I went to Nagashima Spaland a couple of years ago and the best coaster they had then was a piece of crap kiddy-coaster. I guess I'll have to go back, now.
I know people who work at many of the companies listed, and with the exception of SAS Institute (which a few friends working there have told me is an outstanding company to work for) I have heard nothing but horror stories about every single one. My friends don't seem like cynics, but I wonder if it's human nature to complain more than praise?
I actually know an otherwise very intelligent person who doesn't believe in gravity. No joke, she argues with everyone who discovers this fact about her. Gravity still functions on her despite her indifference to it. Of course, she was a law student, and they're trained to convince people (even themselves, apparently) that black is white, gravity doesn't exist, etc.
You mean as the supply diminishes, the price increases????
Gee, way to point out a basic law of microeconomics.
I'd like to remind you that there is also a demand curve, where the price decreases as demand decreases. If there are only a few positions available but many applicants, there will price competition between the applicants resulting in a lower salary.
Over the years most legacy codes are ported to other, more recent languages and systems for exactly this reason.
Of course I have seen companies that still maintain codes that were originally written on punch cards, because the guy that wrote it is dead an nobody else fully understands how it works.
A former girlfriend was a physicist. Being an engineer, we always got into the endless debates of "theory" vs. "practice". As a physicist she seemed to prefer talking about sex, whereas I preferred actually *having* sex.
Isn't this what stuff like Active Directory are for? Why can't I create one hierarchy that represents the actual storage structure, then map an infinite number of additional heirarchies on top of that based on metadata, e.g. as if I were to use softlinks to create additional heirarchies based on a different attribute than what I originally sorted on.
In a manner of speaking, I could store my pr0n as:/pr0n/movies/pr0n/stills/pr0n/text [do people download pr0n text???]
and then create another organizational structure of "links" as/pr0n/perverted/pr0n/spicy/pr0n/nice
I still have the option of layering movies, stills, and text under the perverted, spicy, and nice categories as well.
e-commerce sites that ask me to "print a copy of this page" for a receipt. Yeah, that works really fscking well when I'm on my laptop in a hotel room somewhere, assholes.
Actually the thing that struck me was the whole conservation of energy thing. A human isn't a battery, it's a GENERATOR. You have to feed and water all those humans who then convert that energy into electricity, and that food doesn't come for free either. Somewhere, somehow, the machines are getting energy from an external source (e.g. the sun, geothermal heating) to supplement the energy they already have. They are then using that energy to generate food (even if that food is other humans), which they give to the humans who generate the electricity.
What's the point? Why not make a more efficient mechanical generator to convert directly to electricity instead? By spreading the whole process out over several steps they are just wasting more energy than they really need to.
I don't normall do this, but I noticed a lot of people complaining about the site being down. Here's the text, but if you can read his site, since the little cartoons that go along with each item are pretty funny:
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 Summary: Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines. As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002.
1. No Prices No B2C ecommerce site would make this mistake, but it's rife in B2B, where most "enterprise solutions" are presented so that you can't tell whether they are suited for 100 people or 100,000 people. Price is the most specific piece of info customers use to understand the nature of an offering, and not providing it makes people feel lost and reduces their understanding of a product line. We have miles of videotape of users asking "Where's the price?" while tearing their hair out. Even B2C sites often make the associated mistake of forgetting prices in product lists, such as category pages or search results. Knowing the price is key in both situations; it lets users differentiate among products and click through to the most relevant ones.
2. Inflexible Search Engines Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they're unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody. A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document's importance. Much better if your search engine calls out "best bets" at the top of the list -- especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.
3. Horizontal Scrolling Users hate scrolling left to right. Vertical scrolling seems to be okay, maybe because it's much more common. Web pages that require horizontal scrolling in standard-sized windows, such as 800x600 pixels, are particularly annoying. For some reason, many websites seem to be optimized for 805-pixel-wide browser windows, even though this resolution is pretty rare and the extra five pixels offer little relative to the annoyance of horizontal scrolling (and the space consumed by the horizontal scrollbar).
4. Fixed Font Size Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40. Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.
5. Blocks of Text A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read. Write for online, not print. To draw users into the text and support scannability, use well-documented tricks:
subheads bulleted lists highlighted keywords short paragraphs the inverted pyramid a simple writing style, and de-fluffed language devoid of marketese.
6. JavaScript in Links Links are the Web's basic building blocks, and users' ability to understand them and to use various browser features correctly is key to enhancing their online skills. Links that don't behave as expected undermine users' understanding of their own system. A link should be a simple hypertext reference that replaces the current page with new content. Users hate unwarranted pop-up windows. When they want the destination to appear in a new page, they can use their browser's "open in new window" command -- assuming, of course, that the link is not a piece of code that interferes with the browser's standard behavior.
Users deserve to control their own destiny. Computers that behave consistently empower people by letting them use their own tools and wield them accurately.
7. Infrequently Asked Questions in FAQ Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask. No good. FAQs have a simplistic information design that does not scale well. They must be reserved for frequently asked questions, since that's the only thing that makes a FAQ a useful website feature. Infrequently asked questions undermine users' trust in the website and damage their understanding of its navigation. 8. Collecting Email Addresses Without a Privacy Policy Users are getting very protective of their inboxes. Every time a website asks for an email address, users react negatively in user testing. Don't assume that people will sign up for a newsletter just because it's free. You have to tell them, right there, what they will get and how frequently it will hit their mailboxes. Also, you must provide an explicit privacy statement or an opt-in checkbox right next to the entry field. Otherwise, you have little hope of collecting email addresses other than mickey@mouse.com.
9. URL > 75 Characters Long URLs break the Web's social navigation because they make it virtually impossible to email a friend a recommendation to visit a Web page. If the URL is too long to show in the browser's address field, many users won't know how to select it. If the URL breaks across multiple lines in the email, most recipients won't know how to glue the pieces back together. The result? No viral marketing, just because your URLs are too long. Bad way to lose business.
10. Mailto Links in Unexpected Locations When you click a link on the Web, what do you expect? To get a new page that contains information about the anchor you just clicked. What don't you expect? To spawn an email program that demands that you write stuff rather than read it.
Mailto links should be used on anchors that explicitly indicate that they're email addresses, either by their format (donald@duck.com) or their wording (send email to customer support). Don't place mailto links on names; clicking on people's names should usually lead to their biography.
Again, interaction design must meet users' expectations. The more that things behave consistently, the more users understand what they can do and the greater their sense of system mastery. Violated expectations create a sense of oppression, where technology rules humans and reduces their ability to steer the interaction.
Cartoons by Doug Sheppard and Katrin L. Salyers
The Growing Importance of Email Integration It's interesting to note that the last three mistakes all relate to email. Despite being the oldest of the main Internet services, email continues to be one of the most important. It's also finally becoming better integrated with the Web, and I expect that this trend will continue (if websites can avoid making those mistakes, that is).
What makes you think that Boeing needs to build a faster airplane in order to compete with Airbus?
Frankly, the way air travel has taken a hit the last year and a half, I'm not sure the A380 is such a good idea as it was 2-3 years ago. Having such a large aircraft means you must fill a lot more seats than you would normally in order to cover investment and operating costs. The A380 has had the best luck with preorders in Asia (all preorders I am aware of came in before 9/11), where they currently fill a 7x7 with smaller seats, pack all the passengers in, and fly a lot of short- to medium-range flights (e.g. HK to Singapore). But even in Asia travel has taken a huge hit, and they already have trouble filling the seats of those 747's. How on earth do you think airlines are going to fill 1.5 to 2 times as many seats on an A380? Flying fewer flights works to offet operating costs to an extent, but remember that the airlines will have to pay for these shiny new airplanes, and the only way to do that is more flights, so it's a catch-22.
Boeing already has a couple of platforms that have done very well for them in that market segment, and they also have a strong UAV (and UCAV) program with the Predator. They evaluated the market for Sonic Cruiser, and decided that it was a losing proposition. If they can pull off an efficient version of the 767 I think they could capture that "middle" of the market back from Airbus.
WTF are you talking about? The question was whether the XML be copyright such that OSS projects are not allowed to use it. I showed the part from the DMCA that specifically says you are allowed to reverse engineer code in order to achieve interopability. It has nothing to do with MS being evil, it has to do with how the law is worded.
BTW I personally would consider XML a computer program in this case (it is a compuer language describing/implementing a particular function...isn't that pretty much the definition of a program?), but I guess that's up to a judge.
No, because reverse-engineering for interopability is specifically allowed by the DMCA:
`(f) REVERSE ENGINEERING- (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
Don't you just love forcing your culture on everyone else? Or maybe you're unaware that some cultures use commas and decimal points differently than in the US.
There is already another project called SkyStation that has a significant business advantage IMHO. It's already been in development for several years, and is backed by some rather large corporations such as Lockheed Martin (where some of the development is taking place).
However, given the current state of the telecom industry, I find it hard to believe that *any* of these projects will get off the ground (no pun intended) in the near future.
Creative Commons provides an easy way for creators to give away some of their rights under copyright law without wading through hundreds of pages debating the merits of the GPL verus the OPL versus the FDL verus the public domain ad infinitum
Because, after all they don't want to impinge on/.'s territory.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to Nagashima Spaland a couple of years ago and the best coaster they had then was a piece of crap kiddy-coaster. I guess I'll have to go back, now.
If that's the case then why do so many corporate websites, stock exchanges, and the like prohibit linking? They don't have any advertising whatsoever.
I think it's more akin to opening an office and prohibiting strangers from walking in off the street to use your bathroom.
I take it you haven't been inside a bus with that stuff? You can see out the window just fine, but from the outside all you see is advertising.
I know people who work at many of the companies listed, and with the exception of SAS Institute (which a few friends working there have told me is an outstanding company to work for) I have heard nothing but horror stories about every single one. My friends don't seem like cynics, but I wonder if it's human nature to complain more than praise?
I actually know an otherwise very intelligent person who doesn't believe in gravity. No joke, she argues with everyone who discovers this fact about her. Gravity still functions on her despite her indifference to it. Of course, she was a law student, and they're trained to convince people (even themselves, apparently) that black is white, gravity doesn't exist, etc.
You mean as the supply diminishes, the price increases????
Gee, way to point out a basic law of microeconomics.
I'd like to remind you that there is also a demand curve, where the price decreases as demand decreases. If there are only a few positions available but many applicants, there will price competition between the applicants resulting in a lower salary.
Over the years most legacy codes are ported to other, more recent languages and systems for exactly this reason.
Of course I have seen companies that still maintain codes that were originally written on punch cards, because the guy that wrote it is dead an nobody else fully understands how it works.
A former girlfriend was a physicist. Being an engineer, we always got into the endless debates of "theory" vs. "practice". As a physicist she seemed to prefer talking about sex, whereas I preferred actually *having* sex.
Anyone remember when Halo was supposed to come out simultaneously for PC and Mac, before Bungie was bought by MS? That's right, 2002!
The projected release date (at least for PC) is now second half of 2003 IIRC.
I'm still trying to figure out what a taco place needs with all that horsepower.
Isn't this what stuff like Active Directory are for? Why can't I create one hierarchy that represents the actual storage structure, then map an infinite number of additional heirarchies on top of that based on metadata, e.g. as if I were to use softlinks to create additional heirarchies based on a different attribute than what I originally sorted on.
/pr0n/movies /pr0n/stills /pr0n/text [do people download pr0n text???]
/pr0n/perverted /pr0n/spicy /pr0n/nice
In a manner of speaking, I could store my pr0n as:
and then create another organizational structure of "links" as
I still have the option of layering movies, stills, and text under the perverted, spicy, and nice categories as well.
e-commerce sites that ask me to "print a copy of this page" for a receipt. Yeah, that works really fscking well when I'm on my laptop in a hotel room somewhere, assholes.
Actually the thing that struck me was the whole conservation of energy thing. A human isn't a battery, it's a GENERATOR. You have to feed and water all those humans who then convert that energy into electricity, and that food doesn't come for free either. Somewhere, somehow, the machines are getting energy from an external source (e.g. the sun, geothermal heating) to supplement the energy they already have. They are then using that energy to generate food (even if that food is other humans), which they give to the humans who generate the electricity.
What's the point? Why not make a more efficient mechanical generator to convert directly to electricity instead? By spreading the whole process out over several steps they are just wasting more energy than they really need to.
I don't normall do this, but I noticed a lot of people complaining about the site being down. Here's the text, but if you can read his site, since the little cartoons that go along with each item are pretty funny:
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
Summary:
Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.
As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002.
1. No Prices
No B2C ecommerce site would make this mistake, but it's rife in B2B, where most "enterprise solutions" are presented so that you can't tell whether they are suited for 100 people or 100,000 people. Price is the most specific piece of info customers use to understand the nature of an offering, and not providing it makes people feel lost and reduces their understanding of a product line. We have miles of videotape of users asking "Where's the price?" while tearing their hair out.
Even B2C sites often make the associated mistake of forgetting prices in product lists, such as category pages or search results. Knowing the price is key in both situations; it lets users differentiate among products and click through to the most relevant ones.
2. Inflexible Search Engines
Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they're unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.
A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document's importance. Much better if your search engine calls out "best bets" at the top of the list -- especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.
3. Horizontal Scrolling
Users hate scrolling left to right. Vertical scrolling seems to be okay, maybe because it's much more common.
Web pages that require horizontal scrolling in standard-sized windows, such as 800x600 pixels, are particularly annoying. For some reason, many websites seem to be optimized for 805-pixel-wide browser windows, even though this resolution is pretty rare and the extra five pixels offer little relative to the annoyance of horizontal scrolling (and the space consumed by the horizontal scrollbar).
4. Fixed Font Size
Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.
Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.
5. Blocks of Text
A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read.
Write for online, not print. To draw users into the text and support scannability, use well-documented tricks:
subheads
bulleted lists
highlighted keywords
short paragraphs
the inverted pyramid
a simple writing style, and
de-fluffed language devoid of marketese.
6. JavaScript in Links
Links are the Web's basic building blocks, and users' ability to understand them and to use various browser features correctly is key to enhancing their online skills.
Links that don't behave as expected undermine users' understanding of their own system. A link should be a simple hypertext reference that replaces the current page with new content. Users hate unwarranted pop-up windows. When they want the destination to appear in a new page, they can use their browser's "open in new window" command -- assuming, of course, that the link is not a piece of code that interferes with the browser's standard behavior.
Users deserve to control their own destiny. Computers that behave consistently empower people by letting them use their own tools and wield them accurately.
7. Infrequently Asked Questions in FAQ
Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask. No good. FAQs have a simplistic information design that does not scale well. They must be reserved for frequently asked questions, since that's the only thing that makes a FAQ a useful website feature. Infrequently asked questions undermine users' trust in the website and damage their understanding of its navigation.
8. Collecting Email Addresses Without a Privacy Policy
Users are getting very protective of their inboxes. Every time a website asks for an email address, users react negatively in user testing.
Don't assume that people will sign up for a newsletter just because it's free. You have to tell them, right there, what they will get and how frequently it will hit their mailboxes. Also, you must provide an explicit privacy statement or an opt-in checkbox right next to the entry field. Otherwise, you have little hope of collecting email addresses other than mickey@mouse.com.
9. URL > 75 Characters
Long URLs break the Web's social navigation because they make it virtually impossible to email a friend a recommendation to visit a Web page. If the URL is too long to show in the browser's address field, many users won't know how to select it. If the URL breaks across multiple lines in the email, most recipients won't know how to glue the pieces back together.
The result? No viral marketing, just because your URLs are too long. Bad way to lose business.
10. Mailto Links in Unexpected Locations
When you click a link on the Web, what do you expect? To get a new page that contains information about the anchor you just clicked.
What don't you expect? To spawn an email program that demands that you write stuff rather than read it.
Mailto links should be used on anchors that explicitly indicate that they're email addresses, either by their format (donald@duck.com) or their wording (send email to customer support). Don't place mailto links on names; clicking on people's names should usually lead to their biography.
Again, interaction design must meet users' expectations. The more that things behave consistently, the more users understand what they can do and the greater their sense of system mastery. Violated expectations create a sense of oppression, where technology rules humans and reduces their ability to steer the interaction.
Cartoons by
Doug Sheppard and Katrin L. Salyers
The Growing Importance of Email Integration
It's interesting to note that the last three mistakes all relate to email. Despite being the oldest of the main Internet services, email continues to be one of the most important. It's also finally becoming better integrated with the Web, and I expect that this trend will continue (if websites can avoid making those mistakes, that is).
Did anyone else see the title and think of an exercise machine? It struck me as strange that I'd be seeing health & fitness articles on /.
Whoops you're right I was thinking of the X45, and gave it the wrong moniker.
What makes you think that Boeing needs to build a faster airplane in order to compete with Airbus?
Frankly, the way air travel has taken a hit the last year and a half, I'm not sure the A380 is such a good idea as it was 2-3 years ago. Having such a large aircraft means you must fill a lot more seats than you would normally in order to cover investment and operating costs. The A380 has had the best luck with preorders in Asia (all preorders I am aware of came in before 9/11), where they currently fill a 7x7 with smaller seats, pack all the passengers in, and fly a lot of short- to medium-range flights (e.g. HK to Singapore). But even in Asia travel has taken a huge hit, and they already have trouble filling the seats of those 747's. How on earth do you think airlines are going to fill 1.5 to 2 times as many seats on an A380? Flying fewer flights works to offet operating costs to an extent, but remember that the airlines will have to pay for these shiny new airplanes, and the only way to do that is more flights, so it's a catch-22.
Boeing already has a couple of platforms that have done very well for them in that market segment, and they also have a strong UAV (and UCAV) program with the Predator. They evaluated the market for Sonic Cruiser, and decided that it was a losing proposition. If they can pull off an efficient version of the 767 I think they could capture that "middle" of the market back from Airbus.
Duke Nukem Forever = infinity. Only on Star Trek could they figure out a way to cancel out infinity.
WTF are you talking about? The question was whether the XML be copyright such that OSS projects are not allowed to use it. I showed the part from the DMCA that specifically says you are allowed to reverse engineer code in order to achieve interopability. It has nothing to do with MS being evil, it has to do with how the law is worded.
BTW I personally would consider XML a computer program in this case (it is a compuer language describing/implementing a particular function...isn't that pretty much the definition of a program?), but I guess that's up to a judge.
7 minute abs [patent pending]
I mean, who wants 8 minute abs when you can have it in 7 instead?Don't you just love forcing your culture on everyone else? Or maybe you're unaware that some cultures use commas and decimal points differently than in the US.
However, given the current state of the telecom industry, I find it hard to believe that *any* of these projects will get off the ground (no pun intended) in the near future.
Because, after all they don't want to impinge on /.'s territory.
Only if you avoid the online casinos.