably.
The Xiaomi Mi Max 3 is a phablet with a 6.9" display and a 5500 milliamp battery. It's basically a large pocket-touch-screen with a battery attached. Reports say it runs for 2.5 days without charge. You can watch an entire season of GoT on it and still have time to surf and phonecall.... So if the phablet designers did their work, battery time isn't a problem on these devices.
The eco-balance of meat is abysmal. This is common knowlege. Don't even need to track meat related greenhouse gases to get to that conclusion. Water pollution and antibiotics abuse / resistance alone push meat off the charts right up there with 60ies coal-powerplants and 3rd-rate toxic waste management. SARS, BSE and other pathogens are directly related to current-day mass meat production. If one of those goes haywire, we're doomed. Big time "Contagion" movie style - good film btw., you should watch it.
Bottom line: Eat meat consciously. 1-2 times a month, organic, from local farmers you know don't use antibiotics and feed real greens. You'll taste the difference *and* do some good.
... is zero-fuss rollout in a large organisation. That's what webapps are really good for. If you can build it as a webapp without compromising performance and responsiveness and you expect pushback from internal IT, web is the way to go.
Other than that, custom rich clients are always the better solution. As a professional web application developer I totally agree on that.
He definitely bit off more than he could chew. For a Kickstarter you also should have some sort of team and not be just a one man show. Also: Waaaaaay underfunded.
It's a really cool looking game, I hope it gains critical mass as FOSS.
No, seriously. We are all sceptical of the large scale disruption Amazon is bringing about and yet we all enjoy it. Nice to hear that Bezos isn't all Manchester capitalism about it. I figure he thought I'd I'm going to start large scale philanthropy with my obscene amounts of money, might as well start with some basics for my workers. Nice. Well done.
... for programmers. Seriously. Automating repetitive tasks is what programming is all about. In fact, of I'm your lead and I catch you doing a task manually for the 5th or 10th time without having any sort of automation in place, you'll hear from me.
I'm doing full-stack web and my main job is to maintain a degraded flaky WordPress setup with 40+ plugins that is mission critical and mustn't go offline. Yeah, that sort of thing. It involves keeping track of plugin update states in an Excel sheet. This task is two weeks away from being fully automated with a set of scripts and the PHP-Office classes. No way am I doing this manually for longer than three weeks it takes to automate it. The time I gain from automating I will of course use to dive deeper into new useful technology that may help us move the mess away from the setup and maybe get rid of half the plugins and replace them with well built templates, better configuration or something.
Bottom line: if you're a programmer and your not automating you're not doing your job.
I'm sorry but one of the most significant figures of modern physics was a woman and she was regarded as crazy like most breakthrough scientist, right up until she scored two significant Nobel prizes. On her own. Madam Currie. Throughout history there are women paying key roles in all sorts of discoveries. Not so much as men because they have a womb, but significant enough to demonstrate equal prowess in research and discovery. This sort of bullshit can be dismantled swiftly and on the spot, no need for a firing drama imho.
I know this type of thing, is my dayjob. Given, I'm currently doing total LAMP stack web development on setups degraded beyond imagination and a lot of my work involves coming up with crazy hacks and gluecode that gradually inches it's way towards a solution. In order to achieve I do exactly what he describes. It's basically what loosely typed web development is all about. But as far as I can tell, this type of problem is a regular thing in development and results in having to bend our abstraction of reality (code) to actual reality. This type of problem will never go away and AFAICT it's a standard thing to run into when doing anything but the most trivial cleanroom script.
What kind of rotten does he mean? The kind that happens to the tune of a bazillion dollars in market value? Or the kind where you can bloat your current lineup of signature key products (iPhone) beyond recognition and still be growing faster than competition because even your shoddy 5 years of product lifespan still is the best in the market? Or does he mean being as rotten as a premium fashion brand with an uptick of 200+$ per product sold just for the kicks of it? Or with being so aloof with fashion branding that you can completely ignore the key audience of tech opinion leaders and still be unbeatable?
I just met someone who asked me (a seasoned professional) to pose for a team photo not with my ThinkPad but with a MacBook because that would look more professional (no joke).
Perhaps he means the kind of rotten where you are the only company that has any hope of sustaining a viable smartwatch lineup that is already at least 2 years ahead of the competition and *gaining*.
The cold hard truth is we've gone past essential computing now and Apple can screw around as much as they want, it's very hard for them to fail, no matter how rotten some disgruntled employee thinks they are.
Gender differences manifest the strongest where mating comes into play. It's by emphasising those differences that people men and women alike seek advantage in the mating market. That's why often men act more manly than they are and women act more girly than they ought to.
If you're able to find the right customer/client. Specialisation is the reason I'm torn hither and fro on wether I should ditch PHP or dive deeper. There are setups out there that are not trivial and need someone who's way beyond regular web stuff. Same goes for Cobol. Anything running in Cobol today is bound to be seriously mission critical and thus non-trivial to maintain. Which means if you are able to handle such a set-up you're in a position to ask big bucks.
There are quite a few jobs not doing the latest fad in technology and instead dealing with some obscure ERP system and its internal PL or something similar. Those systems aren't going away and are good places to find positions that are basically unfireable.
It's a verbatim copy of IRC running of cloud microservices and web protocols controlled by a single company and used by bazillions because it offers unified branding and apps you can install everywhere. Plus it also offers per account per channel per user chat history that carries over (a thing that is a bit sucky to set up in IRC). You can also integrate it into other cloudy stuff implemented in modern microservices, such as Google Docs.
Other than that it's just IRC in shiny.... Which is where the "Shiny" actually comes in.
Slashdot Mirror
To get this right out of the way: I have no problem what-so-ever donating FOSS time for ux. I'm in the lucky position to be both usefully good at programming and UI/UX design, with arts and design diplomas and certs to emphasize that.
The big problem is that good UX is hard. Like 'finding that right asynchronous model' hard or 'finding that obscure USB bug' hard. Plus, people doing UX for free want to do UX well - they have to compromise enough on their day jobs (sounds familiar doesn't it?) - rarely get appreciation for how long it takes and how hard it is. Besides, it's usually functionality that's lacking.
Point in case: are the leaving shortcuts for cropping in Gimp a UX problem or a programming problem? Not sure, you tell me. It's only now starting to bug me so much in going to file a feature request this week.
There are enough perfectly good UX people out there. Just don't think that someone who takes pride in his UX work can deliver on the drop of a hat. UX has to be a key concern, just like supporting API XYZ or something. With the whole team. Do that and your UX will be just fine. KDE seems to have UX pretty nearly covered, as does elementary os and quite a few other GUI related projects.
Blender ist a fulll-blown professional 3D kit. Those are hard to use. They are operating systems by themselves and people good in then usually have years of experience and can't operate any other kit beyond basic functionality.
That being said, blender has some quirks in the details. But on the plus side blender has a huge community, many on the design side of things and quite a few 3D UX industry professionals who maintain laundry lists of blender shortcomings and push for changes in that area. So hiring isn't really necessary for the blender camp. They are working on things and recent major updates have always come with ux overhauls.
On the other side blender has stuff that appears to be quirky but actually is absolute genius when it comes to UI stuff. Window and workplace management in blender is unmatched by any other piece of software I've come across. So what may appear as bad ux may just be extremely innovative.
That aside, yes, FOSS crews shouldn't forget ux. But I don't think there is need to hire someone. There are enough ux experts out there that are perfectly willing to help out a FOSS crew if they are willing to listen.
My 2 eurocents.
It needs some obscure cloud service to hook up to do you can configure it. That's attached to a subscription.
How about just building a piece of useful groupware with easy domain configuration and easy ssl cert integration and letting the hardware as a option?
Somehow I feel this will fail just as hard as Protonet.
... brain performance: Physical excersize.
This isn't all that new an insight. Anecdotal point-in-case: I just went surfing for a week (first time, lessons). Surfing meaning - for beginners - swallowing 10-20 liters of seawater and lugging a triple-e class freighter into the ocean while big waves keep coming at you and the huge surfboard you're trying to control only to paddle like your life depends on it and then be so exchausted you can't even stand up for the remaining 1.5 seconds of whitewater when the instructor says so. ... I lost 4 kg of weight in less than a week, maxed my cardio-vascular system out and learned about new muscles I never felt before. They're still hurting.
On the plus side I feel as awesome as I haven't felt in years and coding is easyer and more fun than it has been in a long time.
Going to pick up Yoga again. And I'm not quite done with the surfing thing either. :-)
Bottom line: If you want to perform as a computer person, regular physical excersize (at least 3x a week!) is a must.
My 2 eurocents.
... big brother watchmachine is doubleplusgood. All bow before the almighty chairman, all bow before the almighty Google.
*Kneels and lapses into praising*
Aaaaaaaaaaah,Goooooogle, aaaaaaaaaaah, Rama Rama Goooogle ...
This isn't really news for those who pay attention.
You're welcome. Glad I could help.
At first. Qwerty is a historically green mess, just one we've all gotten used to. An alphabetical keyboard would be objectively better.
Given enough time, you can get used to cord keyboards and other devices and learn to type super fast on them. Often times even faster than with regular keyboards. It just takes time and breaks the norm we all agreed on. That's why it's very difficult to replace Qwerty.
I fully understand human nature. But that won't be the problem of UBI. Society will have to deal with human nature one way or the other, regardless of UBI. We are close to this already. That's why we have people looking pittyful at my Moto G5 plus while holding an iPhone, even though I can do more with my Moto than they will ever be able to do with their iPhone. That's also why people rant about all kinds of things while their biggest problems are overweight, bad habits and drug abuse.
Given, UBi won't change this directly, but that's not what it's supposed to. UBI will replace income by jobs now done by robots. Plain and simple.
The premise is nonsense. UBI is a means of distributing wealth in a economy where the marginal cost of producing goods and services approaches zero. It's a means to offer a transition into post-scarcity economy and a means to keep the ones at the lowest position in the pyramid at bay, because any other option would be more expensive. Rather having people who's jobs have been taken by robots grab kalashnikovs and start taking what they want society will chose to give them UBI. Those societies that will not do so when time is due will fail. UBI raises the bottom to which one can sick to something resembling a frugal but dignified life.
Uber and other shared economy services is just a transition from "private owned cars" to "robot cars used as a commodity" by transition over something that resembles taxis but really is nothing other than people doing lowly work that will be replaced by robots within 10 years. The main part about Uber is nothing but a piece of software anyway. I expect something like Waymo cars becoming attached to the Uber API or something like that within the next 5 years.
The Uber drivers of today will then get UBI. Where they don't, they will cause trouble, understandably.
The Xiaomi Mi Max 3 is a phablet with a 6.9" display and a 5500 milliamp battery. It's basically a large pocket-touch-screen with a battery attached. Reports say it runs for 2.5 days without charge. You can watch an entire season of GoT on it and still have time to surf and phonecall. ... So if the phablet designers did their work, battery time isn't a problem on these devices.
The eco-balance of meat is abysmal. This is common knowlege. Don't even need to track meat related greenhouse gases to get to that conclusion. Water pollution and antibiotics abuse / resistance alone push meat off the charts right up there with 60ies coal-powerplants and 3rd-rate toxic waste management. SARS, BSE and other pathogens are directly related to current-day mass meat production. If one of those goes haywire, we're doomed. Big time "Contagion" movie style - good film btw., you should watch it.
Bottom line:
Eat meat consciously. 1-2 times a month, organic, from local farmers you know don't use antibiotics and feed real greens. You'll taste the difference *and* do some good.
... is zero-fuss rollout in a large organisation. That's what webapps are really good for. If you can build it as a webapp without compromising performance and responsiveness and you expect pushback from internal IT, web is the way to go.
Other than that, custom rich clients are always the better solution. As a professional web application developer I totally agree on that.
... redone the entire engine?
He definitely bit off more than he could chew. For a Kickstarter you also should have some sort of team and not be just a one man show. Also: Waaaaaay underfunded.
It's a really cool looking game, I hope it gains critical mass as FOSS.
... people with Excel.
If that's my job and I get 90 Euros per hour that is.
If it's extra unpaid overtime, that's a different story.
That's probably what he's talking about.
No spectre, no meltdown, support unmatched.
ARM though, no x86,
Which is one of the reasons the quality is so good.
No, seriously. We are all sceptical of the large scale disruption Amazon is bringing about and yet we all enjoy it. Nice to hear that Bezos isn't all Manchester capitalism about it. I figure he thought I'd I'm going to start large scale philanthropy with my obscene amounts of money, might as well start with some basics for my workers.
Nice. Well done.
... for programmers. Seriously. Automating repetitive tasks is what programming is all about. In fact, of I'm your lead and I catch you doing a task manually for the 5th or 10th time without having any sort of automation in place, you'll hear from me.
I'm doing full-stack web and my main job is to maintain a degraded flaky WordPress setup with 40+ plugins that is mission critical and mustn't go offline. Yeah, that sort of thing. It involves keeping track of plugin update states in an Excel sheet. This task is two weeks away from being fully automated with a set of scripts and the PHP-Office classes. No way am I doing this manually for longer than three weeks it takes to automate it.
The time I gain from automating I will of course use to dive deeper into new useful technology that may help us move the mess away from the setup and maybe get rid of half the plugins and replace them with well built templates, better configuration or something.
Bottom line: if you're a programmer and your not automating you're not doing your job.
My 2 cents.
... Super shitty generic OS.
Great.
That's like getting handmade Hermes luggage to carry your h&m t-shirts and offbrand jeans around. LOL!
I'm sorry but one of the most significant figures of modern physics was a woman and she was regarded as crazy like most breakthrough scientist, right up until she scored two significant Nobel prizes. On her own. Madam Currie.
Throughout history there are women paying key roles in all sorts of discoveries. Not so much as men because they have a womb, but significant enough to demonstrate equal prowess in research and discovery. This sort of bullshit can be dismantled swiftly and on the spot, no need for a firing drama imho.
I know this type of thing, is my dayjob. Given, I'm currently doing total LAMP stack web development on setups degraded beyond imagination and a lot of my work involves coming up with crazy hacks and gluecode that gradually inches it's way towards a solution. In order to achieve I do exactly what he describes. It's basically what loosely typed web development is all about. But as far as I can tell, this type of problem is a regular thing in development and results in having to bend our abstraction of reality (code) to actual reality. This type of problem will never go away and AFAICT it's a standard thing to run into when doing anything but the most trivial cleanroom script.
What kind of rotten does he mean? The kind that happens to the tune of a bazillion dollars in market value? Or the kind where you can bloat your current lineup of signature key products (iPhone) beyond recognition and still be growing faster than competition because even your shoddy 5 years of product lifespan still is the best in the market? Or does he mean being as rotten as a premium fashion brand with an uptick of 200+$ per product sold just for the kicks of it? Or with being so aloof with fashion branding that you can completely ignore the key audience of tech opinion leaders and still be unbeatable?
I just met someone who asked me (a seasoned professional) to pose for a team photo not with my ThinkPad but with a MacBook because that would look more professional (no joke).
Perhaps he means the kind of rotten where you are the only company that has any hope of sustaining a viable smartwatch lineup that is already at least 2 years ahead of the competition and *gaining*.
The cold hard truth is we've gone past essential computing now and Apple can screw around as much as they want, it's very hard for them to fail, no matter how rotten some disgruntled employee thinks they are.
Gender differences manifest the strongest where mating comes into play. It's by emphasising those differences that people men and women alike seek advantage in the mating market. That's why often men act more manly than they are and women act more girly than they ought to.
If you're able to find the right customer/client. Specialisation is the reason I'm torn hither and fro on wether I should ditch PHP or dive deeper. There are setups out there that are not trivial and need someone who's way beyond regular web stuff.
Same goes for Cobol. Anything running in Cobol today is bound to be seriously mission critical and thus non-trivial to maintain. Which means if you are able to handle such a set-up you're in a position to ask big bucks.
There are quite a few jobs not doing the latest fad in technology and instead dealing with some obscure ERP system and its internal PL or something similar. Those systems aren't going away and are good places to find positions that are basically unfireable.
It's a verbatim copy of IRC running of cloud microservices and web protocols controlled by a single company and used by bazillions because it offers unified branding and apps you can install everywhere. Plus it also offers per account per channel per user chat history that carries over (a thing that is a bit sucky to set up in IRC). You can also integrate it into other cloudy stuff implemented in modern microservices, such as Google Docs.
Other than that it's just IRC in shiny. ... Which is where the "Shiny" actually comes in.