Your characterization of "Green" as some sort of unbiased, scientific refutation of "Orange" is pure propaganda. "Orange" is obviously biased, but cites and provides links to many excellent articles. "Green" picks a couple of these to criticize and then claims to have refuted "Orange". Follow the links and see for yourself. "Green" even states outright, "... my beliefs are that... [many] alcoholics get sober on their own, and many succeed through AA." Does "Green" provide numbers? Statistics? Anything useful? No, just his "beliefs." And THAT is the fundamental problem of AA and the problem discussed in the blog. Reliance on belief in the face of science is at the core of what's wrong with AA.
Why does AA work? It's a dumb question, because AA actually doesn't work. The real data show that you're better off WITHOUT going to AA meetings. People have a better success rate kicking their addiction on their own. The fundamental problem is that AA works for a minority of people, but those who are in AA are those very people... so they're convinced it works, and they push the program on everyone.
http://religionvirus.blogspot.com/2010/04/christian-shocker-god-based-aa-program.html
I'm 58. Started programming in 1969 in high school. Got my B.S. in 1978, Masters in 1985. They didn't even have "object oriented programming" in 1985, not to mention about a dozen other major technologies. Yet I'm still at the top of my game because I constantly buy books, adopt new technology and educate myself. There's no other way.
A foundation in real computer science (not just programming, but algorithms, data structures, design patterns, analysis of programs, etc.) is critical. With that, you can adapt to new technology quickly.
It's not easy, but it's part of what you signed up for. Go for it.
You guys have completely lost track of every web usability lesson. This "improved" navigation is a perfect example of geeks gone wild, of an open source project run by a bunch of programmers with no idea what usability even means.
Slashdot now has a "user interface" that is completely at odds with every standard on the web. This is so counterintuitive it's unbelievable. The idea that you should "RTFM" is boneheaded.
The comments you're getting in this thread are ALL FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE FIGURED OUT YOUR NON-STANDARD INTERFACE. Normal web users may be trying to read this, but they'd quickly become frustrated and depart, their comments unheard.
Do you guys even read Jacobsen? Do you even know what a hyperlink is?
The web has standards, boys. Get used to it. Work with it. But don't invent your own.
Your best bet by far is to use examples of companies that use Linux. Start with Amazon, FedEx, and so on. These companies DON'T do it for cost, they do it for reliability. Challenge your boss to find similiar-sized companies that use Windows. There are a few, but not many.
Technical geeks (like me) have a silly belief that if we just show someone the facts, they'll go, "Oh! I get it! You were right." And we lose every battle. You can't argue this on technical merit, because the boss in question isn't technical. This sort of battle is always waged at the anecdotal level. Treat it like a political campaign. Use bandwagon tactics, smear tactics, testimonials, and propaganda.
I already pay a fair amount of money for "high speed" internet. What the hell am I paying for, if not to use Vonage, Skype, and the other high-speed services I need? If I were a Bell South customer, I'd be looking for alternatives.
First and foremost: Categorize your users. Usability is meaningless if you haven't identified the skills of the user and the tasks to be accomplished. For example, a rough categorization might be:
Novice, reading email and surfing the web
9-to-5 business user, lots of word processing and spreadsheet,
fairly experienced with Windows
Scientist, uses a few applications heavily, willing and able to
learn arcane interfaces
Computer geek, very knowledgable, wants to customize his windows
heavily, alter all menus, mostly uses command-line and emacs.
A single usability test couldn't possibly span these different users; each needs a completely different test. For example, computer geeks strongly favor the keyboard, and only use the mouse as a last resort. They're willing to spend lots of time learning all the emacs key sequences and are very good at it. They'll use ALT-TAB to change windows. By contrast, Grandma only surfs the web and checks email, and only uses the keyboard when typing an email.
These myths have already been thoroughly debunked
on
Trouble With Open Source?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's hard to know where to start. Every point in this article has already been so thoroughly debunked it's silly to be dredging them up again. I suspect the author, although well meaning, simply didn't do his homework. Eric Raymond's extensive writings would be a great place to begin. I would also humbly remind everyone of my own essay,
THE CARE AND FEEDING OF FOSS which discusses several of these myths.
Not only does he not apologize, he approves of everything MOG wrote, and says they only pulled it for practical reasons, not ethical reasons.
Disgusting. Have these people no sense of decency at all?
I don't object to ads - I object to animated ads. I just can't read news when there's stuff flashing all around the article. It drives me nuts.
Any psychologist could tell you that peripheral-vision distractions, like animated ads, lower our concentration, lower comprehension, and worsen the reading experience. That's why they're used, after all, to distract us. And it works.
Ironically, there's an animated ad at the top of Slashdot as I type this. I blocked it. Now I can focus on what I'm trying to type.
I'm not violating a "social contract". I'm simply making the web pages readable again. I had dropped Yahoo! news in favor of myway.news.com, but with ad blocking, I can now use Yahoo! again. So ironically, my ad blocking gained Yahoo a customer they'd lost.
I am not a crook. DRM is based on the fundamental assumption that we are all dishonest, that *I* am dishonest, and that the author of a work won't give it to me until s/he has a way of controlling me.
I have music that I got thirty years ago. It is still playable. During the cassette era, I made cassette tapes of my collection; during the CD era I made CDs. Now I have MP3s. I've made a few anthologies of favorites to share with a few friends and family. All of this is perfectly legal under "fair use."
If DRM had been available for vinyl, my entire collection would be useless today, even though I bought and paid for it. The chances that DRM would survive across 30 years is virtually zero, given the pace of new operating systems, DRM owners going out of business, disk crashes, new compression formats, and so on.
When I buy a song, I'm buying the right to use it... forever. Period. I won't accept anyone's assertion that I'm fundamentally dishonest and can't be trusted.
"Symantec announced on Wednesday that it has aquired a new patent (United States Patent - 6,851,057) titled "Brain driven detection of burgulars". From the article: "[The patent] could refer to any technology that allows a homeowner to look around his house and detect the presence of a burgular." A Symantec spokesman noted that, "We value our intellectual property, and want homeowners to know that they can't simply use this technology without a license."
I tried to read the article, but the animated advertisements distracted me so much I simply had to quit.
Don't news web sites understand that the human brain can't cope with serious issues and animation at the same time? I include SlashDot in this category...
>> bespoke and vertical market applications which seem to be completely ignored by the article
>Actually they are briefly mentioned as "software that has no commercial viability" and then pretty much ignored for the rest of the article other than as the "FOSS corner case".
You make a good points - my article is about software that's generally useful, as opposed to "bespoke" and other software that isn't useful outside its original environment, what we're calling "no commercial viability".
But but what fraction of programmers actually work on such software? Is it a few, or is it most programmers? I'm curious if anyone has actual numbers on the ratio of programmers working on bespoke and other "internal" projects, versus software that's created "for sale".
Many programmers in for-profit situations feel threatened by FOSS. But if 80% of software will never be generally useful, hence not affected by FOSS projects, then those programmers may feel less threatened.
That's a laugh! UNIX certainly stole a bunch of good ideas from MULTICS, and did invent a few, but "the best operating system invented to date"? That's just ludicrous.
Every operating system stands on the shoulders of those that came before. UNIX is certainly no exception, just as MULTICS built on those that came before it.
I used many of the operating systems that were available before UNIX, and I stand by my assertion: UNIX was better. Sure, it was immature and incomplete, but the foundation was there, and that foundation was clearly superior.
The fact that AT&T made the source code available was, without a doubt, a critical factor in its dominance. But to say "The key innovation of UNIX was not technical" is just wrong, in my opinion. UNIX was a huge technical achievement. Its simplicity and elegance were unmatched at the time. It took both the technical achievement and the open source to put UNIX on the map.
Excellent points, and my apologies to the Mac world. I used a Mac for many years (before OS X) and always thought it superior to the PC in almost every way, and I am a huge admirer of Apple for making the difficult and risky decision to abandon their original operating system and adopt OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
Your characterization of "Green" as some sort of unbiased, scientific refutation of "Orange" is pure propaganda. "Orange" is obviously biased, but cites and provides links to many excellent articles. "Green" picks a couple of these to criticize and then claims to have refuted "Orange". Follow the links and see for yourself. "Green" even states outright, "... my beliefs are that ... [many] alcoholics get sober on their own, and many succeed through AA." Does "Green" provide numbers? Statistics? Anything useful? No, just his "beliefs." And THAT is the fundamental problem of AA and the problem discussed in the blog. Reliance on belief in the face of science is at the core of what's wrong with AA.
Why does AA work? It's a dumb question, because AA actually doesn't work. The real data show that you're better off WITHOUT going to AA meetings. People have a better success rate kicking their addiction on their own. The fundamental problem is that AA works for a minority of people, but those who are in AA are those very people ... so they're convinced it works, and they push the program on everyone.
http://religionvirus.blogspot.com/2010/04/christian-shocker-god-based-aa-program.html
I'm 58. Started programming in 1969 in high school. Got my B.S. in 1978, Masters in 1985. They didn't even have "object oriented programming" in 1985, not to mention about a dozen other major technologies. Yet I'm still at the top of my game because I constantly buy books, adopt new technology and educate myself. There's no other way. A foundation in real computer science (not just programming, but algorithms, data structures, design patterns, analysis of programs, etc.) is critical. With that, you can adapt to new technology quickly. It's not easy, but it's part of what you signed up for. Go for it.
You guys have completely lost track of every web usability lesson. This "improved" navigation is a perfect example of geeks gone wild, of an open source project run by a bunch of programmers with no idea what usability even means. Slashdot now has a "user interface" that is completely at odds with every standard on the web. This is so counterintuitive it's unbelievable. The idea that you should "RTFM" is boneheaded. The comments you're getting in this thread are ALL FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE FIGURED OUT YOUR NON-STANDARD INTERFACE. Normal web users may be trying to read this, but they'd quickly become frustrated and depart, their comments unheard. Do you guys even read Jacobsen? Do you even know what a hyperlink is? The web has standards, boys. Get used to it. Work with it. But don't invent your own.
Your best bet by far is to use examples of companies that use Linux. Start with Amazon, FedEx, and so on. These companies DON'T do it for cost, they do it for reliability. Challenge your boss to find similiar-sized companies that use Windows. There are a few, but not many.
Technical geeks (like me) have a silly belief that if we just show someone the facts, they'll go, "Oh! I get it! You were right." And we lose every battle. You can't argue this on technical merit, because the boss in question isn't technical. This sort of battle is always waged at the anecdotal level. Treat it like a political campaign. Use bandwagon tactics, smear tactics, testimonials, and propaganda.
CJ
The article should have said, "The spammer, with the help and complicity of Microsoft via it's legions of insecure computers, launched a DOS attack."
I already pay a fair amount of money for "high speed" internet. What the hell am I paying for, if not to use Vonage, Skype, and the other high-speed services I need? If I were a Bell South customer, I'd be looking for alternatives.
First and foremost: Categorize your users. Usability is meaningless if you haven't identified the skills of the user and the tasks to be accomplished. For example, a rough categorization might be:
Novice, reading email and surfing the web
9-to-5 business user, lots of word processing and spreadsheet,
fairly experienced with Windows
Scientist, uses a few applications heavily, willing and able to
learn arcane interfaces
Computer geek, very knowledgable, wants to customize his windows
heavily, alter all menus, mostly uses command-line and emacs.
A single usability test couldn't possibly span these different users; each needs a completely different test. For example, computer geeks strongly favor the keyboard, and only use the mouse as a last resort. They're willing to spend lots of time learning all the emacs key sequences and are very good at it. They'll use ALT-TAB to change windows. By contrast, Grandma only surfs the web and checks email, and only uses the keyboard when typing an email.
It's hard to know where to start. Every point in this article has already been so thoroughly debunked it's silly to be dredging them up again. I suspect the author, although well meaning, simply didn't do his homework. Eric Raymond's extensive writings would be a great place to begin. I would also humbly remind everyone of my own essay, THE CARE AND FEEDING OF FOSS which discusses several of these myths.
Not only does he not apologize, he approves of everything MOG wrote, and says they only pulled it for practical reasons, not ethical reasons. Disgusting. Have these people no sense of decency at all?
I don't object to ads - I object to animated ads. I just can't read news when there's stuff flashing all around the article. It drives me nuts.
Any psychologist could tell you that peripheral-vision distractions, like animated ads, lower our concentration, lower comprehension, and worsen the reading experience. That's why they're used, after all, to distract us. And it works.
Ironically, there's an animated ad at the top of Slashdot as I type this. I blocked it. Now I can focus on what I'm trying to type.
I'm not violating a "social contract". I'm simply making the web pages readable again. I had dropped Yahoo! news in favor of myway.news.com, but with ad blocking, I can now use Yahoo! again. So ironically, my ad blocking gained Yahoo a customer they'd lost.
I am not a crook. DRM is based on the fundamental assumption that we are all dishonest, that *I* am dishonest, and that the author of a work won't give it to me until s/he has a way of controlling me. I have music that I got thirty years ago. It is still playable. During the cassette era, I made cassette tapes of my collection; during the CD era I made CDs. Now I have MP3s. I've made a few anthologies of favorites to share with a few friends and family. All of this is perfectly legal under "fair use." If DRM had been available for vinyl, my entire collection would be useless today, even though I bought and paid for it. The chances that DRM would survive across 30 years is virtually zero, given the pace of new operating systems, DRM owners going out of business, disk crashes, new compression formats, and so on. When I buy a song, I'm buying the right to use it... forever. Period. I won't accept anyone's assertion that I'm fundamentally dishonest and can't be trusted.
"Symantec announced on Wednesday that it has aquired a new patent (United States Patent - 6,851,057) titled "Brain driven detection of burgulars". From the article: "[The patent] could refer to any technology that allows a homeowner to look around his house and detect the presence of a burgular." A Symantec spokesman noted that, "We value our intellectual property, and want homeowners to know that they can't simply use this technology without a license."
I tried to read the article, but the animated advertisements distracted me so much I simply had to quit.
...
Don't news web sites understand that the human brain can't cope with serious issues and animation at the same time? I include SlashDot in this category
Craig
>> bespoke and vertical market applications which seem to be completely ignored by the article
>Actually they are briefly mentioned as "software that has no commercial viability" and then pretty much ignored for the rest of the article other than as the "FOSS corner case".
You make a good points - my article is about software that's generally useful, as opposed to "bespoke" and other software that isn't useful outside its original environment, what we're calling "no commercial viability".
But but what fraction of programmers actually work on such software? Is it a few, or is it most programmers? I'm curious if anyone has actual numbers on the ratio of programmers working on bespoke and other "internal" projects, versus software that's created "for sale".
Many programmers in for-profit situations feel threatened by FOSS. But if 80% of software will never be generally useful, hence not affected by FOSS projects, then those programmers may feel less threatened.
Craig A. James
That's a laugh! UNIX certainly stole a bunch of good ideas from MULTICS, and did invent a few, but "the best operating system invented to date"? That's just ludicrous.
Every operating system stands on the shoulders of those that came before. UNIX is certainly no exception, just as MULTICS built on those that came before it.
I used many of the operating systems that were available before UNIX, and I stand by my assertion: UNIX was better. Sure, it was immature and incomplete, but the foundation was there, and that foundation was clearly superior.
The fact that AT&T made the source code available was, without a doubt, a critical factor in its dominance. But to say "The key innovation of UNIX was not technical" is just wrong, in my opinion. UNIX was a huge technical achievement. Its simplicity and elegance were unmatched at the time. It took both the technical achievement and the open source to put UNIX on the map.
Craig A. James
Excellent points, and my apologies to the Mac world. I used a Mac for many years (before OS X) and always thought it superior to the PC in almost every way, and I am a huge admirer of Apple for making the difficult and risky decision to abandon their original operating system and adopt OS X.
Craig A. James