Good points. Three billion people living check to check sounds to me like a very tenuous situation, even if the few at the top who DO make scads of money keep things stable (in their own way).
Something's got to happen, though, right? I mean, it seems like eventually China's workforce will begin to collapse under its own weight if some moderation isn't implemented. Particularly if the population controls begin to really take hold.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I can only imagine that when there are that many people waiting for that many jobs that are that difficult and thankless, the way to move up is not to improve your skills but to kiss your superiors' butts. Which, over a few generations, will create quite a subset of buttkissers within the population at large. Which, one could argue, is what happened here in the States and is the source of the middle management culture. Seems a shame for such a proud, ancient culture to slowly bleed out through a glut of middle managers.
Yeesh -- sounds quite unpleasant. We get some of the horror stories here, but it sounds like it's far more the norm than the exception I had thought. Thanks very much for the information and response!
The feeling among some here is that we shouldn't buy products from China because of the working conditions. But it sounds to me like China desperately needs the work, warts and all. It's too bad that the revenues go to such a small few -- as you say, though, that's how it was here to begin with, so maybe there's a chance that it will evolve to a better situation over time. Dunno, though -- China has a lot more people to feed to the work machine than we did here. And again, we had a huge immigrant population at the time -- just like it may be in China now, there was always someone waiting in line behind you to take your job if you stood up to the bosses at all. I suspect the lines in China, thanks to the sheer numbers involved, might sustain a much longer period of inequity than we had here in the States.
Thanks again for a fascinating (if sobering) response.
Point taken -- thanks. I made the mistake of taking as fact something I read in the Slashdot comments. I guess what I was saying was that many of the people doing this were making zero dollars per day before. This excuses neither the conditions under which they're now working nor the pay, though I wonder if the national average differs from what you're seeing on the mainland around Hong Kong -- I know very little about this, though, so I certainly defer to you. I can find several sources for the Chinese per capita GDP, but I don't know how that corresponds to take-home pay for citizens (nor do I know where to look).
I hope you come back and read this -- I have a question that I've been wondering about for a while, and maybe you or someone else in your neck of the woods can help answer it. Here in the U.S., we have an immigration debate going right now. The common anti-immigration belief (generalized for brevity) seems to be that Indian and Chinese immigrants are coming to take white-collar jobs, and that Latin-Americans are taking more blue-collar jobs. I don't know how the numbers break down, and there are arguments to be made that in many cases, the most eager and/or qualified people are being given the jobs. Our situation, though, is muddied by the legal/illegal immigration issue -- in China, the people doing the same kind of work are already Chinese (politically, at the very least). Do you think that makes it harder to stop the inequity (in a relatively homogenous society, is it harder to discern where the inequity lies), or do you think it allows for more upward mobility possibilities? In other words, as there is not as wide a cultural or racial gap between the haves and have-nots (I know there are a blue million cultural, ethnic, and anthropological distinctions within China, but perhaps still not as random and diverse as here), do you think people have a better chance of working themselves up and out of a job like smelting the gold from circuit boards?
I'm guessing that in China, as is the case anywhere else that humans occupy, people rank themselves using whatever criteria they can find (however small) and then stick to it. But China has always interested me in this regard, because of the 40 years of attempted (and forced) equality. Do you think there are more opportunities to change your life there because there are fewer distinctions?
The payoff is huge on a Chinese scale -- elsewhere in these posts, someone states that the average yearly salary in China is between $300 and $700. I don't know if that's accurate or not, but even if it's half what it should be, they're still doing pretty well considering the number of people vying for work.
And yes, these materials are more easily scavenged from other items -- but I bet that's already being done. This is a relatively new option for Chinese workers, and they're willing to take the health risks that others won't. So to go from NO money to at least the average wage (if not higher) is a huge payoff. Work and money where there was none before.
While your list of chemistry concepts is impressive, I think you're missing the point. The point is to get kids interested, not to teach them EVERYTHING at once. Did you learn to read by picking up Shakespeare? You start small, get kids interested, and then expand on it. If you reject something because it doesn't teach the entire scope of chemistry, you might as well not get kids started on chemistry in the first place.
I think this kid's great -- he has an idea, has started to bring it to market, and it will serve him AND whoever buys and uses it. Win-win. And to say that it's no different from a textbook is silly -- the game couches the concepts in something kids like to do. Sure, some like to read textbooks all day, but many don't. Make it a game, and they start absorbing concepts while they play. Seems fairly clear to me.
Got it -- thanks. I'm on deadline, so I (of course) spent the past hour fiddling with it to test it (after I did the dishes and ran the vacuum and pet the cat). And indeed, you are right.
Track Changes has seemed to me for several versions of Word to be very confusing to the vast majority of people. But then I'm mostly a graphic designer (web for eleven years, print for twenty, doing all the IT stuff for the family publishing business on the side) and deal with Word myself as little as possible. Mostly I deal with authors and copywriters who are more focused on the current words than the past words, and get very confused when they find out they're both in there somewhere.
I guess there are people who know its intricacies and use it well, but it sure seems to confuse some and strike fear into others. In fact, I can see how one would expect that turning off tracking would indeed flush all previous versions -- it's not outside the realm of logic. So while I don't condone more flippin' zero-efficiency popups in Word ("You are viewing a popup message. [OK]"), some type of indication at the point of deactivation that there are still changes being stored might be good.
On that subject, I don't envy the developers of the Office suite (in fact, I have a buddy on the Office team, and while he tells me about a lot of the BS that goes on, he also tells me of some of the really fascinating challenges they face). The range of users they have to anticipate for Word, for example, is ridiculous. Total newbies who use it as a typewriter and don't even save documents all the way up to power users who (now) are building their own OpenXML files on the fly from custom apps. Still, this one seems like a case where you err on the side of caution and somehow indicate that there are stored changes. Don't know how to do it (again, I don't use Word much, and I also am not as good an interface designer as I'd like to be), but there must be a way to make this more clear to the typical user.
Anyhow, thanks again for the clarification -- good points. My wife made the same points moments ago while reading your post (yeah, we have a real firecracker time around here).
Okay, I just did a quick search and found out that you can't really turn off change tracking. You can hide it, of course, but it's still in there tracking. So the only way to get rid of those changes is to accept or reject each one individually. The information is here (this is for Word 2007, but I assume it's the same for previous versions as well). This is a silly and cumbersome thing to have to do, and you're right -- it makes it a bad way to distribute documents.
Now, the suggestions elsewhere around here that they simply standardize on PDF would solve everything, and they could still use Word if they're used to it. But posting.doc files (which has never seemed like a good idea in any area of business or government for countless reasons anyway -- why distribute something that can be so easily edited?) is rife with peril.
No. This is a great reason to have highly sensitive agencies like the CPA job out IT based on something other than lowest bid. This is is simply an example of an IT protocol that is ignorant of a very well-known and well-documented security concern.
Track changes works well for some, and is not a flaw. Writers love it, lawyers fear it. And therefore each should set it up differently. The fact that the CPA is a bunch of security (and culturally, and politically) ignorant yahoos does not make it necessary to replace Word with something else. It makes it necessary to replace the CPA with something else.
Sure, I understand all of that. But I think we've all let ourselves lose (or never develop) the ability to read a simple figure and understand it. A football field works great for a distance of 100 yards, but how about 78 yards? Now you're mentally approximating three-fourths of a football field and transferring that back to whatever you're looking at -- seems like a lot of extra processor cycles to me. Worse yet, how about 127 yards? Now you're laying football fields end to end just so you can truncate them -- lordy. If we have a better understanding of what a yard is, we can just see things for what they are without the overlays. I bet Tiger Woods doesn't view a par-3 over water as two and one-eighth football fields.
But perhaps I've shot myself in the foot -- he probably sees it as a five iron (even farther from reality than the football fields).
Anyhow, the football field thing reminds me of the whole mnemonic craze a few years ago. "Memorize this twelve-letter acronym so you'll remember your boss's birthday." People's minds work different ways, I know, and some word people would find it easier to do that than remember the date. Which gets me on to rote learning vs. this interpretive stuff that's happening in schools now, but that makes me sound old and cranky beyond my years and is too far off topic for this story. But I just wonder if the relational teaching thing is going too far and starting to handicap us a bit.
Is that an American football field or an Australian Rules football field?
Seriously, though, can't we just use yards or meters? I don't know about other countries, but here in the U.S. we spend more mental energy envisioning big rotating or end-to-end football fields around or next to things.
The previous poster stated that Indian students from U.S. universities who are hired after they graduate make the same amount of money. Perhaps H1-Bs do AVERAGE less than American citizens, but the poster was making a valid point about a subset of H1-Bs. Don't be so quick to tell people they're "WRONG!" just because of your experiences (which, in this case, does not account for the circumstances he mentions).
...I need my blinkenlights to tell me my machine is doing something. I have a laptop with a disk activity LED and a desktop without. The desktop I built myself on a shoestring budget, so I bought a dumb "Ninja 2" case with no activity lights and a silly set of blue LEDs to make it look cool instead. I find myself looking at the laptop's LED often to make sure that whatever I just did made something start happening -- sometimes it takes the hourglass a while to appear.
The various "I'm working" indicators in all the interfaces I've used (Windows since 3.11, Gnome, KDE, and OS X) are at the whim of the rendering engine. The LED, on the other hand, seems to be directly related to what's happening on the disk.
In fact, I've installed Desktop Sidebar on my XP laptop so I can have CPU, disk, memory, and network activity meters on-screen at all times. It's still subject to the same delays as the hourglass, but it helps. I wish I had a simple LED for all of them -- I don't need percentages, I just want to know that something's working when I tell it to. I've installed it on my mother's machine and it has cut down her frantic clicking by an order of magnitude.
Routers and switches are the same thing -- if something isn't coming through, I immediately look at the lights. Same with my cable modem, my VoIP box, and so on. All in all, while my office does indeed look like a cockpit at night, there aren't many LEDs I'd give up. I happen to like them, but after reading this I did a fairly careful assessment (I'm on deadline, you see, so I'm more easily distracted than normal) and found that almost everything except the dumb Ninja case was somehow useful to me from pleasantly far away. For 50 mW each, I can avoid burning countless calories rolling around on my chair checking machines and components.
But don't get me started on the eMac I have next to me -- the indicator light (a white LED under the case) tells me that the computer is on or asleep (something I can tell by looking at the 17" screen right next to it), and there is no indicator anywhere on the machine that the disk is running. Simple is good, stark is too simple.
It has long been my opinion that Jakob Nielsen is considered the leading authority on web usability because he keeps telling everyone he is. He takes it to an extreme -- graphic design is, to some extent, a part of usability design. They employ some of the same eye-tracking concepts, for one.
I find Jakob Nielsen's books to be difficult to rea, and his site even moreso. A lot of work goes into weeding out content from opinion and snotty "here's an example of what NOT to do" stuff. I read them, as usability is a part of my job and a major interest of mine. But there's a good middle ground to find that employs good, simple usable content AND relevant and unobtrusive design elements that clarify the content. Elsewhere in this thread it is stated that he practices what he preaches, and in many ways he does. But he preaches an almost ascetic method of usability design that ends up getting in the way as often as it helps.
Just my $.02, of course. I'm exhibiting an equally black-and-white opinion of Jakob Nielsen, so I understand that I could be a little over the top.
That's the point. NO President should authorize illegal wiretaps. I am a Democrat, and I'm perfectly comfortable with the next President (hopefully a Democrat) being subject to the law. I do believe that there is a war on terror going on, but FISA is already quite far-reaching. All you have to do is provide a glimmer of proof why the tap should take place, and it will be granted. FISA produces a more robust paper trail, though, something the current administration would prefer to avoid.
I'm certainly not an expert on this kind of stuff (I'm a web designer), but it seems to me that it could be that the patching process requires that IE be run at some point during the process (perhaps in the background, but still technically in memory and so forth). Maybe after the patch, it has to run IE to confirm successful patching. And if another browser is the default, that can obviously cause problems.
Dunno. Don't understand any of this stuff. Just thinking out loud. I doubt it's an accident, though. If it's not something technical like I'm suggesting, I would guess (as have others) that it's a tactic for user migration.
So noted. Still, that's quite an empty statement from the university. Maybe they're hamstrung, but I guess we'll find out about everything if this ever gets to court.
I seem to recall that when it happened, there was talk of parent groups being involved (sfgate article notwithstanding). I could be wrong, though. Either way, you're right -- it stinks.
I thought I hated her persona as well, until they got this new one who is even worse (who, I am told, was a customer on Miami Ink -- that'll catch up with her). There was a stretch there where the guy from Oobi and Bear in the Big Blue House was doing it, and that was just weird.
I think the point is, though, that in the drunken pirate thing and these PBS things, legislating morality on behalf of someone else's kids is getting out of hand. It used to be that there was some common sense -- now we assume that other parents can't be trusted and attempt to protect their children from even the mildest material.
Personally, I think the whole flap about TV and video games being so violent is missing the point -- the "moral majority's" lack of perspective makes everything seem equally bad, and everyone gets all confused and scared. Suddenly a picture of a teacher with a cup (and a caption that doesn't even begin to compare with the drunken comedy content of half the Warner Brothers cartoons I watched growing up) becomes as bad as X-rated content and is punishable by destruction of a career.
She was denied the degree she was expecting to get and had worked toward -- I'm not sure why they would change her degree like that, unless the education degree includes the teaching certificate as well. Either way, it's a seemingly arbitrary change by the administration to the outcome of her education that will affect her in her chosen profession.
It's lunacy -- I heard the story a few days ago and figured there must be more to it, but having read more about it now, I don't think there is. Apparently if you have any semblance of an adult life outside school, you're unfit to teach (according to the Morals Police).
Reminds me of the Sprout Goodnight Show host and her firing -- she'd been in some short PSA spoofs about sex SEVEN YEARS before she worked at Sprout (which is a 24-hour PBS Kids network), but parents pressured PBS to fire her and they did so. I guess all that matters is that someone thinks something is bad -- that's now apparently enough to make it true. Here's the Sprout story, by the way. My kid didn't seem to care, but I'm sure others did.
Slashdot Mirror
... by the concept of imaginary numbers. And they still taught that!
That's got to be one of the dumber photos I've seen in a long time. I'm reminded of this hands-free headset.
... at splashdot.org were just ruled obsolete. Slashdotters, beware ... we're next!
Good points. Three billion people living check to check sounds to me like a very tenuous situation, even if the few at the top who DO make scads of money keep things stable (in their own way).
Something's got to happen, though, right? I mean, it seems like eventually China's workforce will begin to collapse under its own weight if some moderation isn't implemented. Particularly if the population controls begin to really take hold.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I can only imagine that when there are that many people waiting for that many jobs that are that difficult and thankless, the way to move up is not to improve your skills but to kiss your superiors' butts. Which, over a few generations, will create quite a subset of buttkissers within the population at large. Which, one could argue, is what happened here in the States and is the source of the middle management culture. Seems a shame for such a proud, ancient culture to slowly bleed out through a glut of middle managers.
Yeesh -- sounds quite unpleasant. We get some of the horror stories here, but it sounds like it's far more the norm than the exception I had thought. Thanks very much for the information and response!
The feeling among some here is that we shouldn't buy products from China because of the working conditions. But it sounds to me like China desperately needs the work, warts and all. It's too bad that the revenues go to such a small few -- as you say, though, that's how it was here to begin with, so maybe there's a chance that it will evolve to a better situation over time. Dunno, though -- China has a lot more people to feed to the work machine than we did here. And again, we had a huge immigrant population at the time -- just like it may be in China now, there was always someone waiting in line behind you to take your job if you stood up to the bosses at all. I suspect the lines in China, thanks to the sheer numbers involved, might sustain a much longer period of inequity than we had here in the States.
Thanks again for a fascinating (if sobering) response.
Point taken -- thanks. I made the mistake of taking as fact something I read in the Slashdot comments. I guess what I was saying was that many of the people doing this were making zero dollars per day before. This excuses neither the conditions under which they're now working nor the pay, though I wonder if the national average differs from what you're seeing on the mainland around Hong Kong -- I know very little about this, though, so I certainly defer to you. I can find several sources for the Chinese per capita GDP, but I don't know how that corresponds to take-home pay for citizens (nor do I know where to look).
I hope you come back and read this -- I have a question that I've been wondering about for a while, and maybe you or someone else in your neck of the woods can help answer it. Here in the U.S., we have an immigration debate going right now. The common anti-immigration belief (generalized for brevity) seems to be that Indian and Chinese immigrants are coming to take white-collar jobs, and that Latin-Americans are taking more blue-collar jobs. I don't know how the numbers break down, and there are arguments to be made that in many cases, the most eager and/or qualified people are being given the jobs. Our situation, though, is muddied by the legal/illegal immigration issue -- in China, the people doing the same kind of work are already Chinese (politically, at the very least). Do you think that makes it harder to stop the inequity (in a relatively homogenous society, is it harder to discern where the inequity lies), or do you think it allows for more upward mobility possibilities? In other words, as there is not as wide a cultural or racial gap between the haves and have-nots (I know there are a blue million cultural, ethnic, and anthropological distinctions within China, but perhaps still not as random and diverse as here), do you think people have a better chance of working themselves up and out of a job like smelting the gold from circuit boards?
I'm guessing that in China, as is the case anywhere else that humans occupy, people rank themselves using whatever criteria they can find (however small) and then stick to it. But China has always interested me in this regard, because of the 40 years of attempted (and forced) equality. Do you think there are more opportunities to change your life there because there are fewer distinctions?
The payoff is huge on a Chinese scale -- elsewhere in these posts, someone states that the average yearly salary in China is between $300 and $700. I don't know if that's accurate or not, but even if it's half what it should be, they're still doing pretty well considering the number of people vying for work.
And yes, these materials are more easily scavenged from other items -- but I bet that's already being done. This is a relatively new option for Chinese workers, and they're willing to take the health risks that others won't. So to go from NO money to at least the average wage (if not higher) is a huge payoff. Work and money where there was none before.
While your list of chemistry concepts is impressive, I think you're missing the point. The point is to get kids interested, not to teach them EVERYTHING at once. Did you learn to read by picking up Shakespeare? You start small, get kids interested, and then expand on it. If you reject something because it doesn't teach the entire scope of chemistry, you might as well not get kids started on chemistry in the first place.
I think this kid's great -- he has an idea, has started to bring it to market, and it will serve him AND whoever buys and uses it. Win-win. And to say that it's no different from a textbook is silly -- the game couches the concepts in something kids like to do. Sure, some like to read textbooks all day, but many don't. Make it a game, and they start absorbing concepts while they play. Seems fairly clear to me.
Got it -- thanks. I'm on deadline, so I (of course) spent the past hour fiddling with it to test it (after I did the dishes and ran the vacuum and pet the cat). And indeed, you are right.
Track Changes has seemed to me for several versions of Word to be very confusing to the vast majority of people. But then I'm mostly a graphic designer (web for eleven years, print for twenty, doing all the IT stuff for the family publishing business on the side) and deal with Word myself as little as possible. Mostly I deal with authors and copywriters who are more focused on the current words than the past words, and get very confused when they find out they're both in there somewhere.
I guess there are people who know its intricacies and use it well, but it sure seems to confuse some and strike fear into others. In fact, I can see how one would expect that turning off tracking would indeed flush all previous versions -- it's not outside the realm of logic. So while I don't condone more flippin' zero-efficiency popups in Word ("You are viewing a popup message. [OK]"), some type of indication at the point of deactivation that there are still changes being stored might be good.
On that subject, I don't envy the developers of the Office suite (in fact, I have a buddy on the Office team, and while he tells me about a lot of the BS that goes on, he also tells me of some of the really fascinating challenges they face). The range of users they have to anticipate for Word, for example, is ridiculous. Total newbies who use it as a typewriter and don't even save documents all the way up to power users who (now) are building their own OpenXML files on the fly from custom apps. Still, this one seems like a case where you err on the side of caution and somehow indicate that there are stored changes. Don't know how to do it (again, I don't use Word much, and I also am not as good an interface designer as I'd like to be), but there must be a way to make this more clear to the typical user.
Anyhow, thanks again for the clarification -- good points. My wife made the same points moments ago while reading your post (yeah, we have a real firecracker time around here).
Okay, I just did a quick search and found out that you can't really turn off change tracking. You can hide it, of course, but it's still in there tracking. So the only way to get rid of those changes is to accept or reject each one individually. The information is here (this is for Word 2007, but I assume it's the same for previous versions as well). This is a silly and cumbersome thing to have to do, and you're right -- it makes it a bad way to distribute documents.
.doc files (which has never seemed like a good idea in any area of business or government for countless reasons anyway -- why distribute something that can be so easily edited?) is rife with peril.
Now, the suggestions elsewhere around here that they simply standardize on PDF would solve everything, and they could still use Word if they're used to it. But posting
No. This is a great reason to have highly sensitive agencies like the CPA job out IT based on something other than lowest bid. This is is simply an example of an IT protocol that is ignorant of a very well-known and well-documented security concern.
Track changes works well for some, and is not a flaw. Writers love it, lawyers fear it. And therefore each should set it up differently. The fact that the CPA is a bunch of security (and culturally, and politically) ignorant yahoos does not make it necessary to replace Word with something else. It makes it necessary to replace the CPA with something else.
Sure, I understand all of that. But I think we've all let ourselves lose (or never develop) the ability to read a simple figure and understand it. A football field works great for a distance of 100 yards, but how about 78 yards? Now you're mentally approximating three-fourths of a football field and transferring that back to whatever you're looking at -- seems like a lot of extra processor cycles to me. Worse yet, how about 127 yards? Now you're laying football fields end to end just so you can truncate them -- lordy. If we have a better understanding of what a yard is, we can just see things for what they are without the overlays. I bet Tiger Woods doesn't view a par-3 over water as two and one-eighth football fields.
But perhaps I've shot myself in the foot -- he probably sees it as a five iron (even farther from reality than the football fields).
Anyhow, the football field thing reminds me of the whole mnemonic craze a few years ago. "Memorize this twelve-letter acronym so you'll remember your boss's birthday." People's minds work different ways, I know, and some word people would find it easier to do that than remember the date. Which gets me on to rote learning vs. this interpretive stuff that's happening in schools now, but that makes me sound old and cranky beyond my years and is too far off topic for this story. But I just wonder if the relational teaching thing is going too far and starting to handicap us a bit.
Is that an American football field or an Australian Rules football field?
Seriously, though, can't we just use yards or meters? I don't know about other countries, but here in the U.S. we spend more mental energy envisioning big rotating or end-to-end football fields around or next to things.
The previous poster stated that Indian students from U.S. universities who are hired after they graduate make the same amount of money. Perhaps H1-Bs do AVERAGE less than American citizens, but the poster was making a valid point about a subset of H1-Bs. Don't be so quick to tell people they're "WRONG!" just because of your experiences (which, in this case, does not account for the circumstances he mentions).
Personally, I thought of SCMODS from the Blues Brothers (State County Municipal Offender Data System, I believe).
...I need my blinkenlights to tell me my machine is doing something. I have a laptop with a disk activity LED and a desktop without. The desktop I built myself on a shoestring budget, so I bought a dumb "Ninja 2" case with no activity lights and a silly set of blue LEDs to make it look cool instead. I find myself looking at the laptop's LED often to make sure that whatever I just did made something start happening -- sometimes it takes the hourglass a while to appear.
The various "I'm working" indicators in all the interfaces I've used (Windows since 3.11, Gnome, KDE, and OS X) are at the whim of the rendering engine. The LED, on the other hand, seems to be directly related to what's happening on the disk.
In fact, I've installed Desktop Sidebar on my XP laptop so I can have CPU, disk, memory, and network activity meters on-screen at all times. It's still subject to the same delays as the hourglass, but it helps. I wish I had a simple LED for all of them -- I don't need percentages, I just want to know that something's working when I tell it to. I've installed it on my mother's machine and it has cut down her frantic clicking by an order of magnitude.
Routers and switches are the same thing -- if something isn't coming through, I immediately look at the lights. Same with my cable modem, my VoIP box, and so on. All in all, while my office does indeed look like a cockpit at night, there aren't many LEDs I'd give up. I happen to like them, but after reading this I did a fairly careful assessment (I'm on deadline, you see, so I'm more easily distracted than normal) and found that almost everything except the dumb Ninja case was somehow useful to me from pleasantly far away. For 50 mW each, I can avoid burning countless calories rolling around on my chair checking machines and components.
But don't get me started on the eMac I have next to me -- the indicator light (a white LED under the case) tells me that the computer is on or asleep (something I can tell by looking at the 17" screen right next to it), and there is no indicator anywhere on the machine that the disk is running. Simple is good, stark is too simple.
It has long been my opinion that Jakob Nielsen is considered the leading authority on web usability because he keeps telling everyone he is. He takes it to an extreme -- graphic design is, to some extent, a part of usability design. They employ some of the same eye-tracking concepts, for one.
I find Jakob Nielsen's books to be difficult to rea, and his site even moreso. A lot of work goes into weeding out content from opinion and snotty "here's an example of what NOT to do" stuff. I read them, as usability is a part of my job and a major interest of mine. But there's a good middle ground to find that employs good, simple usable content AND relevant and unobtrusive design elements that clarify the content. Elsewhere in this thread it is stated that he practices what he preaches, and in many ways he does. But he preaches an almost ascetic method of usability design that ends up getting in the way as often as it helps.
Just my $.02, of course. I'm exhibiting an equally black-and-white opinion of Jakob Nielsen, so I understand that I could be a little over the top.
If you're a Muslim, are you even allowed to use smileys? They are a visual representation of the human form, to a certain degree.
That's the point. NO President should authorize illegal wiretaps. I am a Democrat, and I'm perfectly comfortable with the next President (hopefully a Democrat) being subject to the law. I do believe that there is a war on terror going on, but FISA is already quite far-reaching. All you have to do is provide a glimmer of proof why the tap should take place, and it will be granted. FISA produces a more robust paper trail, though, something the current administration would prefer to avoid.
... for being in a landing party with a Star Trek red shirt guy. They always lose those guys.
I'm certainly not an expert on this kind of stuff (I'm a web designer), but it seems to me that it could be that the patching process requires that IE be run at some point during the process (perhaps in the background, but still technically in memory and so forth). Maybe after the patch, it has to run IE to confirm successful patching. And if another browser is the default, that can obviously cause problems.
Dunno. Don't understand any of this stuff. Just thinking out loud. I doubt it's an accident, though. If it's not something technical like I'm suggesting, I would guess (as have others) that it's a tactic for user migration.
Yeah. Not all photos get you exiled for life, though. In the case of the photo I linked to, it's quite unfortunate.
So noted. Still, that's quite an empty statement from the university. Maybe they're hamstrung, but I guess we'll find out about everything if this ever gets to court.
I seem to recall that when it happened, there was talk of parent groups being involved (sfgate article notwithstanding). I could be wrong, though. Either way, you're right -- it stinks.
I thought I hated her persona as well, until they got this new one who is even worse (who, I am told, was a customer on Miami Ink -- that'll catch up with her). There was a stretch there where the guy from Oobi and Bear in the Big Blue House was doing it, and that was just weird.
I think the point is, though, that in the drunken pirate thing and these PBS things, legislating morality on behalf of someone else's kids is getting out of hand. It used to be that there was some common sense -- now we assume that other parents can't be trusted and attempt to protect their children from even the mildest material.
Personally, I think the whole flap about TV and video games being so violent is missing the point -- the "moral majority's" lack of perspective makes everything seem equally bad, and everyone gets all confused and scared. Suddenly a picture of a teacher with a cup (and a caption that doesn't even begin to compare with the drunken comedy content of half the Warner Brothers cartoons I watched growing up) becomes as bad as X-rated content and is punishable by destruction of a career.
She was denied the degree she was expecting to get and had worked toward -- I'm not sure why they would change her degree like that, unless the education degree includes the teaching certificate as well. Either way, it's a seemingly arbitrary change by the administration to the outcome of her education that will affect her in her chosen profession.
It's lunacy -- I heard the story a few days ago and figured there must be more to it, but having read more about it now, I don't think there is. Apparently if you have any semblance of an adult life outside school, you're unfit to teach (according to the Morals Police).
Reminds me of the Sprout Goodnight Show host and her firing -- she'd been in some short PSA spoofs about sex SEVEN YEARS before she worked at Sprout (which is a 24-hour PBS Kids network), but parents pressured PBS to fire her and they did so. I guess all that matters is that someone thinks something is bad -- that's now apparently enough to make it true. Here's the Sprout story, by the way. My kid didn't seem to care, but I'm sure others did.