I don't think I could cope with this absolutely retarded behaviour. Guess I'll hang around on v2 until someone fixes it. When the fuck will developers learn, STOP DOING "CLEVER" THINGS THAT RESULT IN INCONSISTENT AND UNPREDICTABLE RESULTS, I need my (muscle/visual) memory damnit.
Now I know that tenuous cheap shots at Microsoft are tedious, (and if you really care, check my history, I've defended MS more often than I've slated them on here) but honestly - this is exactly the sort of crap I expect from the "I know how to make your computer easier to use - menus items that rearrange and show and hide themselves every bloody time you open them" crew at Redmond.
AFAIK, Apple thoroughly customized the version of Java that comes bundled with OS X so as to make it look consistent with the rest of the platform. It certainly doesn't look half as jarring as it does on windows.
You wouldn't produce the content with javascript. The content would be in the (x)html document; you'd just use javascript to make it invisible to a GUI rendering browser (CSS display:none;, margin-left:-1000px;, etc). The content would always be in the DOM, accessible via scripting, lack of scripting, screenreaders, or plain old view source. You just wouldn't see it if you had js on, which is in the 90%s for all the population, and I might imagine higher within the "gullible enough to be fooled by this sort of thing in the first place" segment they'd be aiming at.
Brilliant post, but I don't agree with this last bit:
Which proves the man is running a Microsoft product, because he's hiding something. Only MS can produce that level of guilt.
Every (recentish)/. story about Ruby on Rails, Java or PHP (let alone >1 of the above compared) has, at least in part, degenerated into the same old flamefests. I could reasonably see the guy's point in taking the approach he did were it any of those, just as much as MS.
Sorry to reply to myself, I got distracted by actual real work (good grief!) and submitted by mistake without saying the actual point.
That is, although Mildenhall is in the UK, I think strictly speaking you may still be correct, as USAF Mildenhall may be technically considered US soil. I don't remember the details of international agreements on this (I'm sure Wikipedia will give you a start, if you really care), but I know my band were hired to play a gig there about 10 years back, and entering the base really feels like crossing a border! You have to change all your currency to USD, drive on the right, etc.
I love how I have to read other country's news reports to find out what's going on in my own country... This was going on in the same country as the news agency. This isn't the BBC reporting on events in America, it's the BBC reporting on events in Suffolk.
But there are some problems with SLAs. The biggest one is the lack of statistical meaningfulness when outages are so rare... The proverbial "six nines" availability (99.9999% uptime) means no more than 30 seconds downtime per year. That's really kind of ridiculous... Think of it this way: If your six nines system goes down mysteriously just once and it takes you an hour to figure out the cause and fix it, well, you've just blown your downtime budget for the next century.
You've corrected his typo and put it there as if to say "I fixed this". Actually, you put [sic] when you quote something erroneous, errors included; it's there to say "I know this is wrong but I deliberately didn't fix it because I wanted to quote strictly verbatim".
I'm a web developer; one of those bloody-minded standards-bashing "on MY watch, we'll serve clean, semantic, gracefully degrading, browser neutral XHTML/CSS" types. I've always hated Flash (as a web user) and perhaps as a result never voluntarily extended my skillset into Flash development.
But my employer needs me to do the odd bit of Flash, so last week I went and did some Flash training.
Verdict: Christ, if only I could never build another XHTML/CSS/JS site ever again, and do everything in Flash...
The best word I can think for it is, is "sane". Instead of thinking: "I want to do <X>, well, that's supposedly not possible, but if I composite some images in a really tricksy way, and allow myself to add a few nonsense non-semantic divs and spans, I can do something that gives a pretty good illusion of <X>. Oh, but it won't work on IE. But if I throw in this javascript compatibility wrapper and stuff my CSS full of deliberately broken comments, I can make IE play along. Oh, but heaven knows if it'll still work in future. I guess that depends whether IE8 renders it as IE8 or as IE8 pretending to be IE7..."
In Flash, every time I thought "I want to do <X>", the tutor would say: "you can accomplish this by going to the <Y> menu and choosing 'Do <X>'." And anywhere it works at all, it will all work.
To be clear: as a user, I'm still not a big fan. But I'm honestly surprised you slate it from the dev point of view. Isn't that why we had/have so many Flash sites in the first place? Because developers can get on with achieving what they want to achieve, in a predictable environment, with a half decent IDE, etc, instead of spending 80% of their time hacking around fragmented insanity?
Can we make the visuals simple, and navigation clean?
Have we avoided clutter? Either visual or cognitive?
Is it readable? Does it pass muster at a Flesch "plain english" level?
Otherwise known as "Information Architecture", and critical to effective web design. (Interesting, IAs tend to be the highest paid job title in the web dev field, see here.)
An analogy for the coders: what's worse than trying to code a major piece of software without having fully worked out scope and specs - exactly what problems it needs to solve for the business, and so on.
Ultimately, IA is why all those comments from the tediously omnipresent snide, sneering, critical, back-seat-driving, basement-dwelling slashdot minority saying graphic design is just clutter and flash and fluff and useless distraction, are sadly mistaken. The talented graphic designer uses every tool in the "visual language" toolbox (whitespace, typography, colour, shape, size, etc) to most clearly serve and support the priorities and relationships established by your IA.
Here's one common method:
Brainstorm a range of persona representing archetypes of your main visitors. For example, you might include:
A (existing/potential) customer (b2c)
An (existing/potential) supplier
Someone from the media
A prospective employee
Obviously it depends on the nature of your business.
Brainstorm what content and/or functionality those people would want to find on your site. Eg. product info, pricing info, online purchasing, how to find your physical shop(s), staff contact information, manuals and documentation, supplementary content/expansions, etc.
For each persona (whether or not that persona was one who desired it), assign numerical values of importance to each content or functionality item, including negative reactions. Eg, -1 = puts me off, 0 = neutral, 1 = pleased to see it, 2 = very pleased to see it / considers it essential. BE STRICT AND HARSH!
Assign a numeric ranking to the importance / weighting of each your persona (if, for example, you are likely to be visited by 10,000 times as many customers as suppliers, it doesn't make sense for the stuff the suppliers want to overwhelm the stuff the customers want.)
Spreadsheet magic (left as an exercise to the reader) can then produce an overall value score for each content or functionality item.
Stuff at the top is obviously critical. Your main nav will obviously want to be influenced by this (remember to structure navigation in terms of how visitors will see things, not in terms of organisational heirachies!) but it may go further. For example you may well want to have the top 2 or 3 items to have a prominent "pull out" direct link from the homepage.
Likewise, stuff at the bottom with very low scores, you should consider cutting altogether. Don't assume everything you add automatically adds value to the overall site - it's possible to have too much there, the more you have the more difficult it becomes to build navigation that remains supremely simple and usable.
Now, some people write off this approach. They've got a point, but I'm wary of falling into sycophantic "OMG! 37signals said it, it must be true!" mode. It works for them, but not everybody has not everybody has their team, their instinct and experience, etc; for many organisations this is unfamiliar territory and therefore the persona exercise is a useful piece of formalism to force them to think of these things. Of course you don't follow it blindly and let yourself temper it with common sense.
As for the technical side, as you're a techie, I ho
Good call. We drop heavy bass amps and flightcases and such on top of our guitarists multifx pedal and it still works fine. And that's a relatively low end (Boss), modern, full-of-electronics-lcd-and-all-that type of pedal, never mind a simple single-purpose, analogue, vintage type of thing. It seems guitar pedals truly are built to take immense punishment as a matter of course.
1. Dropped from hip height quite a few times, indoors (carpet): still worked. 2. Expelled at pace from open hip height pocket whilst running for a train, onto the pavement (sidewalk), 10 days after my warranty expired: stone dead, kaput, dreaming of the fjords etc. 3. Bought a new one. 4. Placed in jeans pocket for a couple of hours whilst I took some photos: screen ruined (otherwise still fully functional).
Guess I haven't had the best of luck with reliability:(
I tell my boss to send me specs/todos and so on in email because that's where I keep track of them, and cross em off as they're done. Otherwise it's in one ear and out the other. Not always about CYA.
Despite your last sentence, it seems like actually you do/could use email for CYA, too.
And I don't mean that as an insult. Despite the implication of CYA in GP post as being a distasteful PHB thing (sick of the TLAs yet?;)), it works both ways.
If you tell your boss to send you specs in email, then you've got a defence when it comes to the PHB scope creep / moving goalposts that/. programmer crew do so love to (rightfully) complain about.
"Hi boss, here's the widget, accepting any input between Q14 and R66, as specified."
"What? You'll have to rewrite it. I told you it needs to accept from Q12 and to R69!"
**produce email**
"No you didn't."
Gentleman, we've pinned it down. Not quite:P
I'm 43 and at school was taught that a billion was a million million, but by the time I got to work thousand million was the norm. I'm 26 and at school was taught that a billion was a million million, but by the time I got to uni thousand million was the norm.
Who modded the GP troll? He is mostly right. By the way, GUI is irreplaceable for vector drawing applications, scientific data visualization, studying various subjects that involve visually represented elements (e.g. medicine) etc. Thank you.
That troll moderation is one of the most moronic moderations I've received. I point out that a text-based interface is superior when you mostly do text-based computing yourself, but this shouldn't lead to myopic overgeneralisation, quite clearly offering various specific examples where graphical presentation and/or allowing graphical manipulation is a superior interface. That's not a troll. It just shows whoever had mod points shared the same "my view == the only possible view" perspective. Laughable.
Maybe YOU don't do any graphic design, video editing, audio production, etc; maybe all YOUR computer use is text-based stuff; I don't see how you can extrapolate that to a blanket statement of fact for the entire world.
Unless you know any graphic designers who use command line photoshop?
> photoshop -select 50,101,40,50 -addtextlayer font:helvetica size:17pt antialiasing:crisp text:"Hello" -addlayerstyle styletype:bevel
Much better. Right?
Or how about, say, ATC systems? I'm sure it's really easy to spot, at a glance, two planes getting too close for comfort when you're given an 80x25 screen full of numbers, as compared to a graphical representation.
Er... no... doesn't really work, does it. So your +4 insightful is... well... not.
I see this story is tagged "Macs for morons", and various posts joking about destroying Mac owners' machines is not a bug, it's a feature, and so forth.
I must take issue with this stance. If we are to celebrate the fact that a certain demographic sector suffered inconvenience and damage to property, I must insist we aim the full force of our collective schadenfreude not at Mac users, but at Mail on Sunday readers;-)
(Serious explanation: The Mail is one of the most nasty, deplorable shit-for-brained rags in the country, but sadly very powerful. I would consider the editor, Paul Dacre, one of the most evil men in Britain, for so shamelessly, irresponsibly and (sadly) skillfully peddling his insiduous blend of bigotry, racism, classism, sexism, and scaremongering. A typical Mail headline is something like: "Does your council spend your tax on teaching illegal immigrants how to give working mothers cancer?" It's not the Mail if it doesn't get in a middle-class whinge about taxes/councils/schools/hospitals, insinuate a highly improbable conspiracy involving immigrants, remind women their rightful place is In The Home, and stir panic on public health issues - naturally, all expressed in the form of a question, since it's UTTER BULLSHIT and they know it.
I am also currently with Be. You're right, they don't seem to call heavy bittorrent-ers. I'm in a house of 5 guys, I don't really use torrents besides pr0n but I do download a lot of (legal) music. Some of the other guys get a lot of films and TV shows (don't tell the MPAA). I bet between us we do 300gb/mo easily, we've never heard a murmur.
I'm wary of recommending them, still: we get about 2-3Mbps after paying for £24, and it drops the connection dozens of times per day, often necessitating a router reboot. But I'm not sure how much of this is Be's fault, and how much is BT's.
DRM-free music was supposedly what slashdot readers want? Or was it just 'free' music all along, and the DRM thing was just a way to claim justification for piracy while it lasted?
People complained that they pirated because the music had DRM, and the DRM is going. People complained the music was too expensive, and itunes led to way lower prices. Now what is the excuse?
To be honest, I get the impression that slashdot readers (by and large, they are not homogenous, etc, etc) don't want music at all. Every music related story is filled with comments like "all modern music is shit, talentless mannequins miming to overcompressed noise..."
Which obviously suggests they haven't bothered to seek out the likes of Seth Lakeman or Ojos de Brujo, churning out albums packed with instrumental ability, superb songwriting, and endless joie de vivre; and furthermore, either could not possibly contemplate buying any non-modern music, as if albums like this instantly stopped being masterpieces the moment they became over 30 years old.
Calm down with your righteous indignation, you're making yourself look stupid.
Second, *every* university I've ever visited had colleges. For example, the University of Washington (definitely not in the Ivy League) has a College of Arts and Sciences, a College of Engineering, a College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and so on.
"College" in that sense obviously correlates to "Faculty", which is entirely different to the Oxbridge concept of colleges.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that really does sound like an absolute trainwreck.
:rolls eyes:
Nearly every site I go to, I just type 1 or 2 letters, down arrow, enter.
"s" - > slashdot, "f" -> facebook, "l" -> last.fm, etc.
I don't think I could cope with this absolutely retarded behaviour. Guess I'll hang around on v2 until someone fixes it. When the fuck will developers learn, STOP DOING "CLEVER" THINGS THAT RESULT IN INCONSISTENT AND UNPREDICTABLE RESULTS, I need my (muscle/visual) memory damnit.
Now I know that tenuous cheap shots at Microsoft are tedious, (and if you really care, check my history, I've defended MS more often than I've slated them on here) but honestly - this is exactly the sort of crap I expect from the "I know how to make your computer easier to use - menus items that rearrange and show and hide themselves every bloody time you open them" crew at Redmond.
Genius
Nice pun ;)
You wouldn't produce the content with javascript. The content would be in the (x)html document; you'd just use javascript to make it invisible to a GUI rendering browser (CSS display:none;, margin-left:-1000px;, etc). The content would always be in the DOM, accessible via scripting, lack of scripting, screenreaders, or plain old view source. You just wouldn't see it if you had js on, which is in the 90%s for all the population, and I might imagine higher within the "gullible enough to be fooled by this sort of thing in the first place" segment they'd be aiming at.
Never had a cellar/basement. And I've lived in 10 houses in the last 10 years...
Brilliant post, but I don't agree with this last bit:
Which proves the man is running a Microsoft product, because he's hiding something. Only MS can produce that level of guilt.Every (recentish) /. story about Ruby on Rails, Java or PHP (let alone >1 of the above compared) has, at least in part, degenerated into the same old flamefests. I could reasonably see the guy's point in taking the approach he did were it any of those, just as much as MS.
Sorry to reply to myself, I got distracted by actual real work (good grief!) and submitted by mistake without saying the actual point.
That is, although Mildenhall is in the UK, I think strictly speaking you may still be correct, as USAF Mildenhall may be technically considered US soil. I don't remember the details of international agreements on this (I'm sure Wikipedia will give you a start, if you really care), but I know my band were hired to play a gig there about 10 years back, and entering the base really feels like crossing a border! You have to change all your currency to USD, drive on the right, etc.
But there are some problems with SLAs. The biggest one is the lack of statistical meaningfulness when outages are so rare... The proverbial "six nines" availability (99.9999% uptime) means no more than 30 seconds downtime per year. That's really kind of ridiculous... Think of it this way: If your six nines system goes down mysteriously just once and it takes you an hour to figure out the cause and fix it, well, you've just blown your downtime budget for the next century.
Offtopic, but that's not how you use [sic].
You've corrected his typo and put it there as if to say "I fixed this". Actually, you put [sic] when you quote something erroneous, errors included; it's there to say "I know this is wrong but I deliberately didn't fix it because I wanted to quote strictly verbatim".
Funny you should say that.
I'm a web developer; one of those bloody-minded standards-bashing "on MY watch, we'll serve clean, semantic, gracefully degrading, browser neutral XHTML/CSS" types. I've always hated Flash (as a web user) and perhaps as a result never voluntarily extended my skillset into Flash development.
But my employer needs me to do the odd bit of Flash, so last week I went and did some Flash training.
Verdict: Christ, if only I could never build another XHTML/CSS/JS site ever again, and do everything in Flash...
The best word I can think for it is, is "sane". Instead of thinking: "I want to do <X>, well, that's supposedly not possible, but if I composite some images in a really tricksy way, and allow myself to add a few nonsense non-semantic divs and spans, I can do something that gives a pretty good illusion of <X>. Oh, but it won't work on IE. But if I throw in this javascript compatibility wrapper and stuff my CSS full of deliberately broken comments, I can make IE play along. Oh, but heaven knows if it'll still work in future. I guess that depends whether IE8 renders it as IE8 or as IE8 pretending to be IE7..."
In Flash, every time I thought "I want to do <X>", the tutor would say: "you can accomplish this by going to the <Y> menu and choosing 'Do <X>'." And anywhere it works at all, it will all work.
To be clear: as a user, I'm still not a big fan. But I'm honestly surprised you slate it from the dev point of view. Isn't that why we had/have so many Flash sites in the first place? Because developers can get on with achieving what they want to achieve, in a predictable environment, with a half decent IDE, etc, instead of spending 80% of their time hacking around fragmented insanity?
The flow goes like this:
Otherwise known as "Information Architecture", and critical to effective web design. (Interesting, IAs tend to be the highest paid job title in the web dev field, see here.)
An analogy for the coders: what's worse than trying to code a major piece of software without having fully worked out scope and specs - exactly what problems it needs to solve for the business, and so on.
Ultimately, IA is why all those comments from the tediously omnipresent snide, sneering, critical, back-seat-driving, basement-dwelling slashdot minority saying graphic design is just clutter and flash and fluff and useless distraction, are sadly mistaken. The talented graphic designer uses every tool in the "visual language" toolbox (whitespace, typography, colour, shape, size, etc) to most clearly serve and support the priorities and relationships established by your IA.
Here's one common method:
Obviously it depends on the nature of your business.
Now, some people write off this approach. They've got a point, but I'm wary of falling into sycophantic "OMG! 37signals said it, it must be true!" mode. It works for them, but not everybody has not everybody has their team, their instinct and experience, etc; for many organisations this is unfamiliar territory and therefore the persona exercise is a useful piece of formalism to force them to think of these things. Of course you don't follow it blindly and let yourself temper it with common sense.
As for the technical side, as you're a techie, I ho
Good call. We drop heavy bass amps and flightcases and such on top of our guitarists multifx pedal and it still works fine. And that's a relatively low end (Boss), modern, full-of-electronics-lcd-and-all-that type of pedal, never mind a simple single-purpose, analogue, vintage type of thing. It seems guitar pedals truly are built to take immense punishment as a matter of course.
Zen Vision:M -
:(
;-)
1. Dropped from hip height quite a few times, indoors (carpet): still worked.
2. Expelled at pace from open hip height pocket whilst running for a train, onto the pavement (sidewalk), 10 days after my warranty expired: stone dead, kaput, dreaming of the fjords etc.
3. Bought a new one.
4. Placed in jeans pocket for a couple of hours whilst I took some photos: screen ruined (otherwise still fully functional).
Guess I haven't had the best of luck with reliability
Still better than an ipod though
This time, I'll keep it polite...
It was deliberate ;)
Despite your last sentence, it seems like actually you do/could use email for CYA, too.
And I don't mean that as an insult. Despite the implication of CYA in GP post as being a distasteful PHB thing (sick of the TLAs yet? ;)), it works both ways.
If you tell your boss to send you specs in email, then you've got a defence when it comes to the PHB scope creep / moving goalposts that /. programmer crew do so love to (rightfully) complain about.
That troll moderation is one of the most moronic moderations I've received. I point out that a text-based interface is superior when you mostly do text-based computing yourself, but this shouldn't lead to myopic overgeneralisation, quite clearly offering various specific examples where graphical presentation and/or allowing graphical manipulation is a superior interface. That's not a troll. It just shows whoever had mod points shared the same "my view == the only possible view" perspective. Laughable.
Er, what?
Maybe YOU don't do any graphic design, video editing, audio production, etc; maybe all YOUR computer use is text-based stuff; I don't see how you can extrapolate that to a blanket statement of fact for the entire world.
Unless you know any graphic designers who use command line photoshop? > photoshop -select 50,101,40,50 -addtextlayer font:helvetica size:17pt antialiasing:crisp text:"Hello" -addlayerstyle styletype:bevel Much better. Right?
Or how about, say, ATC systems? I'm sure it's really easy to spot, at a glance, two planes getting too close for comfort when you're given an 80x25 screen full of numbers, as compared to a graphical representation.
Er... no... doesn't really work, does it. So your +4 insightful is... well... not.
I see this story is tagged "Macs for morons", and various posts joking about destroying Mac owners' machines is not a bug, it's a feature, and so forth.
I must take issue with this stance. If we are to celebrate the fact that a certain demographic sector suffered inconvenience and damage to property, I must insist we aim the full force of our collective schadenfreude not at Mac users, but at Mail on Sunday readers ;-)
(Serious explanation: The Mail is one of the most nasty, deplorable shit-for-brained rags in the country, but sadly very powerful. I would consider the editor, Paul Dacre, one of the most evil men in Britain, for so shamelessly, irresponsibly and (sadly) skillfully peddling his insiduous blend of bigotry, racism, classism, sexism, and scaremongering. A typical Mail headline is something like: "Does your council spend your tax on teaching illegal immigrants how to give working mothers cancer?" It's not the Mail if it doesn't get in a middle-class whinge about taxes/councils/schools/hospitals, insinuate a highly improbable conspiracy involving immigrants, remind women their rightful place is In The Home, and stir panic on public health issues - naturally, all expressed in the form of a question, since it's UTTER BULLSHIT and they know it.
Evil, evil, evil paper.
I am also currently with Be. You're right, they don't seem to call heavy bittorrent-ers. I'm in a house of 5 guys, I don't really use torrents besides pr0n but I do download a lot of (legal) music. Some of the other guys get a lot of films and TV shows (don't tell the MPAA). I bet between us we do 300gb/mo easily, we've never heard a murmur.
I'm wary of recommending them, still: we get about 2-3Mbps after paying for £24, and it drops the connection dozens of times per day, often necessitating a router reboot. But I'm not sure how much of this is Be's fault, and how much is BT's.
Which obviously suggests they haven't bothered to seek out the likes of Seth Lakeman or Ojos de Brujo, churning out albums packed with instrumental ability, superb songwriting, and endless joie de vivre; and furthermore, either could not possibly contemplate buying any non-modern music, as if albums like this instantly stopped being masterpieces the moment they became over 30 years old.