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).
Well because the US is a capitalist country and because currently most people seem to believe that the best way to make money in software is by keeping the code proprietary and because US government favors money-making corporations.
I agree that if it were open source it would be far more likely the security problems would be discovered quickly.
So how about creating an open source alternative... anyone ready to register an OpenVote system on SourceForge?
Even if the Read Estate industry is massive (and it is), this guys market is much smaller unless he gets the word out to the general public, which involves spending lots of money on advertising...
Word of mouth is far more powerful than advertising. What the guy needs to do is get a few RE offices up and running with the software and get those RE agents to talk to others about it. In addition there are specialist RE web sites where RE agents could discuss the project and hence get more coverage of his project.
There is usually an increase in interest (indicated by a short term increase in site hits) when new releases are announced but this fades back to regular traffic of ~40 visits per day as measured by webalizer after a short period of time. Is this an anomaly?
This seems pretty normal. Any time you make an announcement on your project (including releases) you are going to drive traffic to its web site (that's why corporations pump out press releases). The fact that it dies down afterwards is totally normal, you'd expect people to come, see what's going on, download the stuff and leave.
Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?
Probably not. This might be an indication that the software is wonderful, but it's more likely an indication that the user base is small. As the user base increases they are going to find all sorts of weird problems (especially with different machine/OS configurations) which will get reported as bugs.
Is there more interest in a new project vs. one that is more or less mature?
I don't think new vs. old is as important as good vs. bad. If your project is useful and well executed then you'll get hits. Just compare Mozilla with any of the thousands of "new" projects listed on SourceForge.
Is the project too narrow to attract an audience?
I doubt that. Real Estate is a massive business world wide.
Could the underlying business (real estate) just be too saturated with web sites?
That's possible in any business, if your project had some uniqueness then the saturation will not be important. Getting the message out about your feature set will.
Just what are the secrets to a successful (measured by lots of contributors, etc) project...or am I just not defining success correctly?
I don't think number of contributors is the most important measure. How about number of people actually using the software? In POPFile there's a feature where it can report back (opt in) that it's being used, this gives me an idea of how many downloads converted into users. Another measure of success would be mentions of your project in the press.
And here's the key to a coherent FP (for which I think I should win some sort of prize... hey Slashdot editors how about a free T-shirt?).
I subscribe to Slashdot so I get to see the stories before you can reply to them. If there's a story I have something worthwhile commenting on I fully prepare my reply in Emacs' *scratch* buffer and then copy and paste it in when I can reply.
Another interesting viewpoint can be found in this article
which points out that spammers don't even have to sell anything
to make money. They mention a number of schemes:
Offering e-mail recipients "free pornography" if they download a software program.
The program often provides the pornography, but only after the user's computer
dials a 1-900 number to an overseas location, racking up hundreds of dollars in phone charges.
"Pump and dump" stock schemes, in which a spammer sends e-mails touting a certain
stock and encourages people to buy it. The stock's value goes up, and spammers
sell it at a profit.
Accepting payment for an item without sending it. Spammers bet that someone
buying Viagra or pills for the enlargement of body parts would be too
embarrassed to call the police or Better Business Bureau.
Of course, if there was ever need for proof that there's a sucker born
every minute, just check out this quote from the Wired article:
There was a picture on the top of the page that said, 'As Seen on TV,'
and I guess that made me think it was legit.
That really depends on the definition of "folds". Some examples from my experience...
1. Company simply stops operating.
In that case the company itself may still exist (in fact if you go to the web site of the Secretary of State for your state you may be able to determine if the company is still "active" in which case someone's filing simple forms on the company each year). In that case the company (and by extension the shareholders) own the code.
In this case you might find that the owners, who probably have little interest in the company, and acquire the rights for a small fee.
2. Company is bought outright by another company
This one's pretty simple, the new company probably bought all the assets of the old company and that would include the copyright on the source code.
3. Company's assets a bought but company remains alive
This can happen when a company gets into serious trouble, as happened with many boom companies, and is effectively worth nothing because there are no customers. The remaining assets (e.g. physical stuff and copyrights) sometimes get acquired by another company for a small fee. This happened to me, and in that case the new company acquired the assets and got the source code.
4. Company goes bankrupt
If the company owes money to people then all its assets are going to get valued, and that will include the source code, and who gets them will probably be in the hands of a court. In this instance see what happened in the bankruptcy clean up.
In the case of venture backed companies there might be specific clauses in the investment that state what happens if the company goes under and the VCs may end up with the code.
I totally agree. There is *nothing* in the language that forces people to write bad code with Perl (and frankly there are plenty of unreadable non-Perl projects out there).
On the POPFile project I've done everything I can to avoid Perl's temptations into obscurity by writing clear code. Amazingly I've been critized by monoric readers of the code that I could have done things with less "space" (i.e. using less screen real estate). People like that know nothing about maintenance of code and should just bug off.
If you come across Perl code that's unreadable don't blame the language, blame the author. People who write obfuscated code in any language are doing a disservice to themselves and others who read the code; if they release the code as open source then it's a _crime_ since they are inviting readers to work on their crud.
which would have made everything so clear? I mean it's only $33 difference. I hope when you buy these licenses you get a free T-Shirt with "Sucker!" in large letters on the front.
SCO needs to put up or shut up. If they think they have IP in Linux then show us. Dammit if the code is already in Linux it's already public so point to the code.
Could we not go around referring to The Department of Homeland Security as HomeSec? The last thing we need is/. popularizing a cool sounding name for this behemoth.
If we need to refer to it then use the initial letters of its name... DoHs.
Somehow appropriate when they put out warnings like the last one.
I am *not* saying that OSS/FS developers ought to be cloning Windows. That would be stupid, but truly understanding what Windows is and how it operates is very important to getting OSS/FS inside companies.
The reason you want to be inside large companies is because then Microsoft will start losing $$$ from its customers. If the customers start demanding/using OSS/FS then Microsoft is going to get hurt.
You can't do that if you don't understand Windows. One very successful project is SAMBA. It doesn't attempt to clone Windows it attempts to make non-Windows platforms interact with Windows. That's vital is OSS/FS is to "embrace and extend" Windows.
This makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. They can pick at Linux all the want since it's OSS and they can also demo. it to their customers. They'll get great information about how Linux works and they'll be able to compare and constrast in their controlled environment to make Windows look good to their key customers. When a company like Microsoft says "Enterprise" on something they are talking about the really serious $$$ here, not a lab for the average Windows user, but a place to invite very senior people in Fortune x00 companies.
And the OSS/FS could do more of the same. It always worries me when OSS/FS advocates say bad things about Windows and then you find out that they never use it. If you don't know your enemy IN DEPTH then you are missing out. I think every OSS/FS developer ought to have access to a copy of Windows.
The company is Electric Cloud and yes we are rather small (our CEO is John Ousterhout of Tcl fame/infamy): the real web site is going up in early August.
However we didn't blow $400 on VMWare we needed it. Our product runs cross platform on Windows and Linux and wanted a way for the developers to be able to use both cheaply. Dual booting isn't an option because it's very slow to change context and you don't want to have two email clients, etc. to manage (or only be able to check email etc. when in one operating system), two machines was too expensive ($400 is a lot cheaper than a second PC). So VMWare was the answer.
We blew the money on two 19" flat screens per developer.
The article mentions VMWare. This is a truly excellent application that runs in Windows and Linux and fully virtualizes the hardware. You literally "switch on" a machine in a VMWare window and you see a BIOS startup and then your favorite operating system starts.
You can do things like run Linux as your main operating and have Windows as a Window within your window manager. Or you could run Windows as your main operating system and have Linux in a window. In addition you can have multiple versions of each OS. I have, for testing purposes, Windows 98, Windows XP and RedHat Linux as VMWare images, at any time I can boot into a clean version of them and test software. At the end of the session VMWare asks me if I want to save the changes that have occurred in that session. If I say "no" then none of the changes get committed to disk. For Windows that means even the registry, so I am guaranteed a pristine environment next time.
At my company about 25% of people run Linux as their desktop with Windows in a VM and the others the other way around. It's very cool...
It's not _disposable_ it's _reusable_. The camera is returned to a Ritz Camera store where the pictures inside are downloaded to a CD or printed. The camera itself is kept by Ritz and recycled to another customer. In other words your $10.99 is a _rental_ of the camera with processing of the pictures included in the rental price.
The USA Today article has some more details on the camera and its use including the fact that it is likely to be sold at Walgreens and Walt Disney theme parks (seems like a good idea to me).
PASS standards for "Student Performance Analysis System" and can be found here (I guess they felt that PASS was a better acronym then the actual acronym which is SPAS).
The system is part of the HSID extranet which is accessible on the web here (you can read more about HSIDConnect here). (Thanks for Google!)
is a classic text and it's very clearly written. The front cover sums up in three words the core philosophy of the entire book:
Simplicity Clarity Generality
It is a delight to read although it uses C/C++ as the example language everywhere and tends, therefore, to be a little C oriented, although there are examples in other languages.
Much of the material will be familiar to people who've done a CS degree (e.g. trees, O-notation, etc.) but the section on testing is very worthwhile if you are planning to write code that will last a long time.
You profit when you download the song because you didn't pay for it. Had you not downloaded it you would have had two choices:
1. Buy the song at a store on CD/tape/vinyl. 2. Listen to the song on the radio.
In case 2 you are not paying directly for the song, the radio station is doing that by paying for the rights to the songs it plays. And you pay indirectly because you are the target of the radio station's advertising. You pay by being in the radio station's target market. Essentially the advertiser pays on your behalf.
That's a totally boneheaded analysis if ever I saw one. The RIAA does not have to sue every file trader, they just have to sue that ones with large caches of files (because they can get the biggest bang for the buck there... more files, more damages) and then they have to make a noise about what they are doing.
By suing a few, they'll scare the many and reduce file sharing to a background noise nuisance... at least that's what they hope. Their point is to be very public about the fact that they are willing to go after individuals so that many individuals will simply stop file sharing because they are afraid.
A number of people have responded "But I can delete spam really fast" etc. claiming that the costs quoted seem way to high. What they don't estimate is the full cost within an organization of dealing with a problem like spam which is greatly increased by a number of factors:
1. Management get annoyed by spam and see it as a drain on their team's time and want to do something about it: that costs time there for them--- because they are thinking about spam and not making widget X---and the IT department of the company who has to respond to the manager's questions re: what are we doing about this problem?
2. Not all employees are as sophisticated as the Slashdot crowd (can't believe I said that) and so for them spam is a far greater time sink (== $$$). They start wondering why they got the spam (especially when it's pornographic) and wonder if they did something wrong or if someone is going to "find out". While they think about spam they are not working.
3. Spam is a workplace nuisance for the HR department because offensive material that enters the workplace becomes the employer's problem when people go to HR to say that the employer should "do something" about the offensive material (after all an employer would "protect" its employees from a calendar of nude women or a harrassing coworker). More $$ spent in the time to complain and HR doing something about it.
4. And finally there's the IT guy who bears the brunt trying to fight the battle against spam when he's got plenty of other stuff to do. And so he buys expensive software to deal with the problem. More $$ spent on his time and the software and maintaining the software.
It's just a little more complicated than "can't people just delete the stuff". Even people who say "just get tool XYZ" overlook the cost of deploying (to 1000s of desktop machines), training employees (to use the thing) and maintaining it. That's a very expensive proposition.
Slashdot Mirror
From Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes 2002:
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).
So now why do I want this mouse?
John.
Well because the US is a capitalist country and because currently most people seem to believe that the best way to make money in software is by keeping the code proprietary and because US government favors money-making corporations.
I agree that if it were open source it would be far more likely the security problems would be discovered quickly.
So how about creating an open source alternative... anyone ready to register an OpenVote system on SourceForge?
John.
Hey, moderator... how exactly is it _redundant_ if the original story does not include the damn project name??? Hello???
John.
Word of mouth is far more powerful than advertising. What the guy needs to do is get a few RE offices up and running with the software and get those RE agents to talk to others about it. In addition there are specialist RE web sites where RE agents could discuss the project and hence get more coverage of his project.
John.
It seems likely that the project is Free Realty.
John.
This seems pretty normal. Any time you make an announcement on your project (including releases) you are going to drive traffic to its web site (that's why corporations pump out press releases). The fact that it dies down afterwards is totally normal, you'd expect people to come, see what's going on, download the stuff and leave.
Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?
Probably not. This might be an indication that the software is wonderful, but it's more likely an indication that the user base is small. As the user base increases they are going to find all sorts of weird problems (especially with different machine/OS configurations) which will get reported as bugs.
Is there more interest in a new project vs. one that is more or less mature?
I don't think new vs. old is as important as good vs. bad. If your project is useful and well executed then you'll get hits. Just compare Mozilla with any of the thousands of "new" projects listed on SourceForge.
Is the project too narrow to attract an audience?
I doubt that. Real Estate is a massive business world wide.
Could the underlying business (real estate) just be too saturated with web sites?
That's possible in any business, if your project had some uniqueness then the saturation will not be important. Getting the message out about your feature set will.
Just what are the secrets to a successful (measured by lots of contributors, etc) project...or am I just not defining success correctly?
I don't think number of contributors is the most important measure. How about number of people actually using the software? In POPFile there's a feature where it can report back (opt in) that it's being used, this gives me an idea of how many downloads converted into users. Another measure of success would be mentions of your project in the press.
John.
And here's the key to a coherent FP (for which I think I should win some sort of prize... hey Slashdot editors how about a free T-shirt?).
I subscribe to Slashdot so I get to see the stories before you can reply to them. If there's a story I have something worthwhile commenting on I fully prepare my reply in Emacs' *scratch* buffer and then copy and paste it in when I can reply.
John.
Offering e-mail recipients "free pornography" if they download a software program. The program often provides the pornography, but only after the user's computer dials a 1-900 number to an overseas location, racking up hundreds of dollars in phone charges.
"Pump and dump" stock schemes, in which a spammer sends e-mails touting a certain stock and encourages people to buy it. The stock's value goes up, and spammers sell it at a profit.
Accepting payment for an item without sending it. Spammers bet that someone buying Viagra or pills for the enlargement of body parts would be too embarrassed to call the police or Better Business Bureau.
Of course, if there was ever need for proof that there's a sucker born every minute, just check out this quote from the Wired article:
John.
The Skynet funding bill just passed.
IANAL
That really depends on the definition of "folds". Some examples from my
experience...
1. Company simply stops operating.
In that case the company itself may still exist (in fact if you go to
the web site of the Secretary of State for your state you may be able
to determine if the company is still "active" in which case someone's
filing simple forms on the company each year). In that case the
company (and by extension the shareholders) own the code.
In this case you might find that the owners, who probably have little
interest in the company, and acquire the rights for a small fee.
2. Company is bought outright by another company
This one's pretty simple, the new company probably bought all the
assets of the old company and that would include the copyright on the
source code.
3. Company's assets a bought but company remains alive
This can happen when a company gets into serious trouble, as happened
with many boom companies, and is effectively worth nothing because
there are no customers. The remaining assets (e.g. physical stuff
and copyrights) sometimes get acquired by another company for a small
fee. This happened to me, and in that case the new company acquired
the assets and got the source code.
4. Company goes bankrupt
If the company owes money to people then all its assets are going to
get valued, and that will include the source code, and who gets them
will probably be in the hands of a court. In this instance see what
happened in the bankruptcy clean up.
In the case of venture backed companies there might be specific
clauses in the investment that state what happens if the company goes
under and the VCs may end up with the code.
John.
I totally agree. There is *nothing* in the language that forces people to write bad code with Perl (and frankly there are plenty of unreadable non-Perl projects out there).
On the POPFile project I've done everything I can to avoid Perl's temptations into obscurity by writing clear code. Amazingly I've been critized by monoric readers of the code that I could have done things with less "space" (i.e. using less screen real estate). People like that know nothing about maintenance of code and should just bug off.
If you come across Perl code that's unreadable don't blame the language, blame the author. People who write obfuscated code in any language are doing a disservice to themselves and others who read the code; if they release the code as open source then it's a _crime_ since they are inviting readers to work on their crud.
John.
And asked for
$666
which would have made everything so clear? I mean it's only $33 difference. I hope when you buy these licenses you get a free T-Shirt with "Sucker!" in large letters on the front.
SCO needs to put up or shut up. If they think they have IP in Linux then show us. Dammit if the code is already in Linux it's already public so point to the code.
John.
Is it just me or does that story seem to have *nothing* to do with "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters"?
/. just get bought out by Kuro5hin?
Or did
John.
Could we not go around referring to The Department of Homeland Security as HomeSec? The last thing we need is /. popularizing a cool sounding name for this behemoth.
If we need to refer to it then use the initial letters of its name... DoHs.
Somehow appropriate when they put out warnings like the last one.
John.
I am *not* saying that OSS/FS developers ought to be cloning Windows. That would be stupid, but truly understanding what Windows is and how it operates is very important to getting OSS/FS inside companies.
The reason you want to be inside large companies is because then Microsoft will start losing $$$ from its customers. If the customers start demanding/using OSS/FS then Microsoft is going to get hurt.
You can't do that if you don't understand Windows. One very successful project is SAMBA. It doesn't attempt to clone Windows it attempts to make non-Windows platforms interact with Windows. That's vital is OSS/FS is to "embrace and extend" Windows.
John.
This makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. They can pick at Linux all the want since it's OSS and they can also demo. it to their customers. They'll get great information about how Linux works and they'll be able to compare and constrast in their controlled environment to make Windows look good to their key customers. When a company like Microsoft says "Enterprise" on something they are talking about the really serious $$$ here, not a lab for the average Windows user, but a place to invite very senior people in Fortune x00 companies.
And the OSS/FS could do more of the same. It always worries me when OSS/FS advocates say bad things about Windows and then you find out that they never use it. If you don't know your enemy IN DEPTH then you are missing out. I think every OSS/FS developer ought to have access to a copy of Windows.
John.
The company is Electric Cloud and yes we are rather small (our CEO is John Ousterhout of Tcl fame/infamy): the real web site is going up in early August.
However we didn't blow $400 on VMWare we needed it. Our product runs cross platform on Windows and Linux and wanted a way for the developers to be able to use both cheaply. Dual booting isn't an option because it's very slow to change context and you don't want to have two email clients, etc. to manage (or only be able to check email etc. when in one operating system), two machines was too expensive ($400 is a lot cheaper than a second PC). So VMWare was the answer.
We blew the money on two 19" flat screens per developer.
John.
The article mentions VMWare. This is a truly
excellent application that runs in Windows and Linux and fully virtualizes
the hardware. You literally "switch on" a machine in a VMWare window and
you see a BIOS startup and then your favorite operating system starts.
You can do things like run Linux as your main operating and have Windows
as a Window within your window manager. Or you could run Windows as your
main operating system and have Linux in a window. In addition you can have
multiple versions of each OS. I have, for testing purposes, Windows 98,
Windows XP and RedHat Linux as VMWare images, at any time I can boot into
a clean version of them and test software. At the end of the session VMWare
asks me if I want to save the changes that have occurred in that session. If I
say "no" then none of the changes get committed to disk. For Windows that means
even the registry, so I am guaranteed a pristine environment next time.
At my company about 25% of people run Linux as their desktop with Windows in a
VM and the others the other way around. It's very cool...
John.
It's not _disposable_ it's _reusable_. The camera is returned to a
Ritz Camera store where the pictures inside are downloaded to a CD
or printed. The camera itself is kept by Ritz and recycled to another
customer. In other words your $10.99 is a _rental_ of the camera
with processing of the pictures included in the rental price.
There's a picture of one of these cameras here.
The USA Today article has some more details
on the camera and its use including the fact that it is likely to be sold at Walgreens
and Walt Disney theme parks (seems like a good idea to me).
The camera has a 2-megapixel sensor.
John.
PASS standards for "Student Performance Analysis System" and can be found here
(I guess they felt that PASS was a better acronym then the actual acronym which is SPAS).
The system is part of the HSID extranet which is accessible on the web here (you can read more about HSIDConnect here). (Thanks for Google!)
John.
The book you are referring to:
The Practice of Programming
Kerningham and Pike
Addison-Wesley, 1999
is a classic text and it's very clearly written. The front cover sums up in three words the core philosophy of the entire book:
Simplicity
Clarity
Generality
It is a delight to read although it uses C/C++ as the example language everywhere and tends, therefore, to be a little C oriented, although there are examples in other languages.
Much of the material will be familiar to people who've done a CS degree (e.g. trees, O-notation, etc.) but the section on testing is very worthwhile if you are planning to write code that will last a long time.
John.
The story has a link to ampl.org, the correct link is ampl.com.
John.
You profit when you download the song because you didn't pay for it. Had you not downloaded it you would have had two choices:
1. Buy the song at a store on CD/tape/vinyl.
2. Listen to the song on the radio.
In case 2 you are not paying directly for the song, the radio station is doing that by paying for the rights to the songs it plays. And you pay indirectly because you are the target of the radio station's advertising. You pay by being in the radio station's target market. Essentially the advertiser pays on your behalf.
John.
That's a totally boneheaded analysis if ever I saw one. The RIAA does not have to sue every file trader, they just have to sue that ones with large caches of files (because they can get the biggest bang for the buck there... more files, more damages) and then they have to make a noise about what they are doing.
By suing a few, they'll scare the many and reduce file sharing to a background noise nuisance... at least that's what they hope. Their point is to be very public about the fact that they are willing to go after individuals so that many individuals will simply stop file sharing because they are afraid.
John.
A number of people have responded "But I can delete spam really fast" etc.
claiming that the costs quoted seem way to high. What they don't estimate is
the full cost within an organization of dealing with a problem like spam which
is greatly increased by a number of factors:
1. Management get annoyed by spam and see it as a drain on their team's
time and want to do something about it: that costs time there for them---
because they are thinking about spam and not making widget X---and the IT
department of the company who has to respond to the manager's questions re:
what are we doing about this problem?
2. Not all employees are as sophisticated as the Slashdot crowd (can't believe
I said that) and so for them spam is a far greater time sink (== $$$). They
start wondering why they got the spam (especially when it's pornographic) and
wonder if they did something wrong or if someone is going to "find out". While
they think about spam they are not working.
3. Spam is a workplace nuisance for the HR department because offensive material
that enters the workplace becomes the employer's problem when people go to HR
to say that the employer should "do something" about the offensive material
(after all an employer would "protect" its employees from a calendar of nude
women or a harrassing coworker). More $$ spent in the time to complain and HR
doing something about it.
4. And finally there's the IT guy who bears the brunt trying to fight the battle
against spam when he's got plenty of other stuff to do. And so he buys expensive
software to deal with the problem. More $$ spent on his time and the software and
maintaining the software.
It's just a little more complicated than "can't people just delete the stuff". Even
people who say "just get tool XYZ" overlook the cost of deploying (to 1000s of
desktop machines), training employees (to use the thing) and maintaining it. That's
a very expensive proposition.
John.