Count me in the same boat. I had to read the comments just to see if there was any value to this advertisement and completely information-free posting. I really don't mind advertising that much if it's clearly labeled as such (even though I find BoingBoing's long-format ads that look like posts to be annoying, they're clearly labeled as such).
As a long-time reader, this pretty much marks the last straw in terms of irrelevant content and lack of editorial relevance. I mean, I can put up with inane content-free posts and badly-edited posts full of grammar errors that would embarrass any half-literate high school student, but this post is just one too many.
It's true, though. The dotcom I worked for had a semi-open office plan (cubicle-type walls on wheels and clusters of desks). One person would get up to go for a smoking break and that would be the cue for everyone within sight range to take a break with them. If it weren't for the fact that we tended to talk work during smoke breaks, we would have lost quite a bit of productivity with the sudden mass exoduses.
I work for an HMO that lets you do all of that. You can make an appointment online, refill prescriptions and view your patient records (via an interface with EPIC). And I know we're not the only ones who offer this kind of thing.
That said, HMOs have a much easier time of it offering these kinds of things. For a given medical system that's not integrated like an HMO, who's going to offer it? The insurance company can't easily because they don't have access to the medical records that may be on multiple systems and the medical providers typically lack the incentive and economies of scale to offer it.
Hear, hear! At one point, as a user in the U.S., I was unable to properly authenticate to Netscape that I was indeed a U.S. citizen and entitled to the full-encryption version banned to other countries under ITAR. So I downloaded the patch written in and available from Australia for full 128-bit encryption.
I think regionalization is a really poor idea and unworkable in most cases. By way of example, despite not being a citizen of the UK, I've seen all six episodes of The IT Crowd. At one point, I owned a region-free APEX DVD player to watch Region 2 encoded discs that are not available at all in the U.S.
I'm surprised I had to scroll halfway down the page to find the recommendation for Readerware. It's the system my wife and I currently use. Being a librarian by training, she did the research and this is what we came up with.
My only complaints are how it handles cover images (if you even care about such thing) and the difficulties with unknown ISBN numbers. As noted above, since it searches the web for matches, book club editions, small press books and some out-of-print items won't be found. Older printings from the UK seem to be particularly problematic.
Sometimes, the categorization is inconsistent and the meta-data can be unusual. Since Amazon.com uses one system and other catalogs use different systems, it's best to come up with a categorization system and tags (or some kind of taxonomy) for organizing your collection. I think this would be true no matter what system you use or if you built it yourself.
On the plus side, it is compatible with a scanner and the web search is pretty quick unless you search across too broad a variety of sources. If a book doesn't have a bar code, you can easily add ISBNs to a list to search against.
On the last comment, which also relates to the lack of valign tags. Of course I'm using tables still.
On site I worked on, I need to middle align an image and after struggling for way too long to get text and an image to line up along-side each other, I finally just threw it into a table (long story short, there were more issues than I could solve using CSS and use of DIVsor other elements).
Until browsers all follow standards and layout tags don't require hacks, I suspect this practice will continue.
Between the questionable conclusions and the sometimes poor quality of the writing (not to mention, are there graphs and charts? I didn't see any.), I wonder about the usefulness of such an analysis.
Take, for example, the commentary on the element. Abuse is in the eye of the beholder. A number of pages don't follow standards or use deprecated elements. In some cases, that's not entirely the fault of the authors. If I'm developing a corporate site that demands backwards compatibility to Netscape 4.x or an ancient version of IE, I'm certainly not going to jump through all sorts of hoops with layered CSS hacks when I can just use a deprecated element.
And which specifications are we talking about? If I include those elements and validate my document, which elements will fail? At present six by my count (and not five) of those attributes in are deprecated by the W3C for HTML 4.0.
Regarding the use of classes, I wonder how much HTML coding the authors do. I have had countless opportunities to style an element using a "copyright" class (rather than something like "small"). In some ways, it's a better practice since it describes the element rather than the style being applied to that element. It's still not ideal, but in the real world, I can remember that this element, like footer, appears in a certain place on the page and style it accordingly. Using a element is not a substitute; it's not meta-data, it's a display element the user sees.
Similarly, "The button class baffles us. We can't really tell what what it is used for. Similarly, the link class, which is apparently very popular, seems strange. Why would authors label something with that class?" How about I have a submit button and a link side-by-side and I want them to look the same (that is, both appear as buttons)? If it makes sense from a user experience standpoint, then I'll use it. I can certainly see using a link class to style certain links on a page (say in a left navigation or the body) different from others. It's sloppy, but it gets the job done and, even though I'd avoid it whenever possible, I'm not going to slam someone else for doing so.
And on it goes, "onmouseover on a elements is a little worrying; presumably those are mostly cases of the status bar being overridden". How about image rollovers for navigation? Empirically, I've seen fifty sites with image rollovers for every site that changes the status line. The authors then state (in the next section) that the relative few uses on the element is the assumption that few people are using rollovers. Since they typically are applied to the anchor, this is an erroneous assumption. Of course, why bother with scripting events when you can use CSS (apart from pesky backwards compatibility)?
In general, the tone of the article seems to be that many people should not be allowed on the web because they can't follow standards (and are illiterate, in many cases). Nothing is said about browser being inconsistent in following standards, nor about how many of those pages are legacy pages from who knows when. The general attitude seems to be that HTML is as rigorous as a programming language. If that last were the case, browsers would only display pages that conformed to the 4.01 Strict standard or maybe the XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD. I mean, if you really want to slam users for not caring what the standards say, see how many of those documents are properly formed according to the XHTML standards. I don't even have to do an "analysis" to know the number would be very much on the low side.
I'll disagree here. Not because I'm a mac fan or because I think that an environment of all Macs is the way to go, but rather the comment about Macs in an enterprise environment.
Speaking from personal experience, Adobe Systems uses Macs extensively. They develop software to run on Macs. I worked in a test lab that was 50% Macs of all varieties, had a Mac on my Desk and the company supported it and worked closely with Apple to test their software against pre-release OS X Tiger seeds while I was there. To the best of my knowledge, we had no more or less problems with the Macs compared to the Windows machines because of intelligent network security policies and a decent IT group.
In fact, I've worked in far more heterogeneous environments with some mix of machines running different operating systems. Far and away the most unusual was the bank I worked at that used a combination of Macs, Windows machines, and some sort of proprietary DOS system all glued together with Novell to talk to what I think was a VAX mainframe. It was a headache to maintain, but the majority of problems were the kinds of user errors that would have occurred on any system. And for me personally, I kind of prefer the Apple bomb icon to a BSOD.
That's not entirely true about the perks. There are a number of things that temp employees don't get like discounts at the company store or a free copy of the product you worked on. These are perks beyond the usual contract versus full-time employees at other companies.
I have my name in the credits on two XBox games, but I had to go out and buy a copy of one of them. By contrast, when I contracted at Adobe, I left with a copy of the product I was a tester on (without my name in the credits). Considering how little it costs to produce the software and how much goodwill it engenders, it seems like little enough to give people who work there a copy, whether they're full-time or not.
Perks are but one small part of the difference between contractors and full-time employees at Microsoft. This at-will employment thing can really pull you in. If you feel obligated to the company because they're so great, wait till they cut you loose and you can't immediately find another position. Blue badges are offered all kinds of assistance in shifting to another group and encouraged to interview while in their current position. The same is not true for temps. And if you leave on your own before your contract term is ended, you may find it difficult to get hired back later.
All of which is not to say that I wouldn't go back to work there if an opportunity better than my current position.
I know a guy who was quite good at computer programming who could have earned very good money as a senior programmer. He chucked it all to work as an auto mechanic because he liked getting his hands dirty and solving problems that weren't so abstract. He's definitely one of the smarter people I've met and doing what he enjoys.
The comment about four Rs in "referrer" falls rather flat on humor. The sig is much funnier than the post about spelling.
Incidentally, assuming (hoping the poster didn't miss the point and that they were trying for humor), the sig is correct in that it refers to the two Rs in the middle of HTTP_REFERER (which *should* be spelled HTTP_REFERRER and isn't).
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=referer
A misspelling of "referrer" which somehow made it into the HTTP standard. A given web page's referer (sic) is the URL of whatever web page contains the link that the user followed to the current page. Most browsers pass this information as part of a request.
The one downside is that it assumes a certain amount of knowledge on my part that may or may not exist. If I don't have access to your time information (say I'm off the grid and only have a rotary phone and a paper address book), I will only attempt to contact you in a probabilistic fashion. That is to say, I try to call you during normal business hours where at least my odds of reaching you are better than they would be in the middle of the night.
Since people are still driven by circadian rhythms, more often than not, the math is easier with a time zone if I don't have your schedule at hand. And at least, if I call during business hours, I can leave a message with a not entirely unreasonable expectation the person I'm trying to reach will call me back soon, rather than five or six hours later.
I think it's the same reason telemarketers always call around dinner time... Hey! If we got rid of time zones, they'd have to work to figure out when to call me. Kind of like the bit tax on spam. I *like* that idea.
Very much a Beta. This product needed a great deal more testing and feedback before being released. By adding all the "intelligence" or smart-searching features, the results become non-obvious. How it came up with "Optical" and returned opticians when I was looking for "Bookstores" is completely beyond me. Some kind of session issue, I would think.
Add to that the fact that even their canned photostrips for my neighborhood (Ballard in Seattle, WA, 98107) completely miss the actual businesses and show further down a very busy main street and that the few businesses that are shown are sliced in half so there is no "best" photo and they utility is really questionable.
I'd much prefer to see something where I can actually navigate around the neighborhood instead of guessing how to get to a street. Searching may work for books (though it's a poor substitute for browsing in a brick-and-mortar store sometimes), it definitely doesn't work here. I'll take a pass on this technological "advance."
Slashdot Mirror
Count me in the same boat. I had to read the comments just to see if there was any value to this advertisement and completely information-free posting. I really don't mind advertising that much if it's clearly labeled as such (even though I find BoingBoing's long-format ads that look like posts to be annoying, they're clearly labeled as such). As a long-time reader, this pretty much marks the last straw in terms of irrelevant content and lack of editorial relevance. I mean, I can put up with inane content-free posts and badly-edited posts full of grammar errors that would embarrass any half-literate high school student, but this post is just one too many.
Heh.
It's true, though. The dotcom I worked for had a semi-open office plan (cubicle-type walls on wheels and clusters of desks). One person would get up to go for a smoking break and that would be the cue for everyone within sight range to take a break with them. If it weren't for the fact that we tended to talk work during smoke breaks, we would have lost quite a bit of productivity with the sudden mass exoduses.
I work for an HMO that lets you do all of that. You can make an appointment online, refill prescriptions and view your patient records (via an interface with EPIC). And I know we're not the only ones who offer this kind of thing.
That said, HMOs have a much easier time of it offering these kinds of things. For a given medical system that's not integrated like an HMO, who's going to offer it? The insurance company can't easily because they don't have access to the medical records that may be on multiple systems and the medical providers typically lack the incentive and economies of scale to offer it.
Hear, hear! At one point, as a user in the U.S., I was unable to properly authenticate to Netscape that I was indeed a U.S. citizen and entitled to the full-encryption version banned to other countries under ITAR. So I downloaded the patch written in and available from Australia for full 128-bit encryption.
I think regionalization is a really poor idea and unworkable in most cases. By way of example, despite not being a citizen of the UK, I've seen all six episodes of The IT Crowd. At one point, I owned a region-free APEX DVD player to watch Region 2 encoded discs that are not available at all in the U.S.
I'm surprised I had to scroll halfway down the page to find the recommendation for Readerware. It's the system my wife and I currently use. Being a librarian by training, she did the research and this is what we came up with.
My only complaints are how it handles cover images (if you even care about such thing) and the difficulties with unknown ISBN numbers. As noted above, since it searches the web for matches, book club editions, small press books and some out-of-print items won't be found. Older printings from the UK seem to be particularly problematic.
Sometimes, the categorization is inconsistent and the meta-data can be unusual. Since Amazon.com uses one system and other catalogs use different systems, it's best to come up with a categorization system and tags (or some kind of taxonomy) for organizing your collection. I think this would be true no matter what system you use or if you built it yourself.
On the plus side, it is compatible with a scanner and the web search is pretty quick unless you search across too broad a variety of sources. If a book doesn't have a bar code, you can easily add ISBNs to a list to search against.
Wait, are you married to the same woman I am?
My wife has an MLIS degree, likes Trek (original series, please, and occasionally DS9) and we met through a friend at an Anime movie.
On the last comment, which also relates to the lack of valign tags. Of course I'm using tables still.
On site I worked on, I need to middle align an image and after struggling for way too long to get text and an image to line up along-side each other, I finally just threw it into a table (long story short, there were more issues than I could solve using CSS and use of DIVsor other elements).
Until browsers all follow standards and layout tags don't require hacks, I suspect this practice will continue.
Yeah, why is this surprising? Title is also used if I bookmark a page. When would I *not* want to use it?
Between the questionable conclusions and the sometimes poor quality of the writing (not to mention, are there graphs and charts? I didn't see any.), I wonder about the usefulness of such an analysis.
Take, for example, the commentary on the element. Abuse is in the eye of the beholder. A number of pages don't follow standards or use deprecated elements. In some cases, that's not entirely the fault of the authors. If I'm developing a corporate site that demands backwards compatibility to Netscape 4.x or an ancient version of IE, I'm certainly not going to jump through all sorts of hoops with layered CSS hacks when I can just use a deprecated element.
And which specifications are we talking about? If I include those elements and validate my document, which elements will fail? At present six by my count (and not five) of those attributes in are deprecated by the W3C for HTML 4.0.
Regarding the use of classes, I wonder how much HTML coding the authors do. I have had countless opportunities to style an element using a "copyright" class (rather than something like "small"). In some ways, it's a better practice since it describes the element rather than the style being applied to that element. It's still not ideal, but in the real world, I can remember that this element, like footer, appears in a certain place on the page and style it accordingly. Using a element is not a substitute; it's not meta-data, it's a display element the user sees.
Similarly, "The button class baffles us. We can't really tell what what it is used for. Similarly, the link class, which is apparently very popular, seems strange. Why would authors label something with that class?" How about I have a submit button and a link side-by-side and I want them to look the same (that is, both appear as buttons)? If it makes sense from a user experience standpoint, then I'll use it. I can certainly see using a link class to style certain links on a page (say in a left navigation or the body) different from others. It's sloppy, but it gets the job done and, even though I'd avoid it whenever possible, I'm not going to slam someone else for doing so.
And on it goes, "onmouseover on a elements is a little worrying; presumably those are mostly cases of the status bar being overridden". How about image rollovers for navigation? Empirically, I've seen fifty sites with image rollovers for every site that changes the status line. The authors then state (in the next section) that the relative few uses on the element is the assumption that few people are using rollovers. Since they typically are applied to the anchor, this is an erroneous assumption. Of course, why bother with scripting events when you can use CSS (apart from pesky backwards compatibility)?
In general, the tone of the article seems to be that many people should not be allowed on the web because they can't follow standards (and are illiterate, in many cases). Nothing is said about browser being inconsistent in following standards, nor about how many of those pages are legacy pages from who knows when. The general attitude seems to be that HTML is as rigorous as a programming language. If that last were the case, browsers would only display pages that conformed to the 4.01 Strict standard or maybe the XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD. I mean, if you really want to slam users for not caring what the standards say, see how many of those documents are properly formed according to the XHTML standards. I don't even have to do an "analysis" to know the number would be very much on the low side.
I'll disagree here. Not because I'm a mac fan or because I think that an environment of all Macs is the way to go, but rather the comment about Macs in an enterprise environment. Speaking from personal experience, Adobe Systems uses Macs extensively. They develop software to run on Macs. I worked in a test lab that was 50% Macs of all varieties, had a Mac on my Desk and the company supported it and worked closely with Apple to test their software against pre-release OS X Tiger seeds while I was there. To the best of my knowledge, we had no more or less problems with the Macs compared to the Windows machines because of intelligent network security policies and a decent IT group. In fact, I've worked in far more heterogeneous environments with some mix of machines running different operating systems. Far and away the most unusual was the bank I worked at that used a combination of Macs, Windows machines, and some sort of proprietary DOS system all glued together with Novell to talk to what I think was a VAX mainframe. It was a headache to maintain, but the majority of problems were the kinds of user errors that would have occurred on any system. And for me personally, I kind of prefer the Apple bomb icon to a BSOD.
That's not entirely true about the perks. There are a number of things that temp employees don't get like discounts at the company store or a free copy of the product you worked on. These are perks beyond the usual contract versus full-time employees at other companies.
I have my name in the credits on two XBox games, but I had to go out and buy a copy of one of them. By contrast, when I contracted at Adobe, I left with a copy of the product I was a tester on (without my name in the credits). Considering how little it costs to produce the software and how much goodwill it engenders, it seems like little enough to give people who work there a copy, whether they're full-time or not.
Perks are but one small part of the difference between contractors and full-time employees at Microsoft. This at-will employment thing can really pull you in. If you feel obligated to the company because they're so great, wait till they cut you loose and you can't immediately find another position. Blue badges are offered all kinds of assistance in shifting to another group and encouraged to interview while in their current position. The same is not true for temps. And if you leave on your own before your contract term is ended, you may find it difficult to get hired back later.
All of which is not to say that I wouldn't go back to work there if an opportunity better than my current position.
I know a guy who was quite good at computer programming who could have earned very good money as a senior programmer. He chucked it all to work as an auto mechanic because he liked getting his hands dirty and solving problems that weren't so abstract. He's definitely one of the smarter people I've met and doing what he enjoys.
The comment about four Rs in "referrer" falls rather flat on humor. The sig is much funnier than the post about spelling.
Incidentally, assuming (hoping the poster didn't miss the point and that they were trying for humor), the sig is correct in that it refers to the two Rs in the middle of HTTP_REFERER (which *should* be spelled HTTP_REFERRER and isn't).
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=referer
A misspelling of "referrer" which somehow
made it into the HTTP standard. A given web page's
referer (sic) is the URL of whatever web page contains the
link that the user followed to the current page. Most
browsers pass this information as part of a request.
The one downside is that it assumes a certain amount of knowledge on my part that may or may not exist. If I don't have access to your time information (say I'm off the grid and only have a rotary phone and a paper address book), I will only attempt to contact you in a probabilistic fashion. That is to say, I try to call you during normal business hours where at least my odds of reaching you are better than they would be in the middle of the night. Since people are still driven by circadian rhythms, more often than not, the math is easier with a time zone if I don't have your schedule at hand. And at least, if I call during business hours, I can leave a message with a not entirely unreasonable expectation the person I'm trying to reach will call me back soon, rather than five or six hours later. I think it's the same reason telemarketers always call around dinner time... Hey! If we got rid of time zones, they'd have to work to figure out when to call me. Kind of like the bit tax on spam. I *like* that idea.
Very much a Beta. This product needed a great deal more testing and feedback before being released. By adding all the "intelligence" or smart-searching features, the results become non-obvious. How it came up with "Optical" and returned opticians when I was looking for "Bookstores" is completely beyond me. Some kind of session issue, I would think.
Add to that the fact that even their canned photostrips for my neighborhood (Ballard in Seattle, WA, 98107) completely miss the actual businesses and show further down a very busy main street and that the few businesses that are shown are sliced in half so there is no "best" photo and they utility is really questionable.
I'd much prefer to see something where I can actually navigate around the neighborhood instead of guessing how to get to a street. Searching may work for books (though it's a poor substitute for browsing in a brick-and-mortar store sometimes), it definitely doesn't work here. I'll take a pass on this technological "advance."