This. All of this! This very situation came into play during the Boston marathon bombing. The FBI used photo and video content from social media to piece together parts of the scene where they didn't already have their own eyes covering. Authorities and civilians should be working together for a common good, not battling against each other for who has the right to document a situation in public space.
Being just your average guy from across the pond over here in the state, I have absolutely no idea what this whole "Cookie Law" bullshit is even about. Thus, here is a source: https://cookiepedia.co.uk/eu-c...
Can someone tell me who the hell thought of this directive? And why put the burden on every single web site owner, instead of putting the burden on the very few user against commonly used?
As TFS points out: ANDROID. That's why Java is #1. We're still stuck with this shithole as long as Android continues to dominate mobile and they continue to focus almost exclusively on Java.
100% prefer mobile web apps over mobile web sites for 1 reason and 1 reason ONLY.
The got damn mother fucking ads in mobile apps are usually just an annoying banner at the bottom of the app. Ads on mobile sites are full on browser-taking-over malicious bullshit. I can't even count the number of times I open an article and a few seconds later, the browser just redirects to a phishing site that looks like mobile Facebook or a fake security screen. It isn't just an ad spot on a page that does it, it takes over the entire browser session. And they are done in such a way that the browser's back button doesn't go back to the article in question either, it simply reloads the goddamn malicious web page.
*NOW* if we could get a decent ad blockers on a mobile browser without A) requiring root access, or B) requiring the installation of an entirely different browser, THAN I would be all for mobile sites over mobile apps. But until this condition is met, apps are simply the safer way to go right now.
The values have shifted, not become less. The value used to be in verification of business. Now, partly thanks to the NSA, the value is more in encrypting all possible web traffic. There are enough major organizations that all collectively agree that encryption is more valuable than the bottom line at this point that Let's Encrypt can give out certs for free.
They HAVE automated revoking of certs. The revoking happens by the owner of the cert though (in this case, the attacker). How would you automate the process of revoking otherwise, especially in a way that doesn't cause false positives which would render websites unreachable by clients?
I stubbed my toe yesterday. Today I apparently have 20 types of cancer because of it. WebMD worked out great!:D Lawyers are doomed. Now all I need is a lawyer bot to sue the guy who placed that table in my way...
Whenever the question of management arises for programmers, I always return to the same manual. This single document is answers many of the questions regarding failure of IT projects in general.
Just a quick counter-point. If you're only looking at social media, you'll only see social media. But let's look at the current state of the web in another way. Love it or hate it, WordPress is fucking EVERYWHERE.
"74,652,825 sites out there are depending on good ol' WordPress."
I played the shit out of SimCity 2000. That right there is the perfect utopia world. In that place, I solved the entire world's energy crisis. Just place a waterfall on every single hill in the world, then turn every single waterfall into a hydroelectric power plant! PROBLEM SOLVED!
We have TONS of hills in the real world. All we need to do now is to take the water tool, click on those hills, then add the hydro plants on top. BAM. UNLIMITED ENERGY!
Except this has not been the case in the desktop era in quite some time now. Windows Vista and Windows 10 have almost identical system requirements, with everything in between being pretty much the same as well.
I still remember the very day that Wikipedia's homepage strictly stated "DON'T POST THIS ON SLASHDOT", which of course I found through Slashdot. Back when the site first launched, that very first day. For the first couple of years, I contributed quite a bit, but don't really do much of that ever anymore. Why?
Essentially, all of the easy and common knowledge topics have already been covered. We're at the point now where only two types of edits can really happen. First is highly specialized knowledge, so yes, only a fraction of the community can do that properly. The second is new and emerging ideas, which is generally also highly specialized knowledge that has yet to become common knowledge, so again a very small subset of people who can contribute.
If anything, this isn't a problem. It means they've achieved a very significant goal. They have a huge percentage of human factual knowledge all in one place.
My absolute #1 complaint about Linux on the desktop has always been the lack of Common Dialogs. This is a standard DLL that ships with all versions of Windows dating back to at least 3.1. This DLL handles basic dialogs like File Open, File Save, and Printing. Having this DLL available and with a very simple interface solves multiple problems at once.
First, it is extremely easy for developers to use the API.
Secondly, due to the ease of use, developers can focus on their core application instead of writing their own UI for browsing the file system just to open a file or their own printing dialog to enumerate and list printers.
Third, this ensures a clean and consistent UI across all applications that use the Common Dialogs making the OS and applications as a whole easier to use for the end users.
Lastly, the Common Dialogs DLL is upgraded with every version of Windows. Take an application written in 1995 and run it on Windows 10. It still works. It uses the Windows 10 UI for opening/saving files, instead of the old clunky Common Dialog UI for 1995.
This upgrading of the DLL has been another huge advantage too. It has seen several major iterations. The ability to resize the window. The ability to have multiple navigation methods. The ability to drag-n-drop. The ability to copy-paste. Can't remember where you saved that last document? Just open the save dialog again and it'll default to that folder, and you can just copy-paste that folder path into other applications as needed.
How much you wanna be that because PHP just had their first major version increase in over a decade just this very month is the only real reason that Perl decided to do the same? Now I'm personally not trying to advocate or attach either language here, just pointing out the interesting comparison and timing.
The real reason continuous voting doesn't work is because of reactionary bullshit. One thing triggers a spur of viral media, and BAM, laws would literally be changed over night without full analysts and due process of the consequences. Granted, I'm not a fan of the status quo either, but it is at least the lesser of two evils regarding the subject matter at hand.
And you're apart of the reason why geeks and nerds are always looked down upon and constantly viewed as elitist self-centered asshats. Obligatory XKCD as reference: https://xkcd.com/1053/
It was specifically an issue with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. One of their primary sources cited for denying the trademark for "The Slants" is because of something posted in Urban Dictionary for the term "Slant" and because of their Asian heritage.
"Facebook reports that user engagement has gone up since the switch was made."
No, this is absolutely total fucking bullshit. Engagement isn't "up" because of the switch from Flash to HTML5. Average end users wouldn't even know the difference. Why is engagement really "up"? Because they changed the god damn controls around. When playing a video, clicking on it no longer stops the fucking video, but instead takes over the whole god damn browser window with some video player playlist bullshit that nobody asked for. To stop a video now, you have to find the small pause button in the corner, rather than just being able to click anywhere. Give it a couple weeks for people to get pissed off enough to remember this, and their video player usage will tank again.
The problem is that open source developer tools are suited for source code over all other aspects of projects. This isn't just a problem with UX/UI design, it is also a problem with technical writing for documentation, marketing, user interaction, the whole nine yards.
Right now, please, tell me the best way to submit a conceptual UI design for an application into a git repository? Do you just create a PSD file and submit it? Then when someone else edits the PSD, how do you diff it? How do you easily track revision changes of visual assets?
In the closed source world, we have asset management systems that work in parallel with our source code management systems. But this is something that isn't common within the open source world. On top of this, great design is quite possibly much harder than great code. With code, it is easy to run new changes against unit tests to ensure that things do not break. But with layout changes, small or overhauls, how do you test them? They are subject highly to opinion more so than pure fact.
On top of this, take the general nature of open source projects in general. There are often many hoops to jump through to even push a fix for a confirmed bug after discovering it. Just one example (but this has been par for the course all along), I discovered a simple but critical bug in the MariaDB database server returning incorrect results on a SELECT statement. The test case was extremely simple and verified within an hour or two of the bug report being submitted. A couple weeks went by, no work happened on it. I decided to pull down the MariaDB code, hunt down the bug, fix it, and push the change to their git repo. The entire change was only modifying a single if statement condition. The approval process missed several releases of their software and took months, and countless chats in their IRC channel as well. If this is what it takes to get a single simple bug fixed, just imagine what someone would have to do for a serious change like UI cleanup and overhaul of a major application?
On top of that, just read the comments throughout here on Slashdot on this article. The main opinion is that UX/UI design is just "change for the sake of change" - which is apparently inherently bad. But take a step back and think about this: We're about to hit the year 2016. When are we finally going to have "The year of Linux on the Desktop?" We've been trying to push that concept for over a decade. But what is preventing it? Absolutely horrible UX/UI design, that is it. Linux itself may have almost every feature of Windows/OSX, but the elegance of being able to access and use those features is absolutely horrible from someone that doesn't already know Linux. Now look at Android, Google took Linux and re-imagined the UI from scratch, and now it is widely used and successful. It is intuitive and easy for novice users. They don't even need to know it is Linux at the core, it shouldn't matter. The interface is sleek, clean, and simple (save for some bastardizations that some of the handset makers and carriers screw up)
If you want the ultimate test of good vs bad UX/UI design, it is actually quite simple: have people sit down that have absolutely no idea how your program functions. They've never seen it or used it before. And have them attempt to use it with zero supervision. Watch how far they can get. See what all they can do. Look for trends and patterns in their usage. Find where people are getting frustrated, and try to make it simpler. This is what Microsoft did back in the '90s to create the start menu and start button. Check out the history of Windows Chicago: http://oyvind.servehttp.com/wi...
We've had this municipal fiber network here in Tacoma since the 90's though. The major issue at hand was that the city had proposed to lease it out to another company, and now it looks as though they won't be doing it. http://www.usmayors.org/bestpr...
The only downside right now, unless the proposal has changed, is that it isn't symmetrical gigabit. It isn't even fiber to the home. They want to implement 1000/100mbps DOCSIS. For those of us that want to push as much content as we pull, this is still something I hope they improve upon in their proposal before implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
This. All of this! This very situation came into play during the Boston marathon bombing. The FBI used photo and video content from social media to piece together parts of the scene where they didn't already have their own eyes covering. Authorities and civilians should be working together for a common good, not battling against each other for who has the right to document a situation in public space.
Additionally, if you're using a Copy-On-Write file system like ZFS, the contents wouldn't be overwritten anyways.
Being just your average guy from across the pond over here in the state, I have absolutely no idea what this whole "Cookie Law" bullshit is even about. Thus, here is a source: https://cookiepedia.co.uk/eu-c...
Can someone tell me who the hell thought of this directive? And why put the burden on every single web site owner, instead of putting the burden on the very few user against commonly used?
As TFS points out: ANDROID. That's why Java is #1. We're still stuck with this shithole as long as Android continues to dominate mobile and they continue to focus almost exclusively on Java.
100% prefer mobile web apps over mobile web sites for 1 reason and 1 reason ONLY.
The got damn mother fucking ads in mobile apps are usually just an annoying banner at the bottom of the app. Ads on mobile sites are full on browser-taking-over malicious bullshit. I can't even count the number of times I open an article and a few seconds later, the browser just redirects to a phishing site that looks like mobile Facebook or a fake security screen. It isn't just an ad spot on a page that does it, it takes over the entire browser session. And they are done in such a way that the browser's back button doesn't go back to the article in question either, it simply reloads the goddamn malicious web page.
*NOW* if we could get a decent ad blockers on a mobile browser without A) requiring root access, or B) requiring the installation of an entirely different browser, THAN I would be all for mobile sites over mobile apps. But until this condition is met, apps are simply the safer way to go right now.
"CAs has devalued it"
The values have shifted, not become less. The value used to be in verification of business. Now, partly thanks to the NSA, the value is more in encrypting all possible web traffic. There are enough major organizations that all collectively agree that encryption is more valuable than the bottom line at this point that Let's Encrypt can give out certs for free.
They HAVE automated revoking of certs. The revoking happens by the owner of the cert though (in this case, the attacker). How would you automate the process of revoking otherwise, especially in a way that doesn't cause false positives which would render websites unreachable by clients?
Oh, you mean like how Stuxnet couldn't infect airgapped machines? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I stubbed my toe yesterday. Today I apparently have 20 types of cancer because of it. WebMD worked out great! :D Lawyers are doomed. Now all I need is a lawyer bot to sue the guy who placed that table in my way...
Whenever the question of management arises for programmers, I always return to the same manual. This single document is answers many of the questions regarding failure of IT projects in general.
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
Just a quick counter-point. If you're only looking at social media, you'll only see social media. But let's look at the current state of the web in another way. Love it or hate it, WordPress is fucking EVERYWHERE.
"74,652,825 sites out there are depending on good ol' WordPress."
https://www.google.com/webhp?s...
I played the shit out of SimCity 2000. That right there is the perfect utopia world. In that place, I solved the entire world's energy crisis. Just place a waterfall on every single hill in the world, then turn every single waterfall into a hydroelectric power plant! PROBLEM SOLVED!
We have TONS of hills in the real world. All we need to do now is to take the water tool, click on those hills, then add the hydro plants on top. BAM. UNLIMITED ENERGY!
Except this has not been the case in the desktop era in quite some time now. Windows Vista and Windows 10 have almost identical system requirements, with everything in between being pretty much the same as well.
I still remember the very day that Wikipedia's homepage strictly stated "DON'T POST THIS ON SLASHDOT", which of course I found through Slashdot. Back when the site first launched, that very first day. For the first couple of years, I contributed quite a bit, but don't really do much of that ever anymore. Why?
It is the "low hanging fruit" problem: http://www.urbandictionary.com...
Essentially, all of the easy and common knowledge topics have already been covered. We're at the point now where only two types of edits can really happen. First is highly specialized knowledge, so yes, only a fraction of the community can do that properly. The second is new and emerging ideas, which is generally also highly specialized knowledge that has yet to become common knowledge, so again a very small subset of people who can contribute.
If anything, this isn't a problem. It means they've achieved a very significant goal. They have a huge percentage of human factual knowledge all in one place.
My absolute #1 complaint about Linux on the desktop has always been the lack of Common Dialogs. This is a standard DLL that ships with all versions of Windows dating back to at least 3.1. This DLL handles basic dialogs like File Open, File Save, and Printing. Having this DLL available and with a very simple interface solves multiple problems at once.
First, it is extremely easy for developers to use the API.
Secondly, due to the ease of use, developers can focus on their core application instead of writing their own UI for browsing the file system just to open a file or their own printing dialog to enumerate and list printers.
Third, this ensures a clean and consistent UI across all applications that use the Common Dialogs making the OS and applications as a whole easier to use for the end users.
Lastly, the Common Dialogs DLL is upgraded with every version of Windows. Take an application written in 1995 and run it on Windows 10. It still works. It uses the Windows 10 UI for opening/saving files, instead of the old clunky Common Dialog UI for 1995.
This upgrading of the DLL has been another huge advantage too. It has seen several major iterations. The ability to resize the window. The ability to have multiple navigation methods. The ability to drag-n-drop. The ability to copy-paste. Can't remember where you saved that last document? Just open the save dialog again and it'll default to that folder, and you can just copy-paste that folder path into other applications as needed.
Only if you're new to the game, perhaps? But compromised proxy lists for purchase were around back in the '90's... How is this any different now?
How much you wanna be that because PHP just had their first major version increase in over a decade just this very month is the only real reason that Perl decided to do the same? Now I'm personally not trying to advocate or attach either language here, just pointing out the interesting comparison and timing.
The real reason continuous voting doesn't work is because of reactionary bullshit. One thing triggers a spur of viral media, and BAM, laws would literally be changed over night without full analysts and due process of the consequences. Granted, I'm not a fan of the status quo either, but it is at least the lesser of two evils regarding the subject matter at hand.
And you're apart of the reason why geeks and nerds are always looked down upon and constantly viewed as elitist self-centered asshats. Obligatory XKCD as reference: https://xkcd.com/1053/
It was specifically an issue with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. One of their primary sources cited for denying the trademark for "The Slants" is because of something posted in Urban Dictionary for the term "Slant" and because of their Asian heritage.
Just what we need, the Google Pinto!
"Facebook reports that user engagement has gone up since the switch was made."
No, this is absolutely total fucking bullshit. Engagement isn't "up" because of the switch from Flash to HTML5. Average end users wouldn't even know the difference. Why is engagement really "up"? Because they changed the god damn controls around. When playing a video, clicking on it no longer stops the fucking video, but instead takes over the whole god damn browser window with some video player playlist bullshit that nobody asked for. To stop a video now, you have to find the small pause button in the corner, rather than just being able to click anywhere. Give it a couple weeks for people to get pissed off enough to remember this, and their video player usage will tank again.
The problem is that open source developer tools are suited for source code over all other aspects of projects. This isn't just a problem with UX/UI design, it is also a problem with technical writing for documentation, marketing, user interaction, the whole nine yards.
Right now, please, tell me the best way to submit a conceptual UI design for an application into a git repository? Do you just create a PSD file and submit it? Then when someone else edits the PSD, how do you diff it? How do you easily track revision changes of visual assets?
In the closed source world, we have asset management systems that work in parallel with our source code management systems. But this is something that isn't common within the open source world. On top of this, great design is quite possibly much harder than great code. With code, it is easy to run new changes against unit tests to ensure that things do not break. But with layout changes, small or overhauls, how do you test them? They are subject highly to opinion more so than pure fact.
On top of this, take the general nature of open source projects in general. There are often many hoops to jump through to even push a fix for a confirmed bug after discovering it. Just one example (but this has been par for the course all along), I discovered a simple but critical bug in the MariaDB database server returning incorrect results on a SELECT statement. The test case was extremely simple and verified within an hour or two of the bug report being submitted. A couple weeks went by, no work happened on it. I decided to pull down the MariaDB code, hunt down the bug, fix it, and push the change to their git repo. The entire change was only modifying a single if statement condition. The approval process missed several releases of their software and took months, and countless chats in their IRC channel as well. If this is what it takes to get a single simple bug fixed, just imagine what someone would have to do for a serious change like UI cleanup and overhaul of a major application?
On top of that, just read the comments throughout here on Slashdot on this article. The main opinion is that UX/UI design is just "change for the sake of change" - which is apparently inherently bad. But take a step back and think about this: We're about to hit the year 2016. When are we finally going to have "The year of Linux on the Desktop?" We've been trying to push that concept for over a decade. But what is preventing it? Absolutely horrible UX/UI design, that is it. Linux itself may have almost every feature of Windows/OSX, but the elegance of being able to access and use those features is absolutely horrible from someone that doesn't already know Linux. Now look at Android, Google took Linux and re-imagined the UI from scratch, and now it is widely used and successful. It is intuitive and easy for novice users. They don't even need to know it is Linux at the core, it shouldn't matter. The interface is sleek, clean, and simple (save for some bastardizations that some of the handset makers and carriers screw up)
If you want the ultimate test of good vs bad UX/UI design, it is actually quite simple: have people sit down that have absolutely no idea how your program functions. They've never seen it or used it before. And have them attempt to use it with zero supervision. Watch how far they can get. See what all they can do. Look for trends and patterns in their usage. Find where people are getting frustrated, and try to make it simpler. This is what Microsoft did back in the '90s to create the start menu and start button. Check out the history of Windows Chicago: http://oyvind.servehttp.com/wi...
We've had this municipal fiber network here in Tacoma since the 90's though. The major issue at hand was that the city had proposed to lease it out to another company, and now it looks as though they won't be doing it. http://www.usmayors.org/bestpr...
The only downside right now, unless the proposal has changed, is that it isn't symmetrical gigabit. It isn't even fiber to the home. They want to implement 1000/100mbps DOCSIS. For those of us that want to push as much content as we pull, this is still something I hope they improve upon in their proposal before implementation.