Interestingly Soriecki has quoted Mackay several times and refuted some of his conclusions. I will surely get hold of this book and read arguments from the opposite side.
You should read "Wisdom of Crowds" by James Soriecki. It is a very nice text on how, where, and why "collective wisdom" of a few average individuals is better than the wisdom of a few experts.
Now c'mon guys. It is really nasty to nitpick on FEMA in this moment. So you expect them to make their site cross browser compliant, when there are more important things like saving lives. And I just don't understand how guys here have the time and enthusiasm to check out little things on the site in browsers like Opera. It is a shame really. The site gives a phone number and a place to download IE if you don't have it. So who cares? Is the site really going to cause inconvinience to anyone needing the site?
Besides why don't you guys blame the browsers and W3C to agree on common standards instead of whining about FEMA? Why on earth is Opera so different and offers a crazy way to change the User Agent?
Folks keep blaming Microsoft for adding non-standard extensions to IE. But think about things like XMLHTTPRequest, just because MS saw its use long back today we are experiencing some nice interactive websites. If Firefox had to copy it why didn't they simply make it work the same way it was working in IE? Why their own request and way of handling errors? And what is W3C doing? Why couln't the 100s of "experts" preparing tomes at w3c not anticipate such a simple thing?
This cross-browser is such a unrewarding drain of development time. I wonder how much of combined development time has been spent on this artificially generated problem, solving which provides zero gain to the users.
Onus on user doesn't help
on
Do You Code Sign?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think most of the users have no idea what "This code is signed by BlahBlah corp" or "See certificate" etc. means. They simply click on something to get past the annoying window.
We recently created a website for collaboration in creative writing - Collaze
that uses cc licence. We wanted the contributors to write freely for the public domain without losing the rights to commercially utilize their work later. CC seemed to be custom made for this purpose. So, tomorrow if some entity wants to commercialize the collaborative work, it can do so provided it has the permission of the contributors. Writers can agree and give thier permission to the publisher with or without taking royalty - this depends totally on the writer. I think this is just the beginning. CC will be great for a variety of collaborative work in the future.
These products of space and defense research almost inevitably get commercialized and reach normal folks like us. And I am yet to find some healthy packed food that does not cause heartburn or some other discomfort.
a bloated medley of JCP technologies that very few people actually need. It doesn't matter if it is commercial or non-commercial, JBOSS or something else. The volumes that have been written on J2EE, how to use it, best practises, performance tuning, design patterns is a good sign that people are having difficulties using J2EE to rapidly create fast and easily maintainable applications using J2EE at a reasonable cost and time. OK, the servlets and JSPs are very basic and useful but all the EJBs, MDBs, CMPs, Value Objects, etc.. are seldom useful. I have seen many projects go out of control where unsuspecting developers have spent months on this stuff to produce a bulky unusable system. Lightweight technologies like Hibernate and spring are much better. J2EE is going the CORBA way.
grammar hints, and it is a major piece in terms of development time. Also, anyone cares to bring Word Perfect. Dell bundles it free with its PCs I used it to write a 5 page article couple of years ago and found it to very smooth and pleasant to use, unlike OO, which felt clumsy and bulky at that time.
Well, I have nothing against Sun but I am worried. It pains me to see a relentless innovator like Sun resorting to gimmicks like $1 per CPU to boost its sales. I am particularly worried about Java, which I like. While competiting frameworks like RAIL, PHP,.NET, are all catching up, the incredibly slow and bureacratic JCP is churning out more volumes of useless and incredibly gloated frameworks. I am not a CEO but simply a stock holder and user of Sun software. BTW, I have helped create http://www.collaze.com/ . Will appreciate it if you can take a look and give your feedback.
You probably haven't heard of
"Our goal is to organize the world's information"
Compare that to
- Network is the computer
- We are the . in.com
- $100 per developer - Java Desktop System
- $1 per hour of CPU
- You guys are screwing the revenue model - Scott McNealy to JBoss
- Open source Solaris
If a company doesn't show consistency in any commitment, nobody is going to trust it. And it shows in Sun's performance.
It is interesting that I sent "Ask Slashdot" posting yesterday about "What is the future of Hotmail". That posting got rejected, but we got to discuss a lot about it today. I think it is worth a wait and see what hotmail does for you. I am hoping that Bill Gate wakes up to all this news and sends his force to revive hotmail. Yahoo is making improvements already. If one has the desire to provide good features to his users, one always can without the need to hire rocket engineers. While working on http://www.collaze.com/ any feature, however radical it may be, can be added after doing some research and experiments with AJAX/DHTML and back-end processing.
Can simply wait for hotmail and yahoo(well, it is pretty good already) to wake up and introduce smooth AJAX and WYSYIG interface, add more memory, clean up their advertising and spam filters. For a company like Microsoft with billions in cash, it should not be a big deal. So, my guess is if one waits for about 6 months, one does not have to abandon his 9 year old Hotmail account.. Is Microsoft listening? Providing a good interface is a matter of willingness to think about the user and innovate rather than hire rocket scientists. I recently worked on http://www.collaze.com/ and found that any feature I want to give to the user can indeed be implemented in DHTML/Javascript, if you are passionate enough to research and experiment.
Sun's main problem is they are not able to stick to one strategy for rescuing themselves from the mess. Last year Java Desktop System was all over the press. 100$ per developer..I don't hear of it anymore - now it is 1$ per cpu. They are going to have a hard time getting the trust of enterprises to use a CPU in their servers. Good luck Sun, more importantly Good luck Java
Couldn't get why only Billboards will send these bluetooth messages? It can be anything - a tree, a transport truck, a building, a shop - they are all going to torture you with these advertisements till you disable bluetooth or upgrade to "premium" service offered by well, your friendly wireless carrier!
Aren't these features available in most of the messengers?
Is it the cache doing wonders or am I really the first one posting comment on a Googe news? Or may be everybody is busy playing with the new Google Desktop.
I really appreciate your taking some time and providing valuable feedback.
I agree with your point about registration and will work on adding a guest login or read-only view. Still, most of the advantages of the site will become apparent only if someone starts writing. I spent lot of time on the navigation part to keep everything on the writer's fingertips.
There is a "View Demo" link ( http://www.collaze.com/home/demo.htm ) link to show some of the features.
I have a WYSWIG editor in the site with a dictionary always available on the left. To make it really sweet for the writer, I worked extra hard to make sure that the spell-checker is not a pop-up and hilites the incorrect word directly on the WYSWYIG editor. Unlike Wiki model, writers can save chapters as draft, and come back later to edit them. Also writers get a quick save option that saves the document without disturbing the cursor position in the editor or taking the writer to a new page.
Business model is primarily advertisements (Yes, there is one adsense 120X600 in every project page). The purpose of the site is more to help creation of quality work than to make money. I quit my job and spent 3 months creating the site and I am confident that I can support the site with the cash flow from my next day job, provided I get some acceptance and confidence from the community. Of course, I cannot support a million users today, but everything starts small and if people like it I am sure there will be more fincancial support later. What I desparately need now is for some willing participants to see it, feel it, and tell me what I can do to improve it.
I am a fan of Wiki myself, but I don't think it is the best model for creating literary work. What I have done in Collaze is to separate out idea inflow and content inflow. If someone doesn't want to write a chapter, "plot ideas" and "characters" lets the user put some ideas for other writers to use. Each chapter can be written by multiple authors, but not by editing the same document. Each writers submits his version of the chapter and the best version is selected by voting by other readers and writers. There is a 30 day deadline for each chapter, but the writers can keep revising and refining their work based on reader feedback before the deadline. In addition to this, a chapter has to be of 1000 words. This ensures that a chapter is consistent and author gets freedom to maintain his natural flow in a chapter.
There is a link "Why Collaze is different" in the home page http://www.collaze.com/home/howIsCollazeDifferent. jsp
BTW, I wrote a blog http://ambikasukla.blogspot.com/ that touches upon most of these points.
Slashdot Mirror
No
Interestingly Soriecki has quoted Mackay several times and refuted some of his conclusions. I will surely get hold of this book and read arguments from the opposite side.
You should read "Wisdom of Crowds" by James Soriecki. It is a very nice text on how, where, and why "collective wisdom" of a few average individuals is better than the wisdom of a few experts.
Sweet!
Now c'mon guys. It is really nasty to nitpick on FEMA in this moment. So you expect them to make their site cross browser compliant, when there are more important things like saving lives. And I just don't understand how guys here have the time and enthusiasm to check out little things on the site in browsers like Opera. It is a shame really. The site gives a phone number and a place to download IE if you don't have it. So who cares? Is the site really going to cause inconvinience to anyone needing the site?
Besides why don't you guys blame the browsers and W3C to agree on common standards instead of whining about FEMA? Why on earth is Opera so different and offers a crazy way to change the User Agent?
Folks keep blaming Microsoft for adding non-standard extensions to IE. But think about things like XMLHTTPRequest, just because MS saw its use long back today we are experiencing some nice interactive websites. If Firefox had to copy it why didn't they simply make it work the same way it was working in IE? Why their own request and way of handling errors? And what is W3C doing? Why couln't the 100s of "experts" preparing tomes at w3c not anticipate such a simple thing?
This cross-browser is such a unrewarding drain of development time. I wonder how much of combined development time has been spent on this artificially generated problem, solving which provides zero gain to the users.
This news is too old..was expecting better from /.
I think most of the users have no idea what "This code is signed by BlahBlah corp" or "See certificate" etc. means. They simply click on something to get past the annoying window.
Anyone has the exact content of the comments?
We recently created a website for collaboration in creative writing - Collaze that uses cc licence. We wanted the contributors to write freely for the public domain without losing the rights to commercially utilize their work later. CC seemed to be custom made for this purpose. So, tomorrow if some entity wants to commercialize the collaborative work, it can do so provided it has the permission of the contributors. Writers can agree and give thier permission to the publisher with or without taking royalty - this depends totally on the writer. I think this is just the beginning. CC will be great for a variety of collaborative work in the future.
These products of space and defense research almost inevitably get commercialized and reach normal folks like us. And I am yet to find some healthy packed food that does not cause heartburn or some other discomfort.
a bloated medley of JCP technologies that very few people actually need. It doesn't matter if it is commercial or non-commercial, JBOSS or something else. The volumes that have been written on J2EE, how to use it, best practises, performance tuning, design patterns is a good sign that people are having difficulties using J2EE to rapidly create fast and easily maintainable applications using J2EE at a reasonable cost and time. OK, the servlets and JSPs are very basic and useful but all the EJBs, MDBs, CMPs, Value Objects, etc.. are seldom useful. I have seen many projects go out of control where unsuspecting developers have spent months on this stuff to produce a bulky unusable system. Lightweight technologies like Hibernate and spring are much better. J2EE is going the CORBA way.
grammar hints, and it is a major piece in terms of development time. Also, anyone cares to bring Word Perfect. Dell bundles it free with its PCs I used it to write a 5 page article couple of years ago and found it to very smooth and pleasant to use, unlike OO, which felt clumsy and bulky at that time.
Well, I have nothing against Sun but I am worried. It pains me to see a relentless innovator like Sun resorting to gimmicks like $1 per CPU to boost its sales. I am particularly worried about Java, which I like. While competiting frameworks like RAIL, PHP, .NET, are all catching up, the incredibly slow and bureacratic JCP is churning out more volumes of useless and incredibly gloated frameworks. I am not a CEO but simply a stock holder and user of Sun software. BTW, I have helped create http://www.collaze.com/ . Will appreciate it if you can take a look and give your feedback.
In that case send him a mail from his boss's id saying "he should immediately clean up his desk and leave"
Water straight from the untouched springs of Mars! Fabulous!
You probably haven't heard of "Our goal is to organize the world's information" Compare that to - Network is the computer - We are the . in .com
- $100 per developer - Java Desktop System
- $1 per hour of CPU
- You guys are screwing the revenue model - Scott McNealy to JBoss
- Open source Solaris
If a company doesn't show consistency in any commitment, nobody is going to trust it. And it shows in Sun's performance.
It is interesting that I sent "Ask Slashdot" posting yesterday about "What is the future of Hotmail". That posting got rejected, but we got to discuss a lot about it today. I think it is worth a wait and see what hotmail does for you. I am hoping that Bill Gate wakes up to all this news and sends his force to revive hotmail. Yahoo is making improvements already. If one has the desire to provide good features to his users, one always can without the need to hire rocket engineers. While working on http://www.collaze.com/ any feature, however radical it may be, can be added after doing some research and experiments with AJAX/DHTML and back-end processing.
Can simply wait for hotmail and yahoo(well, it is pretty good already) to wake up and introduce smooth AJAX and WYSYIG interface, add more memory, clean up their advertising and spam filters. For a company like Microsoft with billions in cash, it should not be a big deal. So, my guess is if one waits for about 6 months, one does not have to abandon his 9 year old Hotmail account.. Is Microsoft listening? Providing a good interface is a matter of willingness to think about the user and innovate rather than hire rocket scientists. I recently worked on http://www.collaze.com/ and found that any feature I want to give to the user can indeed be implemented in DHTML/Javascript, if you are passionate enough to research and experiment.
Sun can use paypal for worlwide collection or money.
Sun's main problem is they are not able to stick to one strategy for rescuing themselves from the mess. Last year Java Desktop System was all over the press. 100$ per developer..I don't hear of it anymore - now it is 1$ per cpu. They are going to have a hard time getting the trust of enterprises to use a CPU in their servers. Good luck Sun, more importantly Good luck Java
Couldn't get why only Billboards will send these bluetooth messages? It can be anything - a tree, a transport truck, a building, a shop - they are all going to torture you with these advertisements till you disable bluetooth or upgrade to "premium" service offered by well, your friendly wireless carrier!
Aren't these features available in most of the messengers? Is it the cache doing wonders or am I really the first one posting comment on a Googe news? Or may be everybody is busy playing with the new Google Desktop.
Sure.. MRI should be able to scare away diabetes with the ridiculous sounds it makes..Gosh why did no one think of this before?
I really appreciate your taking some time and providing valuable feedback. I agree with your point about registration and will work on adding a guest login or read-only view. Still, most of the advantages of the site will become apparent only if someone starts writing. I spent lot of time on the navigation part to keep everything on the writer's fingertips. There is a "View Demo" link ( http://www.collaze.com/home/demo.htm ) link to show some of the features. I have a WYSWIG editor in the site with a dictionary always available on the left. To make it really sweet for the writer, I worked extra hard to make sure that the spell-checker is not a pop-up and hilites the incorrect word directly on the WYSWYIG editor. Unlike Wiki model, writers can save chapters as draft, and come back later to edit them. Also writers get a quick save option that saves the document without disturbing the cursor position in the editor or taking the writer to a new page. Business model is primarily advertisements (Yes, there is one adsense 120X600 in every project page). The purpose of the site is more to help creation of quality work than to make money. I quit my job and spent 3 months creating the site and I am confident that I can support the site with the cash flow from my next day job, provided I get some acceptance and confidence from the community. Of course, I cannot support a million users today, but everything starts small and if people like it I am sure there will be more fincancial support later. What I desparately need now is for some willing participants to see it, feel it, and tell me what I can do to improve it. I am a fan of Wiki myself, but I don't think it is the best model for creating literary work. What I have done in Collaze is to separate out idea inflow and content inflow. If someone doesn't want to write a chapter, "plot ideas" and "characters" lets the user put some ideas for other writers to use. Each chapter can be written by multiple authors, but not by editing the same document. Each writers submits his version of the chapter and the best version is selected by voting by other readers and writers. There is a 30 day deadline for each chapter, but the writers can keep revising and refining their work based on reader feedback before the deadline. In addition to this, a chapter has to be of 1000 words. This ensures that a chapter is consistent and author gets freedom to maintain his natural flow in a chapter. There is a link "Why Collaze is different" in the home page http://www.collaze.com/home/howIsCollazeDifferent. jsp
BTW, I wrote a blog http://ambikasukla.blogspot.com/ that touches upon most of these points.
Exactly my point. Genetic Algorithms is the way to think about these things.