I do see the issue with the second point (there's a lot of crap out there being vanity-published, most of it really awful, that would have no business being on shelves of bookstores. There's a decent amount of crap being published by legit publishers with no business being on shelves, too, but I would be willing to bet the ratio of mindnumbingly terrible to not, would be much better in the latter case. That is a real issue, given that obviously any company you paid to help you put your books on shelves would claim it was the next coming of Christ to the book world.
The first one is less of an issue, though - if you write well, you probably have friends and/or random internet people who'd be happy to read your betas. Some of them are probably literate and would be happy to help you edit. I know many mainstream authors do that sort of thing as a first-round anyway. That's mostly what I was referring to. Plus that way you don't get "editors" who think part of their job is forcing you to write something more marketable and make you change things you don't want to if you want them to go ahead with the publishing. (I'm not a writer, I've never been a writer, but I've heard things.)
I have seen those studies, and they are interesting.
That said, as someone with supposedly high-functioning Aspergers, I'm generally attracted to other people who are also similar; furthermore, I have a feeling if I was ever a dad, I'd be a better dad to a kid whose brain I understood better, too. So I'm not seeing that as completely a bad thing.:p
(Obviously, having a kid with crazy Autism would suck horribly for both me and the kid, but I honestly don't really think that kind of crazy Autism is even -related- to the generally-socially-awkward-and-kinda-eccentric high-functioning Aspergers that is common among programmers and other geekish professions, and I haven't really seen any evidence stating otherwise. People just call them a spectrum cause... they're a spectrum along social awkwardness, I guess? I'm not even entirely convinced the diagnosis of "Aspergers" is a single thing, as opposed to just a broad range of "abnormalities" given one label for convenience of discussion.)
Title made me curious why someone would be claiming developers shouldn't hook up (possibly a new study about the prevalence of high-level autism in the Silicon Valley?) Being a developer who is dating another developer and who might eventually want kids, that would have been potentially relevant.
But no, this was just another random story of a hot programmer flirting with teammates, which, as a jillion people have aready said, is generally a bad idea whether you're a programmer, or have any other career that involves working in a group. I don't think it'd be any different or less awkward for someone on my team as a developer to hook up with a tester or a graphic designer or a documentation writer on the same team as for them to hook up with another developer.
Inversely, a while ago I learned one of the testers on our team had requested to move to a different team; a few months later I learned it was because she'd started dating a developer on that team. They've been happily married a couple years now, and both still work here. Probably smart of them to be in different teams, though (though both still on the development floor, which I see nothing wrong with at all.)
Because that way you understand each other. Because that way your eccentricities don't bother her so much, and vice versa. Because that way you can generally simultaneously do things that you enjoy doing and also spend time with the person you enjoy spending time with, rather than picking one or the other exclusively.
I've never met anyone exactly like myself, though if I were single and did meet such a person, I would be immediately interested, but I wouldn't even consider a relationship with someone I didn't share a majority of interests and a similar worldview with. I've seen where that leads (it leads to a relationship like my parents':p).
Also reminded of that joke that was so popular in elementary schools, "what would you rather be eaten by, a [any random carnivore], or a [random other carnivore]?" "I'd rather the [two carnivores from the previous sentence] eat each other."
What are you talking about? Recently, everyone actually went so far as to -advertise- their worse screen resolution: all you need to do is come up with a nice gimmicky name that hides the fact that you just made it worse, like, say, "high definition".
I've generally just seen it as a suggestion that inspectors should all be female, preferably attractive. Straight guys would enjoy it, gay guys and girls would be less creeped. I don't really see anything wrong with that plan, other than maybe complaints about discrimination.:p
Presumably because there are more fracked up in the head straight males than gay males or non-straight females (at least in this particular way). That seems to be popular opinion, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were right.
Oh, certainly. Experimental UI designs are certainly essential to progress, and I'm sure that the existing Windows UI (by which I mean the one from win2k, before they started crapping it up with junk) isn't the best thing that could ever exist.
It's just that real UX people of the sort likely to come up with new crazy ideas that'll revolutionize all of UX... are probably off in academia, coming up with crazy ideas (most of which will suck), and then testing them scientifically with prototypes in a lab. Rather than, say, coming up with a crazy idea (which will probably suck), stating that it's the best thing ever without any proof, then forcing it on actual users who just want to be left alone to do what they know.
I've seen exactly that happen before (minus the lawsuit). I actually found a GM script and used it for a while to automatically go to the equivalent wowpedia page whenever I directed my browser to open a page on wowwiki, after they moved all their content and allowed the original wiki to continue to exist as a stagnant shell. Fun times.
No, I mean rather the opposite. Just because Linux UIs were always crap and keep getting worse, doesn't mean Microsoft is pure of that either. They were just better at their peak (though still nowhere near perfect).
Yes, I'm aware that MS -claimed- to have done ux studies of Win8, but from what I can tell that pretty much boiled down to "we showed it to some people, didn't give them any other options, then took the results we wanted to hear."
Reminded me of a great story from a Dilbert book, where the free sodas in the guy's office kept getting crappier and harder to find stocked, and eventually he asked what was up, and the response was that they were testing which sodas people wanted. Eventually, you had a choice between mediocre soda and no soda, so you drank the mediocre soda. Voila! The tests came back: people wanted the mediocre soda, so let's keep buying it!
I agree that it takes a lot of skill to drive 90 mph in traffic. I would even agree that I probably don't have that skill. I do, however, fairly routinely (well, a few times a year) drive 90-100 mph with no worries except the worries of hidden traffic cops... at that point, I'm going -infinitely- faster than the other traffic. Also infinitely slower than the other traffic. There are a lot of places you can drive where you don't -see- any other traffic (except occasionally a slow-moving giant semi. I slow down a bit for those, just in case.)
The fact that speed limits are still generally 70 for most of those drives just doesn't make sense to me. I've just learned to make darn sure to slow down if you see a sign that a small town is coming soon, as that's where cops like to hang out.
I expect this 85 mph limit highway... probably won't change that much except for the number of tickets being given out, as people were probably -already- driving that speed.
By which I mean, instead of the sort projects have now, that say "I am a ux expert, and I like [insert totally unintuitive feature in the name of "prettiness", or "looking like [Apple|chrome|a phone|whatever]", so that is what it has to look like"... instead the real kind, that goes and does useability tests with a wide range of its potential userbase, and then designs based on that.
Once you have a great product that people actually want to use (and yes, I know Linux is technically the kernel, not its window/file managers/etc., but the UI is what people actually -see-), more people might actually want to use it (I am aware that this is a tautological statement, but shut up.) More people using it = more desire for programs = more better. At least assuming some of those application developers also go the route of doing proper useability testing.
No, there are multiple Sharp Mortgages, and they're all competing to display the best factories.
Actually, I had an even worse time of it, as I started off by reading -Sharp- as the primary verb, as in "to cheat", so I was like... cash-poor people sharp their mortgages... what?
The fact that "Do not harm humans" is, in fact, a surprisingly non-simple command (and that's not even also considering the "or through inaction allow a human to come to harm" subclause, which is a whole nother can of worms), is the whole driving force for like 95% of all of Asimov's Robot short stories...
Meanwhile, yes, until we actually do have robots of sufficient, nondeterministic programming complexity that you might actually imagine they're really intelligent and self-aware, which is unlikely to be anytime soon... this is just dumb.
You don't need a publisher in order to get a good editor (or several). You don't need a publisher to get a good artist. You -shouldn't- need a publisher to get your books onto shelves, though my guess is that these days you probably still do (and anyway, it would probably continue to be easier... though one could imagine a do-it-yourself type publishing company that you could pay to deal only with the legal aspects of getting books onto shelves for you, but had you do everything else? I'm sure people would go for that.)
If I had a "Chrome OS-based Chromebox PC or Chromebook laptop", would that not be by definition a PC? So I'd just be replacing my PC-with-one-OS with a PC-with-a-different-OS. Better than predictions that in the future we'll all be doing everything on little tablets (laughable), but still, no thanks.
Harvey Mudd students have long used the word "artistic" euphemistically, from an immortal conversation that occurred many years ago, about a Counterstrike map being played at a LAN party at the time:
"[The bomb sites] are...artistic."
"And by 'artistic', you mean 'stupid'."
"Yes."
Also, later in the evening:
"We've taken an 'interesting' route. And by 'interesting', I mean 'dumb'."
"I thought that was 'artistic'..."
Who cares? A lot of people who actually use their OS's GUI for stuff on a daily basis. All of whom, the moment they're forced to use Win8, will first go complain about it on a random forum, and then go download 3rd party apps to get everything back the way it was.
Saw a play a few months ago called "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow" that played with the same theme (though in this case it wasn't crippling fear of accidents, but just bog-standard agoraphobia). Interesting play, though I felt it suffered a bit from mood whiplash (there were a number of hilarious comedy scenes, and a number of soul-crushingly depressing scenes, all stuck together randomly;)).
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I do see the issue with the second point (there's a lot of crap out there being vanity-published, most of it really awful, that would have no business being on shelves of bookstores. There's a decent amount of crap being published by legit publishers with no business being on shelves, too, but I would be willing to bet the ratio of mindnumbingly terrible to not, would be much better in the latter case. That is a real issue, given that obviously any company you paid to help you put your books on shelves would claim it was the next coming of Christ to the book world.
The first one is less of an issue, though - if you write well, you probably have friends and/or random internet people who'd be happy to read your betas. Some of them are probably literate and would be happy to help you edit. I know many mainstream authors do that sort of thing as a first-round anyway. That's mostly what I was referring to. Plus that way you don't get "editors" who think part of their job is forcing you to write something more marketable and make you change things you don't want to if you want them to go ahead with the publishing. (I'm not a writer, I've never been a writer, but I've heard things.)
I have seen those studies, and they are interesting.
That said, as someone with supposedly high-functioning Aspergers, I'm generally attracted to other people who are also similar; furthermore, I have a feeling if I was ever a dad, I'd be a better dad to a kid whose brain I understood better, too. So I'm not seeing that as completely a bad thing. :p
(Obviously, having a kid with crazy Autism would suck horribly for both me and the kid, but I honestly don't really think that kind of crazy Autism is even -related- to the generally-socially-awkward-and-kinda-eccentric high-functioning Aspergers that is common among programmers and other geekish professions, and I haven't really seen any evidence stating otherwise. People just call them a spectrum cause... they're a spectrum along social awkwardness, I guess? I'm not even entirely convinced the diagnosis of "Aspergers" is a single thing, as opposed to just a broad range of "abnormalities" given one label for convenience of discussion.)
Title made me curious why someone would be claiming developers shouldn't hook up (possibly a new study about the prevalence of high-level autism in the Silicon Valley?) Being a developer who is dating another developer and who might eventually want kids, that would have been potentially relevant.
But no, this was just another random story of a hot programmer flirting with teammates, which, as a jillion people have aready said, is generally a bad idea whether you're a programmer, or have any other career that involves working in a group. I don't think it'd be any different or less awkward for someone on my team as a developer to hook up with a tester or a graphic designer or a documentation writer on the same team as for them to hook up with another developer.
Inversely, a while ago I learned one of the testers on our team had requested to move to a different team; a few months later I learned it was because she'd started dating a developer on that team. They've been happily married a couple years now, and both still work here. Probably smart of them to be in different teams, though (though both still on the development floor, which I see nothing wrong with at all.)
Because that way you understand each other. Because that way your eccentricities don't bother her so much, and vice versa. Because that way you can generally simultaneously do things that you enjoy doing and also spend time with the person you enjoy spending time with, rather than picking one or the other exclusively.
I've never met anyone exactly like myself, though if I were single and did meet such a person, I would be immediately interested, but I wouldn't even consider a relationship with someone I didn't share a majority of interests and a similar worldview with. I've seen where that leads (it leads to a relationship like my parents' :p).
My favorite license is the WTFPL license. http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
You know, the tagline, "whoever wins... we lose"?
Also reminded of that joke that was so popular in elementary schools, "what would you rather be eaten by, a [any random carnivore], or a [random other carnivore]?" "I'd rather the [two carnivores from the previous sentence] eat each other."
What are you talking about? Recently, everyone actually went so far as to -advertise- their worse screen resolution: all you need to do is come up with a nice gimmicky name that hides the fact that you just made it worse, like, say, "high definition".
I've generally just seen it as a suggestion that inspectors should all be female, preferably attractive. Straight guys would enjoy it, gay guys and girls would be less creeped. I don't really see anything wrong with that plan, other than maybe complaints about discrimination. :p
Nah, I live there. The whole place only actually burns down like once every three years.
Sounds like a pretty typical early-stage startup, just slightly more honest about it. :p
Presumably because there are more fracked up in the head straight males than gay males or non-straight females (at least in this particular way). That seems to be popular opinion, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were right.
Oh, certainly. Experimental UI designs are certainly essential to progress, and I'm sure that the existing Windows UI (by which I mean the one from win2k, before they started crapping it up with junk) isn't the best thing that could ever exist.
It's just that real UX people of the sort likely to come up with new crazy ideas that'll revolutionize all of UX... are probably off in academia, coming up with crazy ideas (most of which will suck), and then testing them scientifically with prototypes in a lab. Rather than, say, coming up with a crazy idea (which will probably suck), stating that it's the best thing ever without any proof, then forcing it on actual users who just want to be left alone to do what they know.
I've seen exactly that happen before (minus the lawsuit). I actually found a GM script and used it for a while to automatically go to the equivalent wowpedia page whenever I directed my browser to open a page on wowwiki, after they moved all their content and allowed the original wiki to continue to exist as a stagnant shell. Fun times.
No, I mean rather the opposite. Just because Linux UIs were always crap and keep getting worse, doesn't mean Microsoft is pure of that either. They were just better at their peak (though still nowhere near perfect).
Yes, I'm aware that MS -claimed- to have done ux studies of Win8, but from what I can tell that pretty much boiled down to "we showed it to some people, didn't give them any other options, then took the results we wanted to hear."
Reminded me of a great story from a Dilbert book, where the free sodas in the guy's office kept getting crappier and harder to find stocked, and eventually he asked what was up, and the response was that they were testing which sodas people wanted. Eventually, you had a choice between mediocre soda and no soda, so you drank the mediocre soda. Voila! The tests came back: people wanted the mediocre soda, so let's keep buying it!
I agree that it takes a lot of skill to drive 90 mph in traffic. I would even agree that I probably don't have that skill. I do, however, fairly routinely (well, a few times a year) drive 90-100 mph with no worries except the worries of hidden traffic cops... at that point, I'm going -infinitely- faster than the other traffic. Also infinitely slower than the other traffic. There are a lot of places you can drive where you don't -see- any other traffic (except occasionally a slow-moving giant semi. I slow down a bit for those, just in case.)
The fact that speed limits are still generally 70 for most of those drives just doesn't make sense to me. I've just learned to make darn sure to slow down if you see a sign that a small town is coming soon, as that's where cops like to hang out.
I expect this 85 mph limit highway... probably won't change that much except for the number of tickets being given out, as people were probably -already- driving that speed.
By which I mean, instead of the sort projects have now, that say "I am a ux expert, and I like [insert totally unintuitive feature in the name of "prettiness", or "looking like [Apple|chrome|a phone|whatever]", so that is what it has to look like"... instead the real kind, that goes and does useability tests with a wide range of its potential userbase, and then designs based on that.
Once you have a great product that people actually want to use (and yes, I know Linux is technically the kernel, not its window/file managers/etc., but the UI is what people actually -see-), more people might actually want to use it (I am aware that this is a tautological statement, but shut up.) More people using it = more desire for programs = more better. At least assuming some of those application developers also go the route of doing proper useability testing.
You can patent something truly horrific, then not use your patent or let anyone else use it. Hopefully that's what they're going for here.
No, there are multiple Sharp Mortgages, and they're all competing to display the best factories.
Actually, I had an even worse time of it, as I started off by reading -Sharp- as the primary verb, as in "to cheat", so I was like... cash-poor people sharp their mortgages... what?
The fact that "Do not harm humans" is, in fact, a surprisingly non-simple command (and that's not even also considering the "or through inaction allow a human to come to harm" subclause, which is a whole nother can of worms), is the whole driving force for like 95% of all of Asimov's Robot short stories...
Meanwhile, yes, until we actually do have robots of sufficient, nondeterministic programming complexity that you might actually imagine they're really intelligent and self-aware, which is unlikely to be anytime soon... this is just dumb.
You don't need a publisher in order to get a good editor (or several). You don't need a publisher to get a good artist. You -shouldn't- need a publisher to get your books onto shelves, though my guess is that these days you probably still do (and anyway, it would probably continue to be easier... though one could imagine a do-it-yourself type publishing company that you could pay to deal only with the legal aspects of getting books onto shelves for you, but had you do everything else? I'm sure people would go for that.)
If I had a "Chrome OS-based Chromebox PC or Chromebook laptop", would that not be by definition a PC? So I'd just be replacing my PC-with-one-OS with a PC-with-a-different-OS. Better than predictions that in the future we'll all be doing everything on little tablets (laughable), but still, no thanks.
Harvey Mudd students have long used the word "artistic" euphemistically, from an immortal conversation that occurred many years ago, about a Counterstrike map being played at a LAN party at the time:
"[The bomb sites] are...artistic."
"And by 'artistic', you mean 'stupid'."
"Yes."
Also, later in the evening:
"We've taken an 'interesting' route. And by 'interesting', I mean 'dumb'."
"I thought that was 'artistic'..."
Who cares? A lot of people who actually use their OS's GUI for stuff on a daily basis. All of whom, the moment they're forced to use Win8, will first go complain about it on a random forum, and then go download 3rd party apps to get everything back the way it was.
So I guess you're right.
Saw a play a few months ago called "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow" that played with the same theme (though in this case it wasn't crippling fear of accidents, but just bog-standard agoraphobia). Interesting play, though I felt it suffered a bit from mood whiplash (there were a number of hilarious comedy scenes, and a number of soul-crushingly depressing scenes, all stuck together randomly ;)).
Being a genius? Doesn't work for most people, but it certainly made Notch a jillion dollars...