Good point, but grandparent is still a bit more clairvoyant than all the privacy conspiracists around here (whom I know and love, and I know we need!). Facebook has toed the line since the beginning, and they have always done a spectacular job. Of course there's a huge uproar in the tiny geek communities that pay attention to these details, but Facebook knows how to do cool features without crossing over the annoyance threshold of most users. Sooner or later they may go too far, but this doesn't smell like it.
Plus, the ability to interact with corporate entities is exactly what Facebook has been missing. Don't think Sprite, think Radiohead. Facebook finally has the one thing that MySpace still had over them. If the ads are kept to a reasonable noise level then there is real user value here.
Your cited post says nothing to contradict the grandparent. Facebook offers impressive privacy controls, and they work better than anything else out there. The fact that they don't offer fine-grained control in one particular area, or they release a new feature that uses information in new ways the user didn't expect, doesn't mean their privacy controls are bogus. Bottom line is there are a lot privacy puritans who will see any kind of personal information database as a conspiratorial slippers slope, but Facebook has done a pretty good job so far.
If you think about it from the perspective of someone who likes the idea of social networking, but doesn't want it to be a crazy fucking free for all like MySpace, then Facebook is actually a pretty decent service. Let's not sound the bullhorns until they do something a little more obviously wrong. I think we have greater privacy in todays world than Facebook.
Give me a break. If you deactivate your account, all your information is deleted. You're complaining that if someone tags you in a photo, that tag still exists? Well, first, I'm not so sure that's true. It would be pretty sloppy engineering since the user account doesn't exist and so the link would go nowhere. And second, anyone can post anything about you anywhere, that doesn't make it someone else's responsibility.
Don't like what your friends are posting about you? Take it up with them!
WTF? You need an advanced data extraction tool to tell you that there aren't enough Warthogs for the player to use? Give me a break. This is what play testing is for, not to mention a little addition and subtraction. I think they are making this Pagulayan guy out like he is going to save the game from bad level design by making a bunch of graphs and charts. A lot of the issues he discovers with his data analysis could be easily solved by common sense.
Sheesh, it's just an example. The depth of information they are getting from details statistical analysis goes 100 times deeper than the immediate feedback from playtesters (which they are also using). For instance, the visualizations of death frequency over thousands of matches revealing where maps are uneven.
The other important factor would be the curvature of the ramp and the suspension setup on the bus. As any snowboarder or freerider will tell you, this makes a huge difference on the initial launch angle.
Good points, but somehow it feels very apropos to the original page, where they seem to be doing the exact same sort of ass-"fact"-pulling.
Frankly, I'm not interested in a real rebuttal. Two points:
If I site doesn't support Firefox then I won't use the site, and I won't be shy about telling others that the site sucks.
The page is full of whiny, hyperbolic, unprofessional bombast that indicts their visitors, the majority of whom are not blocking ads. Following in the footsteps of the RIAA to redefine "theft" to mean "anything we suspect might somehow affect us even though it has nothing to do with actual stealing" sends a strong message that the company is filled with self-entitled poofsters with more lawyers than business acumen. So not only will I not use their site, but I'll harbor deep suspicions about their company, and likely tell everyone I know that they suck without actually knowing anything about them.
Now if I thought this was a movement that had any chance of gaining traction, then I might have some interest in bringing some actual evidence to bear. As it is, this is just one more company I have no respect for.
So you think using Flash for video rather than a single obvious tag is "slathering on additional layers of crap"? Or is it that you don't think we should be displaying video in our web browsers? The new tags are by-and-large very well thought out, and reflect a standardization of common practices over the last decade. The structural tags alone such as header, footer, nav, and article are applicable to the vast majority of websites and provide semantic meaning that could easily be leveraged by browsers (especially screen readers) to improve the user experience. The result is not an additional "layer of crap" but the replacement of a sea of arbitraily classed divs with semantic markup that is more meaningful than before.
Obviously HTML/HTTP is not the ideal platform for rich applications. I fully acknowledge that. However we're not going back to HTML as a platform for purely static content. If that's all you want to use your browser for, please carry on with the rest of the nostalgic internet luddites. I'm sure you can find a few dozen other curmudgeons to reminisce with over on Usenet. However as far as delivering applications, the web has undeniable advantages. Economic realities mean we'll be moving forward with the web for better or for worse, just like with so many other imperfect technologies in the past.
+5 insightful? WTF? This is the same kind of specious reasoning that leads to such gems as "everything that can possibly be invented has been invented."
With the one exception of Microsoft letting IE rot for 7 years, the advancement of the web has been steady and rapid. Even while IE was a thorn in our side, we were able to drop support for NS4, then IE5, then IE5.5. Firefox and Safari continually pushed the envelope of standards support. Javascript toolkits proliferated, bridging the gap between implementations. Even 5 years ago, using CSS for site layout was a much more difficult proposition than it is today.
Now, if you had actually read the article, you would see that some of these tags provide very common functionality that currently require a mess of tag soup, CSS, and/or javascript. <video> and <audio> tags for instance, or <progress>. Sure you can't use them now, but in 10 years everyone will use them, and they'll be horrified with what we used to have to do. There's no reason to stop progress just because a handful of browser makers and lethargic standards bodies haven't yet perfected the first de-facto cross-platform, cross-media information platform in human history.
The difference is that <article> is an element defined by HTML 5 with a documented meaning. <div class="article"> is a generic element with an arbitrary attribute defined by the document author.
I would go so far as to say <div class="article"> is semantically useless. Sure a human or a clever heuristic engine can infer some meaning from that, but it's too imprecise to be of much use on a large scale aggregation or data mining.
Frankly I'm not a huge believer in HTML semantics anyway. Standards snobs will endlessly critique the use of a <ul> vs an <ol> on the merit of "semantics" which in practice makes no appreciable difference. It's like they've never seen tag soup and the real reason for using CSS.
That said, a lot of these new tags are well overdue. If you consider HTML hasn't changed in 10 years and at that time we barely knew how the web would be used. HTML is pretty good for traditional text, but it has virtually nothing for the web as we know it. For instance, structural markup defining navigation has an actual tangible benefit. Browsers (especially screen readers) could make wonderful use of that information.
Okay, I can't speak for Britain, but come on man, have some faith in your own culture. The only thing preventing first-generation immigrants is nostalgia, if they're old enough. However the younger generation will easily be indoctrinated into the culture quite rapidly. Especially western culture which has already proven powerful enough to invade the whole world.
You know, previous generations of immigrants did not magically integrate. It takes time, but it's inevitable. Sure the old culture is subtly changed over time by this influx, but it's a good thing. Do you really want to inbreed yourselves until your eyes are all half an inch apart and your culture is as flavorless as the food you eat?
Then your designers are better than your developers. A good developer should inherently understand the benefits of clean HTML, as well as the subtleties of what can be accomplished with CSS much better than a designer. Developers are always thinking in terms of code reuse and maintainability (at least if they're any good), whereas a designer is more concerned with how things look and maybe usability. The developer is the one who actually has to refactor HTML mockups from designers into templates, so (s)he is the one that should be concerned about bloated non-reusable HTML.
Good to hear that your design people know the benefits of CSS though.
Admittedly, most of Apple's competition seem to have great difficulty getting their head round what seems to me a very simple proposition (make it nice to use and nice to hold, like an iPod, but make it do stuff an iPod can't)
I think almost every player does something an iPod cant. And I don't think their interfaces are that terrible either. What's missing is branding. Apple's brand is untouchable. Sure, better features and good interface will sell a certain number. But the target market is teenagers and hipsters to whom brand is everything. I mean why do designer jeans sell for 3 times as much as Levis even though they only last half as long? Why is that? Because people want to impress other people. The biggest threat to the iPod does not come from other device manufacturers directly. It's the fickle nature of cool that will most likely bring about their demise. Even killer features like DRM-free play-anywhere 10 cent songs and unlimited wireless sharing would have an uphill battle against Apple's brand.
Please cite some examples. A lot of Rails' technical sacrifices are in the name of speed of development and maintainable code. Obviously I haven't used all web frameworks, so I don't know. Maybe you're right. But I'm suspicious you're just pulling that out of your ass.
more extensive set of third party libraries, faster serving of pages, better i18n and actual Unicode support
Yes, Ruby is slow, has fewer libraries, and no unicode support. However these issues don't really speak to Rails itself. Yes, they may showstoppers in some instances, but Ruby was chosen for other reasons which greatly affect the usability and development performance of the framework. Yeah, you could do most of the same in Python or SmallTalk, but certainly not in most popular languages.
better support of varied pre-existing environments (less 'opinionatedness', if you will)
The opinionatedness of Rails is what makes it so powerful. There is plenty of support for dealing with legacy schemas. Of course Rails encourages database constraints in the application code, which is distasteful to some, and definitely precludes the use of outside applications directly writing to the database safely. However, if you have the means to use Rails conventions then you get an awful lot for free, and I don't really see how you can have it both ways (ie. faster to develop, more maintainable, and more flexible) unless of course the Rails architecture is just garbage and it can easily be replaced by a more powerful architecture which is better in all ways.
better scalability in terms of page views and in terms of application complexity.
See Rails is more focused on the complexity side and maintainability side. Sure there's a computational cost there. For one thing you're on Ruby which is fairly slow to begin with, then you provide all the request hooks to keep the application organized, finally you add a basic ORM layer that is great for 95% of queries, but is maybe a bit naive. However if you need to optimize those things, by all means write your own queries and do your fragment caching. At some point, yes, you should be looking at other languages and frameworks.
However, Rails does what it does very well, and what it does is a huge market niche. Anyone using Rails should be aware of its philosophy and shortcomings, but it's not poorly designed from a technical standpoint. Maybe its design goals don't go over well with you (it pretty much pisses all over the idea of database-level data integrity, which is a pretty controversial idea at best), but don't mistake that for poor technology.
It's not really trivial to create your own custom spam security. Not everyone with a website has a programmer. Even if they did, the cost of combatting spam can be huge. On my little blog I created the entire thing from scratch in Rails using a novel form of spam prevention, I found one post where someone had gone through the effort to code up a spambot just for that one page (linked from reddit)!
But the essence of your post seems to be that it's the website operator's responsibility, which I don't think anyone can reasonably argue against. Google spends millions upon millions combatting spam, and there's no reason for them to give an inch just because one website can't protect itself. It's the lesser of two evils by far.
History says no. Apple without Steve was not the same...
Although I don't think Apple could be the same, I think there are a number of people who could lead Apple well. Sculley, Spindler and Amelio drove the company into the ground, that doesn't mean everyone else would as well. Apple's identity is arguably stronger now, and their technology is definitely stronger. Microsoft, meanwhile, is floundering. The landscape is totally different.
I think it's going to blow the iPhone out of the water... at least for people that want a useful, hackable mini-computer and not a $3000 status symbol.
I'd say the people looking for a status symbol outnumber the people looking for 'hackable mini-computer' by at least 10 to 1. Plus you're leaving out the majority of potential customer--people that want usable mobile email and web access. Look, I don't know what you expected from Apple. They make devices for the typical consumer, not the gadget hobbyist. Sure OS X is BSD and hackable, but that's easy to do because it's a computer.
Plus the whole $3000 thing is just propaganda. Yeah, you can't get one with 2 years of service, but if you get one you are going to need the service from somewhere. The fact that you're locked into a contract does not make the price any higher than if you weren't locked in. Otherwise all those free phones you can get would be $1200 phones. And your Internet connection is $2000. And you're $12000 car? By the way, it's actually $16000.
Maybe, but I think it's that the average person is reluctant to spend 500 bucks on a gadget, no matter what it is. You limit yourself primarily to early adopters and gadget freaks. This may also be a big reason the PS3 is having difficulty gaining traction.
This doesn't really make much sense to me. Certainly more early adopters will buy at $500, but I think gadget freaks are more interested in features. Sort of like how the iPhone won't really sell in the Japanese market. But here in the States I think there are huge numbers of people who can't stomach learning the advanced interfaces of today's smartphones, but could nevertheless benefit greatly in their career from mobile applications. If so, then the iPhone is poised to grow the market (like they did with the iPod). Frankly, if people are willing to pay $400 for a recreational gadget, $500 or $600 is nothing to pay for something that benefits one financially. If the touch screen improvements are as good as they say, and if Apple nails the interface then they've got a good shot at 1%.
I don't think the PS3 is a good comparison because there's really nothing innovative about it other than the technical specs. But tech specs don't matter to anyone but spec freaks. Even the hardcore gamers who spend all day talking about graphics minutiae will flock to the 360 if that's where the good games are.
I applaud you for going against the conventional wisdom, but you're not really make your case... why is putting a phone and a computer together crazy? Yeah cell providers screw you, but everyone still has a phone don't they? And since when does hardware refresh cycles have anything to do with people's purchasing habits? People who need mobile email and other "PDA features" do not want to carry two devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point, but grandparent is still a bit more clairvoyant than all the privacy conspiracists around here (whom I know and love, and I know we need!). Facebook has toed the line since the beginning, and they have always done a spectacular job. Of course there's a huge uproar in the tiny geek communities that pay attention to these details, but Facebook knows how to do cool features without crossing over the annoyance threshold of most users. Sooner or later they may go too far, but this doesn't smell like it.
Plus, the ability to interact with corporate entities is exactly what Facebook has been missing. Don't think Sprite, think Radiohead. Facebook finally has the one thing that MySpace still had over them. If the ads are kept to a reasonable noise level then there is real user value here.
Your cited post says nothing to contradict the grandparent. Facebook offers impressive privacy controls, and they work better than anything else out there. The fact that they don't offer fine-grained control in one particular area, or they release a new feature that uses information in new ways the user didn't expect, doesn't mean their privacy controls are bogus. Bottom line is there are a lot privacy puritans who will see any kind of personal information database as a conspiratorial slippers slope, but Facebook has done a pretty good job so far.
If you think about it from the perspective of someone who likes the idea of social networking, but doesn't want it to be a crazy fucking free for all like MySpace, then Facebook is actually a pretty decent service. Let's not sound the bullhorns until they do something a little more obviously wrong. I think we have greater privacy in todays world than Facebook.
Give me a break. If you deactivate your account, all your information is deleted. You're complaining that if someone tags you in a photo, that tag still exists? Well, first, I'm not so sure that's true. It would be pretty sloppy engineering since the user account doesn't exist and so the link would go nowhere. And second, anyone can post anything about you anywhere, that doesn't make it someone else's responsibility.
Don't like what your friends are posting about you? Take it up with them!
Same as any other website since the beginning of time. The user is responsible for what they do.
If you register another 100 or so typos maybe you pick up 0.1% of his intended traffic, all for the low low price of $1000 a year!!
Much like Ballmer himself.
*SPELLING NAZI, Insufferable Pedant!!!!!!
Sheesh, it's just an example. The depth of information they are getting from details statistical analysis goes 100 times deeper than the immediate feedback from playtesters (which they are also using). For instance, the visualizations of death frequency over thousands of matches revealing where maps are uneven.
The other important factor would be the curvature of the ramp and the suspension setup on the bus. As any snowboarder or freerider will tell you, this makes a huge difference on the initial launch angle.
Good points, but somehow it feels very apropos to the original page, where they seem to be doing the exact same sort of ass-"fact"-pulling.
Frankly, I'm not interested in a real rebuttal. Two points:
If I site doesn't support Firefox then I won't use the site, and I won't be shy about telling others that the site sucks.
The page is full of whiny, hyperbolic, unprofessional bombast that indicts their visitors, the majority of whom are not blocking ads. Following in the footsteps of the RIAA to redefine "theft" to mean "anything we suspect might somehow affect us even though it has nothing to do with actual stealing" sends a strong message that the company is filled with self-entitled poofsters with more lawyers than business acumen. So not only will I not use their site, but I'll harbor deep suspicions about their company, and likely tell everyone I know that they suck without actually knowing anything about them.
Now if I thought this was a movement that had any chance of gaining traction, then I might have some interest in bringing some actual evidence to bear. As it is, this is just one more company I have no respect for.
So you think using Flash for video rather than a single obvious tag is "slathering on additional layers of crap"? Or is it that you don't think we should be displaying video in our web browsers? The new tags are by-and-large very well thought out, and reflect a standardization of common practices over the last decade. The structural tags alone such as header, footer, nav, and article are applicable to the vast majority of websites and provide semantic meaning that could easily be leveraged by browsers (especially screen readers) to improve the user experience. The result is not an additional "layer of crap" but the replacement of a sea of arbitraily classed divs with semantic markup that is more meaningful than before.
Obviously HTML/HTTP is not the ideal platform for rich applications. I fully acknowledge that. However we're not going back to HTML as a platform for purely static content. If that's all you want to use your browser for, please carry on with the rest of the nostalgic internet luddites. I'm sure you can find a few dozen other curmudgeons to reminisce with over on Usenet. However as far as delivering applications, the web has undeniable advantages. Economic realities mean we'll be moving forward with the web for better or for worse, just like with so many other imperfect technologies in the past.
+5 insightful? WTF? This is the same kind of specious reasoning that leads to such gems as "everything that can possibly be invented has been invented."
With the one exception of Microsoft letting IE rot for 7 years, the advancement of the web has been steady and rapid. Even while IE was a thorn in our side, we were able to drop support for NS4, then IE5, then IE5.5. Firefox and Safari continually pushed the envelope of standards support. Javascript toolkits proliferated, bridging the gap between implementations. Even 5 years ago, using CSS for site layout was a much more difficult proposition than it is today.
Now, if you had actually read the article, you would see that some of these tags provide very common functionality that currently require a mess of tag soup, CSS, and/or javascript. <video> and <audio> tags for instance, or <progress>. Sure you can't use them now, but in 10 years everyone will use them, and they'll be horrified with what we used to have to do. There's no reason to stop progress just because a handful of browser makers and lethargic standards bodies haven't yet perfected the first de-facto cross-platform, cross-media information platform in human history.
The difference is that <article> is an element defined by HTML 5 with a documented meaning. <div class="article"> is a generic element with an arbitrary attribute defined by the document author.
I would go so far as to say <div class="article"> is semantically useless. Sure a human or a clever heuristic engine can infer some meaning from that, but it's too imprecise to be of much use on a large scale aggregation or data mining.
Frankly I'm not a huge believer in HTML semantics anyway. Standards snobs will endlessly critique the use of a <ul> vs an <ol> on the merit of "semantics" which in practice makes no appreciable difference. It's like they've never seen tag soup and the real reason for using CSS.
That said, a lot of these new tags are well overdue. If you consider HTML hasn't changed in 10 years and at that time we barely knew how the web would be used. HTML is pretty good for traditional text, but it has virtually nothing for the web as we know it. For instance, structural markup defining navigation has an actual tangible benefit. Browsers (especially screen readers) could make wonderful use of that information.
Huh? How do you use CSS without HTML?
Okay, I can't speak for Britain, but come on man, have some faith in your own culture. The only thing preventing first-generation immigrants is nostalgia, if they're old enough. However the younger generation will easily be indoctrinated into the culture quite rapidly. Especially western culture which has already proven powerful enough to invade the whole world. You know, previous generations of immigrants did not magically integrate. It takes time, but it's inevitable. Sure the old culture is subtly changed over time by this influx, but it's a good thing. Do you really want to inbreed yourselves until your eyes are all half an inch apart and your culture is as flavorless as the food you eat?
Then your designers are better than your developers. A good developer should inherently understand the benefits of clean HTML, as well as the subtleties of what can be accomplished with CSS much better than a designer. Developers are always thinking in terms of code reuse and maintainability (at least if they're any good), whereas a designer is more concerned with how things look and maybe usability. The developer is the one who actually has to refactor HTML mockups from designers into templates, so (s)he is the one that should be concerned about bloated non-reusable HTML.
Good to hear that your design people know the benefits of CSS though.
Yes you did, don't feed the troll.
I think almost every player does something an iPod cant. And I don't think their interfaces are that terrible either. What's missing is branding. Apple's brand is untouchable. Sure, better features and good interface will sell a certain number. But the target market is teenagers and hipsters to whom brand is everything. I mean why do designer jeans sell for 3 times as much as Levis even though they only last half as long? Why is that? Because people want to impress other people. The biggest threat to the iPod does not come from other device manufacturers directly. It's the fickle nature of cool that will most likely bring about their demise. Even killer features like DRM-free play-anywhere 10 cent songs and unlimited wireless sharing would have an uphill battle against Apple's brand.
All implementation details aside, having that kind arbitrary access would totally destroy the ability to browse through things.
Please cite some examples. A lot of Rails' technical sacrifices are in the name of speed of development and maintainable code. Obviously I haven't used all web frameworks, so I don't know. Maybe you're right. But I'm suspicious you're just pulling that out of your ass.
Yes, Ruby is slow, has fewer libraries, and no unicode support. However these issues don't really speak to Rails itself. Yes, they may showstoppers in some instances, but Ruby was chosen for other reasons which greatly affect the usability and development performance of the framework. Yeah, you could do most of the same in Python or SmallTalk, but certainly not in most popular languages.
The opinionatedness of Rails is what makes it so powerful. There is plenty of support for dealing with legacy schemas. Of course Rails encourages database constraints in the application code, which is distasteful to some, and definitely precludes the use of outside applications directly writing to the database safely. However, if you have the means to use Rails conventions then you get an awful lot for free, and I don't really see how you can have it both ways (ie. faster to develop, more maintainable, and more flexible) unless of course the Rails architecture is just garbage and it can easily be replaced by a more powerful architecture which is better in all ways.
See Rails is more focused on the complexity side and maintainability side. Sure there's a computational cost there. For one thing you're on Ruby which is fairly slow to begin with, then you provide all the request hooks to keep the application organized, finally you add a basic ORM layer that is great for 95% of queries, but is maybe a bit naive. However if you need to optimize those things, by all means write your own queries and do your fragment caching. At some point, yes, you should be looking at other languages and frameworks.
However, Rails does what it does very well, and what it does is a huge market niche. Anyone using Rails should be aware of its philosophy and shortcomings, but it's not poorly designed from a technical standpoint. Maybe its design goals don't go over well with you (it pretty much pisses all over the idea of database-level data integrity, which is a pretty controversial idea at best), but don't mistake that for poor technology.
It's not really trivial to create your own custom spam security. Not everyone with a website has a programmer. Even if they did, the cost of combatting spam can be huge. On my little blog I created the entire thing from scratch in Rails using a novel form of spam prevention, I found one post where someone had gone through the effort to code up a spambot just for that one page (linked from reddit)!
But the essence of your post seems to be that it's the website operator's responsibility, which I don't think anyone can reasonably argue against. Google spends millions upon millions combatting spam, and there's no reason for them to give an inch just because one website can't protect itself. It's the lesser of two evils by far.
Although I don't think Apple could be the same, I think there are a number of people who could lead Apple well. Sculley, Spindler and Amelio drove the company into the ground, that doesn't mean everyone else would as well. Apple's identity is arguably stronger now, and their technology is definitely stronger. Microsoft, meanwhile, is floundering. The landscape is totally different.
I'd say the people looking for a status symbol outnumber the people looking for 'hackable mini-computer' by at least 10 to 1. Plus you're leaving out the majority of potential customer--people that want usable mobile email and web access. Look, I don't know what you expected from Apple. They make devices for the typical consumer, not the gadget hobbyist. Sure OS X is BSD and hackable, but that's easy to do because it's a computer.
Plus the whole $3000 thing is just propaganda. Yeah, you can't get one with 2 years of service, but if you get one you are going to need the service from somewhere. The fact that you're locked into a contract does not make the price any higher than if you weren't locked in. Otherwise all those free phones you can get would be $1200 phones. And your Internet connection is $2000. And you're $12000 car? By the way, it's actually $16000.
This doesn't really make much sense to me. Certainly more early adopters will buy at $500, but I think gadget freaks are more interested in features. Sort of like how the iPhone won't really sell in the Japanese market. But here in the States I think there are huge numbers of people who can't stomach learning the advanced interfaces of today's smartphones, but could nevertheless benefit greatly in their career from mobile applications. If so, then the iPhone is poised to grow the market (like they did with the iPod). Frankly, if people are willing to pay $400 for a recreational gadget, $500 or $600 is nothing to pay for something that benefits one financially. If the touch screen improvements are as good as they say, and if Apple nails the interface then they've got a good shot at 1%.
I don't think the PS3 is a good comparison because there's really nothing innovative about it other than the technical specs. But tech specs don't matter to anyone but spec freaks. Even the hardcore gamers who spend all day talking about graphics minutiae will flock to the 360 if that's where the good games are.
I applaud you for going against the conventional wisdom, but you're not really make your case... why is putting a phone and a computer together crazy? Yeah cell providers screw you, but everyone still has a phone don't they? And since when does hardware refresh cycles have anything to do with people's purchasing habits? People who need mobile email and other "PDA features" do not want to carry two devices.