I'll never forget September 11th 2001 on Slashdot. When I first heard the news that somebody had flown a plane into the World Trade Centre I reflexively checked the BBC website. It was unreachable - completely swamped. I checked CNN and that was swamped too. I went to Slashdot and they were reporting it and available so on-and-off I followed the story on Slashdot and on TV all day.
By the evening on the TV they had already gathered their pundits and reduced the days events to a continuous 10 second loop of a plane hitting a building. It was already starting to look like a music video.
Meanwhile on slashdot there were real conversations going on with real people who had been there, seen it or been affected by it. I remember one comment in particular - somebody wrote about psychologists being dispatched (volunteering I think) to go to school bus stops to tell some of the waiting kids that their parents were dead.
This is an obvious feature to put into the Apple feature set. You think the Apple devs were sat around wondering what to do and this obvious-thing-to-do-next app hits the appstore and they're blind-sided? I think not. They just don't want another app arriving sooner and stealing their WWDC thunder. It's their playground.
And as for stealing the logo, give me a break! Both the developer and Apple both took the existing Apple logo for 'sync' and the existing Apple logo for 'wireless' and put them together. Not only is that an obvious thing to do it's the *only* sensible thing to do. What else would a good designer do but leverage the existing affordance in both those symbols?
We're going to need to get some designer shades up there in advance of deploying the lasers. The hot sex-starved space-babes will be protected and still hot-looking whilst the chest-explody types will be blinded, defeated by their fatal falw: a lack of ears.
If there was a clamor from customers, and Microsoft thought they would lose money or leverage, then they would be more standards compliant. But there is no clamor. The voices we hear asking for standards compliance are from technologists, web developers and industry press because those are the people who bear the greatest burdens due to lack of compliance. These people do not represent the majority of IE7's end users and MS knows it.
What most people want is to read their email, store their photos, and shop and bank securely on-line. They can already do this. The benefits of standards compliance are real but they are invisible to most end users and will remain so unfortunately.
L.
Re:Check out Rob Pike's thoughts on code commentin
on
How to Write Comments
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· Score: 1
You need to consider how your users deal with email. People sending emails tend to think as if the people receiving it will only be reading their email. The truth is that most business people have lots and lots and lots of email to wade through and they triage their email brutally.
You're competing with a lot of other email so you need to not look like spam, keep it short, and get to the point. Colourful shiny things have an important place in marketing but email doesn't seem like a medium well suited to that approach.
Almost anything looks good when your interaction with it consists of a trailer, some stills, a few out-of-context quotes and maybe a rough plot.
Actually I'm starting to think that a really _bad_ trailer is often the sign of a good movie. As you suggest there is a formula to trailers and some films just can't be made to fit it. American Beauty was the best example I've seen. The trailer makers clearly didn't have a *clue* how to get that across in a trailer.
I've never heard of other media outlets picking up an ad and running it all over the place without charging:)
See any Benetton ad from the eighties/nineties for an example of an ad ending up in print articles. See any of the US Presedential election TV ads for examples of a TV ad ending up on TV/Web/print articles. See any UK election poster for examples of posters ending up on TV/print articles.
I hire developers. Some of them have agricultural engineering degrees, some have maths degrees and some didn't get near a college. I think one has a CS degree but I don't hold that against them.
All the successful candidates have two things in common:
The ability to pass our fearsome programming test.
A demonstrable love of programming.
My experience of recruiting is that having a CS degree is not a reliable indicator for either of those qualities.
L.
Re:Why do I want to break out my atari
on
NASA's Deep Impact
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· Score: 1
OK. If it blows up it's asteroids. But if the commet doesn't blow up but gets freakishly knocked off course and hits a big red planet that then falls into a black hole it's interplanetary snooker.
L.
Re:Consequences of destroying a comet
on
NASA's Deep Impact
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· Score: 2, Funny
Well if we find a dump-truck sized lump of copper being thrown back at the Earth in a few days we can probably conclude that we pissed *somebody* off.
Either that or they're just trying to talk to us...
Er, the person in front has the distinct advantage of being nearer the finish line...
L.
Re:amazing programing in 256k, and no serious bugs
on
Apollo 12 at 35
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· Score: 2, Funny
When you have some room to work with, you're more likely to be sloppy...
Surely if you're programming for 256 megs it's at least as much a question of complexity as of having room to be sloppy in. With the best will in the world the difference in potential complexity, and the consequent chances of introducing bugs, between 256k and 256 meg is staggering.
I don't imagine for a minute that if you'd offered the apollo engineers 256 megs they'd have turned you down and said "sorry we'll stick to 256k thanks, it keeps us real."
L.
Re:They left out the most important category...
on
Win the X-Prize Cup
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· Score: 1
And at the other end of the success scale, a wooden spoon for the team that spreads itself over the widest area on landing.
Surely he or she can agree that Microsoft should not be given that power. Thus, sticking to IE is not a solution, rather it contributes to the problem.
Asking your boss to be part of a geek crusade is *not* going to swing it, not if they're any good at their job. You're not setting out how this change will provide any benefit to the company they and you are paid to represent. You're effectively saying if your boss switches and then an utterly huge body of millions of other users all do the same at around the same time then all the websites that already look OK in his current browser will continue to look OK in this other browser you think is better. I appreciate your argument is subtler than that but I'm sat at home and can afford to think that way. If I was at work and I was your boss I wouldn't.
Also I've seen first hand projects spin wildly out of control or fail to meet client's expectations due to last minute "golf course" promises or bizarre inexplicable "You don't need to know why just do it" decrees.
Those are examples of bad management on any project, software or otherwise. You don't have to know *anything* about programming to avoid them. You have to know about the process of software development and that does not require you to have been a programmer.
A good manager probably can manage anything. The trouble is that guru managers are as thin on the ground as guru programmers (and guru marketeers for that matter) and a manager performing badly will likely have a much more magnified effect on the outcome of a project than one of a team of programmers performing badly.
...but we'll probably still be drafting the EU-constitution and letting the voters kill the draft with a referendum.
Don't underestimate the galvanising effect a Chinese super/hyper-power, or a few successive fundamentalist regimes in the USA, might have. The EU was originally set up to ensure that the Western European powers didn't have any more wars. That goal has pretty much been met. I think the current malaise has set in whilst it casts around for a new purpose. I suspect that in the presence of a genuine threat (as with the threat of a third Franco-German war 50 years ago) us Europeans would find some common ground to agree on.
The only wrench in the scenarios, is how do you protect your populace versus terrorist who don't play by normal rules? Will it come down to holding "terrorist" countries hostage to the actions of a few of their people or the groups they support?
To be honest with you I can't think of a better way than that to make *more* terrorists. Really I can't.
Isn't making an interface usable something interesting? Something challenging? Aren't challenges something geeks do well?
Indeed, but making good interfaces is a challenge of psychology, design and empathy rather than programming skill, not typical geekish qualities. Before you can empathise you've got to want to empathise with the user. Not something particularly in evidence in this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll never forget September 11th 2001 on Slashdot. When I first heard the news that somebody had flown a plane into the World Trade Centre I reflexively checked the BBC website. It was unreachable - completely swamped. I checked CNN and that was swamped too. I went to Slashdot and they were reporting it and available so on-and-off I followed the story on Slashdot and on TV all day.
By the evening on the TV they had already gathered their pundits and reduced the days events to a continuous 10 second loop of a plane hitting a building. It was already starting to look like a music video.
Meanwhile on slashdot there were real conversations going on with real people who had been there, seen it or been affected by it. I remember one comment in particular - somebody wrote about psychologists being dispatched (volunteering I think) to go to school bus stops to tell some of the waiting kids that their parents were dead.
L.
This is an obvious feature to put into the Apple feature set. You think the Apple devs were sat around wondering what to do and this obvious-thing-to-do-next app hits the appstore and they're blind-sided? I think not. They just don't want another app arriving sooner and stealing their WWDC thunder. It's their playground.
And as for stealing the logo, give me a break! Both the developer and Apple both took the existing Apple logo for 'sync' and the existing Apple logo for 'wireless' and put them together. Not only is that an obvious thing to do it's the *only* sensible thing to do. What else would a good designer do but leverage the existing affordance in both those symbols?
L
wtf?
Score:3, Wordsmith.
L.
We're going to need to get some designer shades up there in advance of deploying the lasers. The hot sex-starved space-babes will be protected and still hot-looking whilst the chest-explody types will be blinded, defeated by their fatal falw: a lack of ears.
L
If there was a clamor from customers, and Microsoft thought they would lose money or leverage, then they would be more standards compliant. But there is no clamor. The voices we hear asking for standards compliance are from technologists, web developers and industry press because those are the people who bear the greatest burdens due to lack of compliance. These people do not represent the majority of IE7's end users and MS knows it.
What most people want is to read their email, store their photos, and shop and bank securely on-line. They can already do this. The benefits of standards compliance are real but they are invisible to most end users and will remain so unfortunately.
L.
He's used two stupid examples of commenting
Actual comment from actual production code:
return 1; # returns 1
L.
You need to consider how your users deal with email. People sending emails tend to think as if the people receiving it will only be reading their email. The truth is that most business people have lots and lots and lots of email to wade through and they triage their email brutally.
You're competing with a lot of other email so you need to not look like spam, keep it short, and get to the point. Colourful shiny things have an important place in marketing but email doesn't seem like a medium well suited to that approach.
L.
> A postage stamp sized video that takes 100% of a 3ghz machine to play.
> Well done NASA, you guys rock.
Yeah, c'mon NASA, it's exactly rocket science you kn...
OK. We may be in trouble.
L.
Actually I'm starting to think that a really _bad_ trailer is often the sign of a good movie. As you suggest there is a formula to trailers and some films just can't be made to fit it. American Beauty was the best example I've seen. The trailer makers clearly didn't have a *clue* how to get that across in a trailer.
L.
No they didn't, the 100,000 refers to the total number of different known viruses.
L.
There is, but it's on the way out...
L.
See any Benetton ad from the eighties/nineties for an example of an ad ending up in print articles. See any of the US Presedential election TV ads for examples of a TV ad ending up on TV/Web/print articles. See any UK election poster for examples of posters ending up on TV/print articles.
L.
s/hands/eyebrows/g;
L.
I hire developers. Some of them have agricultural engineering degrees, some have maths degrees and some didn't get near a college. I think one has a CS degree but I don't hold that against them.
All the successful candidates have two things in common:
My experience of recruiting is that having a CS degree is not a reliable indicator for either of those qualities.
L.
OK. If it blows up it's asteroids. But if the commet doesn't blow up but gets freakishly knocked off course and hits a big red planet that then falls into a black hole it's interplanetary snooker.
L.
Well if we find a dump-truck sized lump of copper being thrown back at the Earth in a few days we can probably conclude that we pissed *somebody* off.
Either that or they're just trying to talk to us...
L.
L
Er, the person in front has the distinct advantage of being nearer the finish line...
L.
When you have some room to work with, you're more likely to be sloppy...
Surely if you're programming for 256 megs it's at least as much a question of complexity as of having room to be sloppy in. With the best will in the world the difference in potential complexity, and the consequent chances of introducing bugs, between 256k and 256 meg is staggering.
I don't imagine for a minute that if you'd offered the apollo engineers 256 megs they'd have turned you down and said "sorry we'll stick to 256k thanks, it keeps us real."
L.
And at the other end of the success scale, a wooden spoon for the team that spreads itself over the widest area on landing.
L
Asking your boss to be part of a geek crusade is *not* going to swing it, not if they're any good at their job. You're not setting out how this change will provide any benefit to the company they and you are paid to represent. You're effectively saying if your boss switches and then an utterly huge body of millions of other users all do the same at around the same time then all the websites that already look OK in his current browser will continue to look OK in this other browser you think is better. I appreciate your argument is subtler than that but I'm sat at home and can afford to think that way. If I was at work and I was your boss I wouldn't.
L
Those are examples of bad management on any project, software or otherwise. You don't have to know *anything* about programming to avoid them. You have to know about the process of software development and that does not require you to have been a programmer.
A good manager probably can manage anything. The trouble is that guru managers are as thin on the ground as guru programmers (and guru marketeers for that matter) and a manager performing badly will likely have a much more magnified effect on the outcome of a project than one of a team of programmers performing badly.
L.
Don't underestimate the galvanising effect a Chinese super/hyper-power, or a few successive fundamentalist regimes in the USA, might have. The EU was originally set up to ensure that the Western European powers didn't have any more wars. That goal has pretty much been met. I think the current malaise has set in whilst it casts around for a new purpose. I suspect that in the presence of a genuine threat (as with the threat of a third Franco-German war 50 years ago) us Europeans would find some common ground to agree on.
L.
To be honest with you I can't think of a better way than that to make *more* terrorists. Really I can't.
L.
Indeed, but making good interfaces is a challenge of psychology, design and empathy rather than programming skill, not typical geekish qualities. Before you can empathise you've got to want to empathise with the user. Not something particularly in evidence in this thread.
L.