First of all, this entire discussion is just going to get people all worked up. Emotional responses will drive the flow and so many useless words are going to be written on this topic. It is such a shame. Instead of taking the time to do research and think through this "problem" people will just whip off postings of little value. For being so intelligent, most folks here prefer to complain and whine and groan. As usual, even through feelings are strong, no real analysis will be provided and we'll only hear opinions.
Second, if you think for a moment that this isn't going to continue, you are smoking crack. More and more jobs are going to flow out of the United States, and other countries, to countries where the cost of doing business is lower. Notice that I say "cost of doing business" versus salaries. Listen, this isn't just about jobs and salaries and benefits. Those things are a very small part of this trend. You need to look at the entire picture and you need to think about how organizations are determining costs. It is cheaper for many reasons to move jobs to other countries.
Third, you can bet your ass that the output of folks in China and India is as good as the United States. I have first hand experience that demonstrates that quality is no longer an issue in most cases. That's one data point, sure, but I've heard similar stories from my colleagues and I've seen the reports. One more time: Quality is not an issue. "They" can do "our" work, if that is how you think about things.
Fourth, any and all jobs are up for grabs. Forget about competition from other humans, you also need to be concerned with competition from machines. Machines will outsmart us, and they will take our jobs this century. You can go into nursing, for example, but even face-to-face and touch-n-feel jobs are not as secure as you think they might be. With technology, any job can be eliminated, reduced, or changed. That last point is critical -- jobs and job types change over time.
Fifth, the only "solution" to the "problem" of job loss to other countries / technologies is to stay on top of the game: educate yourself continuously, never stop until you die. This keeps you happy, healthy, and employed. Another helpful hint is to be ultra flexible. In your job, your life, your thinking, your location. Be ready for change, and stay ahead...through education and training. Do whatever it takes to be the best, absolutely the best, at what you do. But, don't just focus on that skill or that area. Educate and adapt. Innovate. Treat yourself like a freakin' miniture company. Write articles, network, build value, sell yourself, remain as mobile as possible, never settle for what you have. Be like David Bowie and think of yourself like a product (Madonna, and other smart entertainers do this also). Are you getting the drift here?
"Had Sakamura decided to charge even one cent to each user of TRON, he would easily be a dollar billionaire by now, possibly even rivalling Gates, reputed to be the world's richest man with a fortune estimated at $43 billion by Forbes magazine."
This assumes that he could charge one penny, or one dollar, or 100 yen, or whatever. This kind of speculation is vacuous. It is like saying, If I had a nickel for every time I read/. I'd be rich! No one can say what would have happened in terms of adoption if there was a financial barrier.
$250 will buy a lot of drugs, sex and rock and roll in the real world. Then again, SWG is addictive like drugs, you can get plenty of no-hassle porn online, and P2P will get you many gigs of rock and roll if the RIAA can be kept at bay.
Does this mean that Lawrence Lessig likes Howard Dean? If yes, why? What ideas? Are they friends? Does Lessig think Dean would be a good president? Does it mean that will see the "real" Howard Dean? What kind of traffic boost will Lessig's site get? Will people associate Lessig's ideas and writing with Dean's, and is that a good thing? What is Dean's real motivation behind this? As a geek, do you think this is a good idea? Will your grandmother care, and does it matter that she does not understand this blog stuff? What is your favorite color?
One of the key problems is that software vendors think that they should continue to add more and more features. Each time a software vendor solves some little bullshit problem for one customer, they decide to throw it into the next version resulting is feature creep. This might be kind of cool for the geeks but it sucks for most users, especially the typical users of the software. As most of us know, as you increase the number of features, you increase the complexity. As you increase the complexity, you decrease the usabilty. Thus, paradoxically, as you help some people you hurt a lot of other people. Stated another way, the harder these vendors try to help users the more they hurt them. Usability just keeps dropping.
...and make no money. As usual, Jakob Nielsen slants the data in a way that seems so very important. But, almost no small sites make any money. Why isn't that the real story? Bah!!
As usual, Jakob throws shit against the wall. A little sticks, but a lot of it does not stick. Why do people ignore this? For example, he predicted micropayments, which would be great for small web sites. Are micropayments viable now? No! They sucked in 2000 and they suck now. (Good idea, but, micropayments suck!)
Last year I wrote Spanking Jakob Nielsen. I'm just so tired of how he throws around ideas and "important" data and people got nuts. Have you ever noticed that he rarely points to sites outside of useit.com and he often is selling his usability reports? Drives me insane...
As a very serious exercise, try to name albums where every track is good or great. Off the top of my head, I can only name a few from my own collection. I did a quick review of my 120 CDs and only 6 of the CDs fit this description. That's only 5% of the total.
By the way, what albums of yours fit this description? What are some "perfect" albums that are good from start to finish? I'm always looking for good stuff, especially hard rock and heavy metal!;-)
I started thinking, Why is the price $0.99 versus $1.00? Then I expanded on that and started thinking about how Apple come up with their pricing scheme. What is the optimal pricing? Was $0.99 selected by guess and by golly? What is the right price? Does anyone know how the $0.99 price was actually selected? My guess is that it was a... guess.
My general problem articles and reviews such as A Week of Wacky Input Devices is that they are not empirical. That is, little soft or hard research is done. I'd like more data bases on market research, user surveys, usability studies, and so forth. Opinions can certainly interesting and useful, but they don't have the same bite as research. Give me more data!
If you are interested Dvorak keyboards, I suggest you check out The Fable of the Keys by Liebowitz and Margolis (1990). At a minimum, it is a long article on why Dvorak failed economically, but it covers more ground than that.
Unfortunately, this paper doesn't really offer any practical advice. Is is probably a little useful to very good, or great programmers. However, for new or moderately good programmers, it probably won't be very useful. It is certainly interesting in the academic sense, but I always want to see more practical advice. (I suppose that good practical advice flows down from good theoretical advice.)
What are some of the best ways to learn to avoid problems? I know that experience is useful. Trial and error is good, mentoring is good, education is good. What else can you think of? What books are useful?
Also, I wonder about usability problems. In other words, this article mainly hits on the problems of "hidden" code, not the interface. I'd like to see more about how programmers stuff interfaces with more and more useless crap, and how to avoid it. (Part of the answer is usability testing and gathering useful requirements, of course.) What do you think about this? How can we attack errors of omission and commission in interfaces?
I don't deal much with Apache. But, I decided to take a look at the download page to get a feel for its usability. What struck me the most was that there seem to be two important versions:
1. "Apache 2.0.44 is the best available version" 2. "Apache 1.3.27 is also available"
Now, don't get me wrong. I know enough to know that keeping around previous versions can be a Good Thing. However, as an outsider, this is confusing. Also, if you care to know, the entire section on verifying the integrity of the files was confusing.
Yes, I understand, I'm not the target audience. But, it still makes me frustrated to know that the Apache download site is mysterious. Just for giggles, take a look at the Windows NT Server download page. It ain't perfect, but at least you don't have to work about file integrity...
How Warchalking Died -- "The purpose of this article is to explain how Warchalking has become obsolete. It is being replaced by Wi-Fi Zones that are being fueled by home networks, corporate networks, and even payphones. The internet will be all around you in all places but you won't ever need to care about Warchalking. Let's bury the idea and move along."
Excellent Book and Some Resources
on
The Art of Deception
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'm reading this book now. Surprisingly, it isn't so much about technology and security. Instead, it is more about understanding humans. Despite the sterotype that geeks have for being socially incompetent, to be a truly good hacker using social engineering, you have to be good socially. Maybe not great, but pretty good. And, you need to know the right language and the right people to communicate with. Mitnik does a great job with this stuff and I am really enjoying the book. (However, I'm not so sure his tactics will work as well as they did a few years ago.)
Here are some pretty good resources for learning more about social engineering:
I know that Graffiti had very reasonable usability: "After one minute studying the Graffiti reference chart, about 86% accuracy is attainable. Following five minutes of practice, accuracy improves to about 97%. Without further practice, users demonstrate total retention after a one-week lapse, with accuracy holding at around 97%."
How does the usability of Jot compare? Any ideas? Personally, if I am entering text, I like to use a thumb keyboard (e.g., Blackberry). One more thing, I guess that Jot 2.0 is available as shareware. It gets good ratings, but I haven't seen any "real" usability research.
Funny how I wrote an article three days ago but Roland Piquepaille is writing almost the exact same thing that I did. Mere coincidence? In any event, here's the abstract of my article:
"The purpose of this article is to explain how Warchalking has become obsolete. It is being replaced by Wi-Fi Zones that are being fueled by home networks, corporate networks, and even payphones. The internet will be all around you in all places but you won't ever need to care about Warchalking. Let's bury the idea and move along."
Throw some technology together and get some interesting integration. Surprisingly, there is no mention of iPod in the announcement. Wouldn't it be nice to have a wireless connection to your iPod and stream that way too? Walk around the house or apartment with an almost infinite selection of streamed songs from your desktop or laptop. Eliminates the need for larger and larger storage on the iPod, at least while you are in range of the transmitter.
Speaking of this idea, how many people know about the Dr. Bott iPod Connection Kit w/ FM Wireles Transmitter? Not the same thing, of course, but it still should get you thinking about other ways to extend and expand your devices. And, while I am off on a tangent here, wouldn't it be interesting to get RSS feeds on our various wireless web devices?;-) If this is already being done, post some references here. I'd be interested to learn more about it.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, this entire discussion is just going to get people all worked up. Emotional responses will drive the flow and so many useless words are going to be written on this topic. It is such a shame. Instead of taking the time to do research and think through this "problem" people will just whip off postings of little value. For being so intelligent, most folks here prefer to complain and whine and groan. As usual, even through feelings are strong, no real analysis will be provided and we'll only hear opinions.
Second, if you think for a moment that this isn't going to continue, you are smoking crack. More and more jobs are going to flow out of the United States, and other countries, to countries where the cost of doing business is lower. Notice that I say "cost of doing business" versus salaries. Listen, this isn't just about jobs and salaries and benefits. Those things are a very small part of this trend. You need to look at the entire picture and you need to think about how organizations are determining costs. It is cheaper for many reasons to move jobs to other countries.
Third, you can bet your ass that the output of folks in China and India is as good as the United States. I have first hand experience that demonstrates that quality is no longer an issue in most cases. That's one data point, sure, but I've heard similar stories from my colleagues and I've seen the reports. One more time: Quality is not an issue. "They" can do "our" work, if that is how you think about things.
Fourth, any and all jobs are up for grabs. Forget about competition from other humans, you also need to be concerned with competition from machines. Machines will outsmart us, and they will take our jobs this century. You can go into nursing, for example, but even face-to-face and touch-n-feel jobs are not as secure as you think they might be. With technology, any job can be eliminated, reduced, or changed. That last point is critical -- jobs and job types change over time.
Fifth, the only "solution" to the "problem" of job loss to other countries / technologies is to stay on top of the game: educate yourself continuously, never stop until you die. This keeps you happy, healthy, and employed. Another helpful hint is to be ultra flexible. In your job, your life, your thinking, your location. Be ready for change, and stay ahead...through education and training. Do whatever it takes to be the best, absolutely the best, at what you do. But, don't just focus on that skill or that area. Educate and adapt. Innovate. Treat yourself like a freakin' miniture company. Write articles, network, build value, sell yourself, remain as mobile as possible, never settle for what you have. Be like David Bowie and think of yourself like a product (Madonna, and other smart entertainers do this also). Are you getting the drift here?
Pffft.
"Had Sakamura decided to charge even one cent to each user of TRON, he would easily be a dollar billionaire by now, possibly even rivalling Gates, reputed to be the world's richest man with a fortune estimated at $43 billion by Forbes magazine."
/. I'd be rich! No one can say what would have happened in terms of adoption if there was a financial barrier.
This assumes that he could charge one penny, or one dollar, or 100 yen, or whatever. This kind of speculation is vacuous. It is like saying, If I had a nickel for every time I read
$250 will buy a lot of drugs, sex and rock and roll in the real world. Then again, SWG is addictive like drugs, you can get plenty of no-hassle porn online, and P2P will get you many gigs of rock and roll if the RIAA can be kept at bay.
Does this mean that Lawrence Lessig likes Howard Dean? If yes, why? What ideas? Are they friends? Does Lessig think Dean would be a good president? Does it mean that will see the "real" Howard Dean? What kind of traffic boost will Lessig's site get? Will people associate Lessig's ideas and writing with Dean's, and is that a good thing? What is Dean's real motivation behind this? As a geek, do you think this is a good idea? Will your grandmother care, and does it matter that she does not understand this blog stuff? What is your favorite color?
One of the key problems is that software vendors think that they should continue to add more and more features. Each time a software vendor solves some little bullshit problem for one customer, they decide to throw it into the next version resulting is feature creep. This might be kind of cool for the geeks but it sucks for most users, especially the typical users of the software. As most of us know, as you increase the number of features, you increase the complexity. As you increase the complexity, you decrease the usabilty. Thus, paradoxically, as you help some people you hurt a lot of other people. Stated another way, the harder these vendors try to help users the more they hurt them. Usability just keeps dropping.
...and make no money. As usual, Jakob Nielsen slants the data in a way that seems so very important. But, almost no small sites make any money. Why isn't that the real story? Bah!!
As usual, Jakob throws shit against the wall. A little sticks, but a lot of it does not stick. Why do people ignore this? For example, he predicted micropayments, which would be great for small web sites. Are micropayments viable now? No! They sucked in 2000 and they suck now. (Good idea, but, micropayments suck!)
Last year I wrote Spanking Jakob Nielsen. I'm just so tired of how he throws around ideas and "important" data and people got nuts. Have you ever noticed that he rarely points to sites outside of useit.com and he often is selling his usability reports? Drives me insane...
As a very serious exercise, try to name albums where every track is good or great. Off the top of my head, I can only name a few from my own collection. I did a quick review of my 120 CDs and only 6 of the CDs fit this description. That's only 5% of the total.
;-)
By the way, what albums of yours fit this description? What are some "perfect" albums that are good from start to finish? I'm always looking for good stuff, especially hard rock and heavy metal!
The Ghost!
Visiting The Ghost
I started thinking, Why is the price $0.99 versus $1.00? Then I expanded on that and started thinking about how Apple come up with their pricing scheme. What is the optimal pricing? Was $0.99 selected by guess and by golly? What is the right price? Does anyone know how the $0.99 price was actually selected? My guess is that it was a ... guess.
My general problem articles and reviews such as A Week of Wacky Input Devices is that they are not empirical. That is, little soft or hard research is done. I'd like more data bases on market research, user surveys, usability studies, and so forth. Opinions can certainly interesting and useful, but they don't have the same bite as research. Give me more data!
If you are interested Dvorak keyboards, I suggest you check out The Fable of the Keys by Liebowitz and Margolis (1990). At a minimum, it is a long article on why Dvorak failed economically, but it covers more ground than that.
Forget PHP. Use Whitespace! If that is too hard, install FrontPage! The real l337 h4x0r solution.
Ian Watson's Novels
An Interview with Ian Watson
Ian Watson's Bibliography
Science Fiction Weekly Interview
I drink too much coffee. I leak several times per day.
1. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Deer is a play on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.
2. I can't believe that this article doesn't mention William C. Dement. He's basically the father of modern sleep research.
FLAC about MP3!
Unfortunately, this paper doesn't really offer any practical advice. Is is probably a little useful to very good, or great programmers. However, for new or moderately good programmers, it probably won't be very useful. It is certainly interesting in the academic sense, but I always want to see more practical advice. (I suppose that good practical advice flows down from good theoretical advice.)
What are some of the best ways to learn to avoid problems? I know that experience is useful. Trial and error is good, mentoring is good, education is good. What else can you think of? What books are useful?
Also, I wonder about usability problems. In other words, this article mainly hits on the problems of "hidden" code, not the interface. I'd like to see more about how programmers stuff interfaces with more and more useless crap, and how to avoid it. (Part of the answer is usability testing and gathering useful requirements, of course.) What do you think about this? How can we attack errors of omission and commission in interfaces?
I don't deal much with Apache. But, I decided to take a look at the download page to get a feel for its usability. What struck me the most was that there seem to be two important versions:
1. "Apache 2.0.44 is the best available version"
2. "Apache 1.3.27 is also available"
Now, don't get me wrong. I know enough to know that keeping around previous versions can be a Good Thing. However, as an outsider, this is confusing. Also, if you care to know, the entire section on verifying the integrity of the files was confusing.
Yes, I understand, I'm not the target audience. But, it still makes me frustrated to know that the Apache download site is mysterious. Just for giggles, take a look at the Windows NT Server download page. It ain't perfect, but at least you don't have to work about file integrity...
Flash Player for Linux (Obvious)
Flash Usability (Flazoom!)
SWF Extractor (Windows prgrams that extracts images and mp3 files from a SWF file as separate files)
Unlock SWF (Open up compressed SWF files)
SWiSH (Low cost alternative to Macromedia)
How Warchalking Died -- "The purpose of this article is to explain how Warchalking has become obsolete. It is being replaced by Wi-Fi Zones that are being fueled by home networks, corporate networks, and even payphones. The internet will be all around you in all places but you won't ever need to care about Warchalking. Let's bury the idea and move along."
I'm reading this book now. Surprisingly, it isn't so much about technology and security. Instead, it is more about understanding humans. Despite the sterotype that geeks have for being socially incompetent, to be a truly good hacker using social engineering, you have to be good socially. Maybe not great, but pretty good. And, you need to know the right language and the right people to communicate with. Mitnik does a great job with this stuff and I am really enjoying the book. (However, I'm not so sure his tactics will work as well as they did a few years ago.)
Here are some pretty good resources for learning more about social engineering:
Social Engineering: What is it, why is so little said about it and what can be done?
Social Engineering Fundamentals, Part I: Hacker Tactics
Social Engineering: The Human Side Of Hacking
I know that Graffiti had very reasonable usability: "After one minute studying the Graffiti reference chart, about 86% accuracy is attainable. Following five minutes of practice, accuracy improves to about 97%. Without further practice, users demonstrate total retention after a one-week lapse, with accuracy holding at around 97%."
How does the usability of Jot compare? Any ideas? Personally, if I am entering text, I like to use a thumb keyboard (e.g., Blackberry). One more thing, I guess that Jot 2.0 is available as shareware. It gets good ratings, but I haven't seen any "real" usability research.
All-In-One Arcade Console
Better solution = powerline broadband
The idea is to use exactly the same lines as the power lines for broadband. Nice!
Funny how I wrote an article three days ago but Roland Piquepaille is writing almost the exact same thing that I did. Mere coincidence? In any event, here's the abstract of my article:
"The purpose of this article is to explain how Warchalking has become obsolete. It is being replaced by Wi-Fi Zones that are being fueled by home networks, corporate networks, and even payphones. The internet will be all around you in all places but you won't ever need to care about Warchalking. Let's bury the idea and move along."
Read the rest of it here: How Warchalking Died
Throw some technology together and get some interesting integration. Surprisingly, there is no mention of iPod in the announcement. Wouldn't it be nice to have a wireless connection to your iPod and stream that way too? Walk around the house or apartment with an almost infinite selection of streamed songs from your desktop or laptop. Eliminates the need for larger and larger storage on the iPod, at least while you are in range of the transmitter.
;-) If this is already being done, post some references here. I'd be interested to learn more about it.
Speaking of this idea, how many people know about the Dr. Bott iPod Connection Kit w/ FM Wireles Transmitter? Not the same thing, of course, but it still should get you thinking about other ways to extend and expand your devices. And, while I am off on a tangent here, wouldn't it be interesting to get RSS feeds on our various wireless web devices?