Then I must be an exception. I've never had more than 15 tabs open at the same time. I usually only have 3 or 4. Once I get past 6 I have the tendency to close as many tabs as I can because I don't like how it clutters the screen.
Does that even matter? Joe Average doesn't complain about Firefox's speed or memory usage, only geeks do because they have 2000 tabs open and leave Firefox running for 4 years.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
on
Ruby 1.9.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How do you know the tons of manhours put into optimization work won't cost you more than the added hardware?
Stuff like that, in other words all the core code, are and will still be written in C. Or did you somehow imagine that *everything* must be written in an interpreted language?
Besides, most *application-level* GUI code doesn't do things like that. They tell the widget toolkit "put a button with this label here" and "render this text with this font and this transformation there". They don't render stuff pixel-by-pixel. In these cases it doesn't matter what language you write this kind of code in, the performance loss will not be noticable.
Then what about trolling and people who are deliberately spreading disinformation? If there are too many of them, then fighting each and every anonymous poster is going to waste a lot of time. Time that could have been used for more useful activities instead.
But Stackoverflow is a tech site, so using OpenID exclusively there is acceptable. You're going to lose a lot of users if you do that on your consumer site.
"This is exactly why OpenID is a Good Thing. Once signed up, you don't have to go through that hassle ever again for sites that support OpenID."
Agreed. Only one problem: one has to sign up! Understanding what OpenID is, as well as signing up, is just way too much work. I can imagine that most people don't even want to bother.
"As for "long magical URL"; I don't think it need be any harder to remember than an email address. Certainly, it can be no harder than remember a telephone number, which everybody used to do back in the day."
That's true in an isolated case, but we live in a world where email addresses and phone numbers are common, and OpenID URLs are not. This makes it easier for people to deal with email addresses and phone numbers, simply because they're more used to it.
I'm talking about all the people flaming Google for not letting people login to Gmail and other Google services with OpenID.
Anyway, your use of the phrase "identity space" proves my point. Why should I have to know about that kind of jargon? You've already lost the average user as soon as you start talking like that. It's like saying that average users should learn how to use the commandline. They shouldn't have to! Likewise, they shouldn't have to learn about all this magic URL or "identity space" stuff. It's all about usability, and the fact that you even mention something like "identity space" proves that you're not getting it.
"It also means FooBarWidget's dad (the proverbial Joe the Plumber of this thread) also has to remember that on every other site he has to use something else. And if he wants to use his Yahoo or MSN account, he has to remember its something totally different. Google has simply added to the confusion by throwing in their own proprietary non-interoperable standard, further fractioning a standard you've already argued is unusable for its complexity."
While this sounds logical on paper, I have to disagree. The thing is, most people are already familiar with Yahoo, MSN or Google and are likely to already have an account for those services. Not so with OpenID, its use is mostly limited to tech people. You would be right if everybody in this world is new to the Internet and have to learn everything from scratch, but that's not the case. It is way, way, way easier to use one's existing MSN/Yahoo/Google account to login and to read up on OpenID, trying to understand what it is, and signing up for it. The barrier to entry is just too high.
"I'm happy its easy for you and your dad. But theres about eighty things a 9 year old programmer would have made better decisions about, and at no cost to the rediculously low bar you've set for your expectations."
"Rediculous low bar" huh? It's called usability. To make usable software one has to be ambitious, or should I even say zealous, about it. One must have the mind set that every click is one click too many, and that every line of text is one too many. It's way to easy for tech people to think that something is "easy to learn". But the thing is, people shouldn't *have* to learn. Computers are here to serve humans, not vice versa. The attitude that people should learn is the wrong one.
Right. Instead of acknowledging the problem, you try to find excuses for it. If all OpenID developers have attitude like yours then of course usability is never going to improve.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm saying that your attitude is wrong. Usability must always have the highest priority. Every click is one click too much.
Too long. If you need to explain it in more than 6 words then you've already lost the user. He has more important things to do than reading an explanation.
Oh yes it has. It means that now, people who have Google accounts can login to my website without having to register. So it *is* a win. I don't care whether I can login to Google with OpenID.
"Rubbish. For people like your dad, OpenID is both simple *and* simpler than having to sign up for dozens of sites just to post a comment."
That's true if you count the step. The thing you overlooked is, he doesn't know what OpenID is! Try to explain OpenID to a random person on street. How big is the chance that he understands it and will even care? Have you ever went through an OpenID registration process? There's no way my dad understands that. The barrier to entry for average users is too high.
There's more to usability than simply counting the number of steps.
"Suppose we live in a world where everybody implements OpenID (as a consumer and provider)."
It's useless to speak of such a world. It simply doesn't exist. The hard reality is that OpenID adoption is still low.
"If I "can't possibly expect [your dad] to do something as complex" as that, I weep for your dad - and you, given that you got 50% of your genes from him."
Oh yeah, like launching a personal attack on me will make the usability problems magically go away. If anything, this is a sign of your weakness.
There, I said it. It's true. My computer-illiterate dad just wants to post a comment on a blog, or to login to a new website. You can't possibly expect him to do something as complex as reading up on what OpenID is, signing up for an OpenID account on a totally different website that has got nothing to do with the original website that he was on, and then logging in by entering a long magical URL. People like him - average users - have trouble enough understanding usernames and passwords! The recently published OpenID usability study confirms all the criticism that I've had on OpenID.
While OpenID is technologically sound, its usability is not. If Google's version is more usable, but is still open, then I'd gladly support it even if it's not compatible with the "official" OpenID standard. I don't care whether they're being "nice" or "evil" or whatever, I want better usability because software is supposed to be usable.
I don't care about all that. All that I care about is that the tons and tons of MSN users are now able to login to my site without having to register an account at my site first. I don't care whether people can use OpenID to login to Windows Live.
Microsoft supporting OpenID like this is a good thing.
That was years ago, with FastCGI. Everybody has moved on to Mongrel and Phusion Passenger, so that problem belongs to the past. Rails is very stable nowadays.
The old "Rails can't scale" myth again. Yellow Pages, MTV, New York Times, Reuters and many other high-profile companies managed to scale Rails. Twitter's scaling problems are Twitter-specific, not inherent to Rails.
I entered the US 3 months ago, and left after a week. I too had read about stories where they could search and confiscate your laptop for no reason. Since I'm a Linux user, the act of using an operating system that they don't know (i.e. everything except Windows) might cause suspicion, so I removed Linux from the boot loader and put a few photos and documents on the Windows partition as a decoy. I really didn't want to go through the trouble of formatting my Linux partition since all my important stuff are not on Windows. My business partner, who traveled with me, didn't bring his Macbook at all out of fear that it would be confiscated.
It turned out that we have been worried about nothing. There was no search. One time I forgot to remove the laptop from my backpack. They took the backpack and inspected it, and I was acting nervous because I was worried they'd confiscate the laptop. After a few minutes I got my laptop back. Nothing happened.
I do not understand this. Why is one's own moral compass more important than others'? If your own moral compass says that murdering people is justice, then does that make murder OK? Aren't morals and justice generally dictated by society instead?
Slashdot Mirror
Then I must be an exception. I've never had more than 15 tabs open at the same time. I usually only have 3 or 4. Once I get past 6 I have the tendency to close as many tabs as I can because I don't like how it clutters the screen.
Does that even matter? Joe Average doesn't complain about Firefox's speed or memory usage, only geeks do because they have 2000 tabs open and leave Firefox running for 4 years.
How do you know the tons of manhours put into optimization work won't cost you more than the added hardware?
Lucene is a full-text indexer and search library. Solr is a full-text indexer and search server, based on Lucene.
Stuff like that, in other words all the core code, are and will still be written in C. Or did you somehow imagine that *everything* must be written in an interpreted language?
Besides, most *application-level* GUI code doesn't do things like that. They tell the widget toolkit "put a button with this label here" and "render this text with this font and this transformation there". They don't render stuff pixel-by-pixel. In these cases it doesn't matter what language you write this kind of code in, the performance loss will not be noticable.
What is the difference? Aren't all facts true and aren't all true statements facts?
That's only true if you use number of bugs as a measurement of overall quality.
It's not a lame duck, it's a cute duck.
Then what about trolling and people who are deliberately spreading disinformation? If there are too many of them, then fighting each and every anonymous poster is going to waste a lot of time. Time that could have been used for more useful activities instead.
But Stackoverflow is a tech site, so using OpenID exclusively there is acceptable. You're going to lose a lot of users if you do that on your consumer site.
"This is exactly why OpenID is a Good Thing. Once signed up, you don't have to go through that hassle ever again for sites that support OpenID."
Agreed. Only one problem: one has to sign up! Understanding what OpenID is, as well as signing up, is just way too much work. I can imagine that most people don't even want to bother.
"As for "long magical URL"; I don't think it need be any harder to remember than an email address. Certainly, it can be no harder than remember a telephone number, which everybody used to do back in the day."
That's true in an isolated case, but we live in a world where email addresses and phone numbers are common, and OpenID URLs are not. This makes it easier for people to deal with email addresses and phone numbers, simply because they're more used to it.
I'm talking about all the people flaming Google for not letting people login to Gmail and other Google services with OpenID.
Anyway, your use of the phrase "identity space" proves my point. Why should I have to know about that kind of jargon? You've already lost the average user as soon as you start talking like that. It's like saying that average users should learn how to use the commandline. They shouldn't have to! Likewise, they shouldn't have to learn about all this magic URL or "identity space" stuff. It's all about usability, and the fact that you even mention something like "identity space" proves that you're not getting it.
While this sounds logical on paper, I have to disagree. The thing is, most people are already familiar with Yahoo, MSN or Google and are likely to already have an account for those services. Not so with OpenID, its use is mostly limited to tech people. You would be right if everybody in this world is new to the Internet and have to learn everything from scratch, but that's not the case. It is way, way, way easier to use one's existing MSN/Yahoo/Google account to login and to read up on OpenID, trying to understand what it is, and signing up for it. The barrier to entry is just too high.
"Rediculous low bar" huh? It's called usability. To make usable software one has to be ambitious, or should I even say zealous, about it. One must have the mind set that every click is one click too many, and that every line of text is one too many. It's way to easy for tech people to think that something is "easy to learn". But the thing is, people shouldn't *have* to learn. Computers are here to serve humans, not vice versa. The attitude that people should learn is the wrong one.
Right. Instead of acknowledging the problem, you try to find excuses for it. If all OpenID developers have attitude like yours then of course usability is never going to improve.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm saying that your attitude is wrong. Usability must always have the highest priority. Every click is one click too much.
Too long. If you need to explain it in more than 6 words then you've already lost the user. He has more important things to do than reading an explanation.
Oh yes it has. It means that now, people who have Google accounts can login to my website without having to register. So it *is* a win. I don't care whether I can login to Google with OpenID.
"Rubbish. For people like your dad, OpenID is both simple *and* simpler than having to sign up for dozens of sites just to post a comment."
That's true if you count the step. The thing you overlooked is, he doesn't know what OpenID is! Try to explain OpenID to a random person on street. How big is the chance that he understands it and will even care? Have you ever went through an OpenID registration process? There's no way my dad understands that. The barrier to entry for average users is too high.
There's more to usability than simply counting the number of steps.
"Suppose we live in a world where everybody implements OpenID (as a consumer and provider)."
It's useless to speak of such a world. It simply doesn't exist. The hard reality is that OpenID adoption is still low.
"If I "can't possibly expect [your dad] to do something as complex" as that, I weep for your dad - and you, given that you got 50% of your genes from him."
Oh yeah, like launching a personal attack on me will make the usability problems magically go away. If anything, this is a sign of your weakness.
OpenID usability sucks.
There, I said it. It's true. My computer-illiterate dad just wants to post a comment on a blog, or to login to a new website. You can't possibly expect him to do something as complex as reading up on what OpenID is, signing up for an OpenID account on a totally different website that has got nothing to do with the original website that he was on, and then logging in by entering a long magical URL. People like him - average users - have trouble enough understanding usernames and passwords! The recently published OpenID usability study confirms all the criticism that I've had on OpenID.
While OpenID is technologically sound, its usability is not. If Google's version is more usable, but is still open, then I'd gladly support it even if it's not compatible with the "official" OpenID standard. I don't care whether they're being "nice" or "evil" or whatever, I want better usability because software is supposed to be usable.
I don't care about all that. All that I care about is that the tons and tons of MSN users are now able to login to my site without having to register an account at my site first. I don't care whether people can use OpenID to login to Windows Live.
Microsoft supporting OpenID like this is a good thing.
That was years ago, with FastCGI. Everybody has moved on to Mongrel and Phusion Passenger, so that problem belongs to the past. Rails is very stable nowadays.
"That's interesting, the New York Times [nytimes.com] runs on rails? Oh no. No it doesn't. Not even close."
I never said they run on it on the front page. But oh yes they are, very very close. (FYI, Phusion Passenger is a Rails deployment tool.)
"A site that is so useless that I defy you to find a single person linking to it in the history of Slashdot [google.com]. Zero hits."
So you're using the Slashdot demographic to judge how useful a website is? Seriously? What's your freaking point?
If anything, you're just trying to find excuses because you don't want to accept that Rails is production-ready.
The old "Rails can't scale" myth again. Yellow Pages, MTV, New York Times, Reuters and many other high-profile companies managed to scale Rails. Twitter's scaling problems are Twitter-specific, not inherent to Rails.
I entered the US 3 months ago, and left after a week. I too had read about stories where they could search and confiscate your laptop for no reason. Since I'm a Linux user, the act of using an operating system that they don't know (i.e. everything except Windows) might cause suspicion, so I removed Linux from the boot loader and put a few photos and documents on the Windows partition as a decoy. I really didn't want to go through the trouble of formatting my Linux partition since all my important stuff are not on Windows. My business partner, who traveled with me, didn't bring his Macbook at all out of fear that it would be confiscated.
It turned out that we have been worried about nothing. There was no search. One time I forgot to remove the laptop from my backpack. They took the backpack and inspected it, and I was acting nervous because I was worried they'd confiscate the laptop. After a few minutes I got my laptop back. Nothing happened.
"So what? Who cares if your likes or dislikes are posted for all to see?
I LIKE JUNO REACTOR AND SEX
See? Was that so hard? Has my life become worse now that you know this?"
It may very well become worse if your current and/or future employer knows this.
"Your own moral compasss should guide you"
I do not understand this. Why is one's own moral compass more important than others'? If your own moral compass says that murdering people is justice, then does that make murder OK? Aren't morals and justice generally dictated by society instead?