You truly are ignorant as to what this world has become aren't you. It is us against the radical islamists, (those who follow Muhammad's teachings) and anyone who has children doesn't want them targeted just because their parents did their job in keeping the nutjobs in the Middle East from coming over to the US again.
No one in North America has died in a terrorist attack in five years. Thousands and thousands have died in their cars. Get a sense of perspective, that dumb blond in the SUV yakking on her phone is more likely to kill your family than a terrorist.
Those who follow Muhammad's teachings don't kill, any more than those who follow Christ's teachings kill. Except, of course, the abortion clinic bombers and the state Governors.
The Muslims aren't against us, the authoritarians are. And I refer to the "Muslim" authoritarians and teh "Christian" authoritarians (Ashcroft, Bush, YOU)
USAF vetran(sic), ha! You clearly are the type that made us sick, in the Army, you didn't do squat, just sat on the sidelines and let the real servicemen do the work then come home and say, oh it was so hard for us.
All I can say to that is fuck you, you insignifigant little dickweed. Go cower under your desk. BTW what branch were you in? Oh you weren't, I forgot, you're a fuckless coward.
This is the first I have heard of laws prohibiting men from cheerleading or women from playing professional football.
I need read no farther. You not only missed the fucking point, you avoided it. There IS NO LAW against male cheerleaders, but there ARE laws against gender discrinination.
AFAIC this conversation is over. Take a course in reading comprehension at your local college.
How is this legal? ISPs aren't law enforcement, and I don't think (but ianal) possession of ANY child porn is legal.
And how is this supposed to cut it down? It's just going to get more children molested on camera if what's there goes away.
The software can't possibly tell whether it's a picture of a child unless a human has tagged it. Methinks somebody at AOL and Yahoo and Microsoft wants to watch child porn legally! Fucking perverts.
Plus, different states have different legal ages. In Illinois it's 17, in some states it's 18, in Arkansas it's 13. So a movie of two fifteen year olds its legal in Arkansas but not Illinois.
Redd Foxx once asked "what looks like sex but isn't? Fidel Castro eating a bananna!
If the computer can tel Castro from oral sex, how can it tell a 16 year old from a 17 year old? Hell, at my age the thirty year olds look like children! If a human can't tell, how can a machine? </on topic>
<-1 off topic> It's bad enough when the New York Times stubbornly insists on being illiterate, but this is allegedly a nerd site.
If "ISP's" is plural for "ISP" then what is the possessive? What is the plural posessive?
ISP - a single ISP ISPs - more than one ISP ISP's - singular ossessive; "the first ISP's routers were down" ISPs' - plural possessive, "the next two ISPs' routers were down"
The Times says ISP is a contraction, but it isn't. Its an acronym. Just because the New York Times editors are illiterate morons doesn't mean slashdot has to be, to.
You learned this is the fourth grad, guys. Stop embarrassing me. </off topic>
Nothing to do with TFA, everything to do with the post I responded to.
Take thesis A: "The law must be completely gender blind".
If so, then we need to take the urinals out of all public restrooms and make sure there are an equal number of toilets. We'll have to outlaw "ladies night". We'll have to do away with women's tees in golf, let men cheerlead and women play professional football.
The proposed thesis is a fantasy with no basis in reality.
I'd rather we stop giving priveledges to married (or unmarried) couples altogether. Why should a couple have more rights than me, whether straight or gay? When a married couple have no benefits over unmarried people under the law, there would be no NEED for "gay marriage" or "Civil Unions" and would strengthen marriage itself, which could revert to a religious and spiritual thing as it was for thousands of years. Under this scenario, if your religion (say, you worship the Flying Spagetti Monster) says men can marry men then I would have no problem with it. It's simply not my religion and doesn't affect it or me.
Speaking of which, homosexuals are missing a good propoganda play. When the fundies scream about sin, point out that none of the ten commandmebnts say "thou shalt not fuck an anus" but it DOES say "thou shalt not commit adultery" and "thou shalt not covet" (want somethin that you don't own) and the biggie "thou shalt have no gods before me" when most so-called "Christians" (Bush, Robertson, your next door neighbor) in fact worship money. Also, homosexuals should point out that Jesus said "Judge not, lest you be judged yourself", and "before you try to remove the speck from your brother's eye, first remove the beam (plank) from your own" and, when they were to stone an adultress, said "let he who is without sin cast the first stone".
I'd see benefits to parents of minor children over non-parents, with the priveleges gone when the kids grow up and leave, and sexual orientation would logically have nothing to do with it. I was the single parent of two teenage girls when my evil, adulterous ex left us, and my taxes went up. That's just not right!
Whether that guy's your lover or simply your roommate is none of my business, and I like it that way.
Now this post HAS gotten WAY off topic.
That is like saying "we shouldn't hire Jane because the dictionary says you have to have a willy to be the best *man* for the job".
You shouldn't have to be a man for the job. Your entire post is just silly. Are you possessed by the ghost of Graham Chapman perhaps?
I haven't had formal training in useability, but I have had formal training in design. One of my instructors was fond of twisting a layman's take on art, saying "I know what art is but I don't know what I like."
You're right, accessability isn't the same as useability, but a horse isn't the same as a four legged animal. If your site is not accessable to me it isn't useable by me. If I'm deaf and your site is only graphics with no "alt" tags, it usn't useable to me.
If you're 100% sure no blind people are going to read your site, then yes, it doesn't need to be JAWS compliant. But few sites are like that. And it isn't hard to make a site JAWS compliant.
Having worked for the gov't and knowing that some documents that I have signed and worked on should be redacted, this scares the crap out of me.
Which is exactly what is wrong with the Federal government, you God damned coward. Grow a fucking spine or resign and let someone less cowardly do what needs to be done.
You do realize Americans are being beheaded, bombed, shot, and tortured in Iraq because of your and your colleagues' cowardly incompetence?
Yeah go ahead and mod me flamebait, but I'm a USAF vetran who volunteered for South East Asia during the Vietnam war (and had my SSN stolen out of some asshat's computer, probably this guy) and fucking pussies like him make me want to puke.
they expect computers to work like a friggin' toaster
When using a toaster, you have to know not to wash it in the sink, and not to try to get the bread out with a butter knife while it's still plugged in.
If I'm a carpenter (I'm not) and my job requires the use of a ladder, electric saws, hydraulic nail guns, etc, I'd damned well better not only be able to use them but to use them safely.
Sure, lots of this crap shouldn't be classified, but if they "redacted" the location of troops in Afghanistan this way, dozens or more people could die.
Your analogy doesn't fit the circumstances. I don't have to know how an electron gun works to watch TV, but I have to know where the "on" button and channel change buttons are. And not to take the back off and touch anything inside even if shut off.
These spooks threw away the remote control and TFM and have no idea where the "on" button is. They're carpenters who peer down the barrel of their nail gun, and pull the trigger wondering while doing so.
You don't have to know how your tools work, but you have to know how to use them and use them safely. It doesn't matter if you're a carpenter, a lawyer, or a CIA spook.
Well, you kids and your newfangled wooden shit. Why back in my day when you were jumping from ball to ball trying to not be born a nerd we were using abacuses. I've been working on upgrading mine quite a while now, still.
I have a head start on not only you whippersnappers and your wood compooters, these new kids are using sand, melting it and putting germanium and other shit in it. Is that dumb or what? I'm amazed the damned things work at all!
They're talking about their sand computers becoming sentient and aware if they get complicated enough. HAH! Do you kids have any idea how many beads I have on my abacus?
I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?
Oh, the wooden woman. You know what she wooden do... Oh wait, this is slashdot, never mind.
You're a useability expert and JAWS won't read your designs? WTF???
No wonder the web sucks so bad. Do you use teeny tiny fixed fonts and animated crapola as well? Do you have "click here" as link text? Do you have links you have to mouse over before you can tell they're links?
I'm no useability expert by far, but I know a shitty web site when I see one. Give me a link to one of these sites you've done useability testing on and I might believe you're not trying to fill us all full of shit.
I wish I had mod points. Slashdot ISN'T an example of "design for a technical elite" even if its audience IS a bunch of nerds. The design itself is quite clean and useable.
No it isn't. "Blogosphere" and "vlog" are far worse.
But I agree the "word" (heh) "blog" is pretty damned stupid. I ise the word "blagh" on my journal (which is terribly out of date, I've been too busy getting drunk and chasing women (unsucessfully, of course:) to do much blaghing lately.
This should make you feel better: Ralph Blog, the god you pray to at the porcelain altar. In that light, "blog" is pretty descriptive!
Do the people who plant IEDs have IED? Are these devices IED? Did they go to IED? I doubt they went to IED and I'm pretty sure they didn't attend the IED! I'm also fairly sure they didn't go to IED.
Acronyms are for lazy, stupid people. IMO. YMMV. HAND.
Why should I design for or even think about my grandmother's tastes if I'm doing a coding blog, or a baseball blog
If you're doing a coding blog, people want to read about coding. You don't need to worry bout Grandma, because there's little chance Grandma's coding. But the coders aren't there to look at your cute design, they want to read about coding, preferably without going blind. "Click Here" is bad link text on any page, whether for a 12 year old MySpace user or a ninety year old baseball fan.
But if you're doing a baseball blog, you should design for everybody. Granny is a Cardinals fan. Don't use six point fixed type that breaks Firefox's incredibly useful Ctrl-+. Don't blind me with flashing animated shit that will give a normal person epilepsy.
Much of useability is common sense - but as Walt Kelly's Pogo once noted, "it ain't so common no more". Black text on a dark gray background? Unless it's a goth site, your page SUXXXXX0rZ and bad.
Your page design should follow your audience, and with a baseball blog, granny IS the audience.
I view Nielsen as someone who has taken a good idea and turned it into ideology.
No, he's taken RESEARCH and published the results. When the results changed, so did his guidelines. E.g, he no longer says long pages are bad (someone please tell C|NET!)
Our old blogs and emails are what OUR children will be reading when we die.
And they're going to say "OMFG what a bunch of stupid primitives those morons were!"
OK, not "all", a few of you seem to have your heads on straight. But most of you seem to be deeply in denial. I don't blame you; most of your blogs are likely BAD (Sorry, Joe, but your page is entirely unreadable).
Nielson's views have changed as his research (real research using scientifically sound principles). For example, in the last century he advocated, based on studies of users, that long pages were bad design. Folks didn't know how to scroll, and long pages ate some of the primitive browsers (and computers) of the time.
He's changed this. Scrolling is now part of computing, and computers can handle it. Someone please tell ZD Net and CNET and the Chicago Tribune!
I'm a former art student (note that page was written 8 years ago, and yes, not having line breaks between paragraphs IS bad design). Admittedly my instructors were minimalists. One design principle they taught is universally ignored these days: Form follow function.
One poster above mentioned designing for your prospective audience, and that's exactly correct.
My old, long-gone (it's still in the wayback machine) Quake site broke quite a few design principles, but the broken rules were broken for concrete reasons... well, usually. Some things got complaints from readers, like the animated Strogg dancing to the Quake theme. I eventually moved the music to a different page. And got rid of one of the Stroggs.
Content is king! Nobody goes to your site for the way it looks. The Prisoner's number two was right- "we want information". (and porn;)
Some of you even deny your own perceptions. Nielson is exactly right; if it's animated, it's an ad and is dismissed. I know I'm like that, and eye tracking studies show that everyone else is, too. He's done the fcking research! There's no way you can contradict that, except by pointing to conflicting research. I haven't seen any of you do that.
My old Quake site was pretty popular, considering how sparsely populated the web was, and that it was a niche site. I had a Google Pagerank of 7. Its "cheats" page is still widely plagairized (I should hire a lawyer?) and I attribute a large part of its success to the fact that I wanted it to be useable. When people wrote bitch letters, I listened and considered what they were saying.
I got a lot more letters saying how much the site rocked than how shitty it was, and quite a few mentioned how easy it was to find INFORMATION (and humor and music and gossip and links and... and...).
Slashdot has always been pretty useable.
If you have a web site or blog, you ignore useability at your own peril. Nielson has done his homework. Few of you seem to have. The major newspapers certainly haven't.
I get awfully damn tired of people trying to redefine words to suit their own ends.
Does that include the word "gay"? (bright and pleasant; promoting a feeling of cheer; "a cheery hello"; "a gay sunny room"; "a sunny smile" [syn: cheery, sunny]")
Which now also means homosexual, despite the fact that half of all homosexuals gaily attempt suicide. What's wrong with "homo"? It's an insulting term. Ironically, calling someone "gay" is now usually an insult as well; good job fucking up the language for no reason whatever, fellows. I still wonder how we allowed our language to be hijacked by a very small minority for their own ends.
These same folks are now trying (with much success) to redefine "marriage", again to their own ends and to my detriment - I can't find a woman either, although I'm hetero. I want to marry my right hand and deduct it as a dependant. I'm deeply in love with my hand, we're very happy together.
But you're right, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, the real question is how good an encyclopedia it is.
That is purely a distinction of semantics and misses the point completely.
That aside, though, the major corporations own both our political parties lock, stock, and barrel. These people are the government. Therefore it is censorship.
Look what it cost to shoot a major motion picture compared to the cost of producing a game. Ten milliion for the game vs a hundred million or more for a movie. But the DVD costs half what the game costs.
The published specs are not the same thing as what the system needs to talk to it...
My LG phone is a buggy piece of shit. I guess I'm using the wrong video card in it?
They see a BSOD or the machine reboots
Then their OS is not robust. I've never seen that on the mainframd at work, nor have I seen it in Linux at home (not saying it never happens, flaky hardware will make any computer flaky)
I really doubt you've ever even looked at either a programming language or any source code...
I wouldn't call anything from Oracle "cheap." For that matter, sixty bucks for a damned game isn't cheap, either. $500 for MS Office is cheap? WTF do you call expensive??
Oh, you mean cheap to write, my bad.
released fast
I don't expect or want... oh. The developer. Gotcha.
run on all kinds of platforms
But I only have one plat... oh.
The answer to shitty software is simple: we should have an assumed warrantee; it shouold be coded into law that if your product, whether a car or a toaster or a database, should do what it says on the box and in the advertisement, or my money back plus ten percent for my trouble. Security hole pops up in XP? Microsoft has to fix it, and be liable for any damages its defective piece of shit causes.
I'm not singling out Microsoft, you all write bug ridden pieces of shit.
Sadly, at least in the US, it won't happen, as our governemnt is owned lock, stock, and barrell by the corporations. You're not likely to get beef without hormones or antibiotics or e-coli for the same reason.
1) Development cost will be a lot more
I can live with Microsoft and Oracle making fewer billions. No problem.
2) Development time will be a lot more
Well, Duke Nukem Forever and LongVista should be completely bug-free then.
3) Hardware will be restricted. You are not going to be running this on any random hardware
I don't buy it. So long as everything is standard and functioning properly I can use any brand of gasoline or spark plugs in my car. A new video card shouldn't be a crap shoot, all of its specs should be published, it should be an OS issue; the web browser shouldn't care what brand of hard drive I'm using.
4) Other software will be limited. Only apps fully tested with your app can run on the same system
Again, I don't buy it. My software shouldn't depend on your software unless your software is the OS.
5) Slower performance.
Bullshit. Write cleaner, tighter code. My old XT had a 5 mz processor and it ran a spreadsheet just fine. I'm typing this on a machine with an 1800mz CPU, that's almost 400 times as fast. Blame everything except your own laziness and incompetence and greed, eh?
Every single point you made was an excuse, a copout.
The thing is, if your hypothetical bridge were software (and it's quite simple compared to software) people would expect to be able to put the same design anywhere and have it work
My car just works, and I posit it's a lot more complex than your database.
people would expect to be able to put the same design anywhere and have it work, drive tanks over it and not have it collapse, have terrorists explode bombs under it
No, we expect tit to do what it was designed to do, without breaking. If your database has a limit of a million records, I have no cause to complain that it won't take the 1,000,001st record. I do have cause to complain if it won't take the 500,000th.
For what this stuff costs it should work. Period. And developers should stop making excuses and copping out and admit that they don't write good software because they don't have to.
Slashdot Mirror
You truly are ignorant as to what this world has become aren't you. It is us against the radical islamists, (those who follow Muhammad's teachings) and anyone who has children doesn't want them targeted just because their parents did their job in keeping the nutjobs in the Middle East from coming over to the US again.
No one in North America has died in a terrorist attack in five years. Thousands and thousands have died in their cars. Get a sense of perspective, that dumb blond in the SUV yakking on her phone is more likely to kill your family than a terrorist.
Those who follow Muhammad's teachings don't kill, any more than those who follow Christ's teachings kill. Except, of course, the abortion clinic bombers and the state Governors.
The Muslims aren't against us, the authoritarians are. And I refer to the "Muslim" authoritarians and teh "Christian" authoritarians (Ashcroft, Bush, YOU)
USAF vetran(sic), ha! You clearly are the type that made us sick, in the Army, you didn't do squat, just sat on the sidelines and let the real servicemen do the work then come home and say, oh it was so hard for us.
All I can say to that is fuck you, you insignifigant little dickweed. Go cower under your desk. BTW what branch were you in? Oh you weren't, I forgot, you're a fuckless coward.
Just fuck off, dickweed.
This is the first I have heard of laws prohibiting men from cheerleading or women from playing professional football. I need read no farther. You not only missed the fucking point, you avoided it. There IS NO LAW against male cheerleaders, but there ARE laws against gender discrinination. AFAIC this conversation is over. Take a course in reading comprehension at your local college.
My page rank went up... well, actually it didn't exactly go up so much as finally appearing in the results at all.
So this guy's harming me by trying to get Google to raise his pagerank, thereby lowering mine. I'm gonna sue the bastard!
<\sarcasm>
AND he's not even a search engine per se; it's a directory, with its search box using real search engines like Google and Yahoo.
What a loser.
How is this legal? ISPs aren't law enforcement, and I don't think (but ianal) possession of ANY child porn is legal.
And how is this supposed to cut it down? It's just going to get more children molested on camera if what's there goes away.
The software can't possibly tell whether it's a picture of a child unless a human has tagged it. Methinks somebody at AOL and Yahoo and Microsoft wants to watch child porn legally! Fucking perverts.
Plus, different states have different legal ages. In Illinois it's 17, in some states it's 18, in Arkansas it's 13. So a movie of two fifteen year olds its legal in Arkansas but not Illinois.
Redd Foxx once asked "what looks like sex but isn't? Fidel Castro eating a bananna!
If the computer can tel Castro from oral sex, how can it tell a 16 year old from a 17 year old? Hell, at my age the thirty year olds look like children! If a human can't tell, how can a machine?
</on topic>
<-1 off topic>
It's bad enough when the New York Times stubbornly insists on being illiterate, but this is allegedly a nerd site.
If "ISP's" is plural for "ISP" then what is the possessive? What is the plural posessive?
ISP - a single ISP
ISPs - more than one ISP
ISP's - singular ossessive; "the first ISP's routers were down"
ISPs' - plural possessive, "the next two ISPs' routers were down"
The Times says ISP is a contraction, but it isn't. Its an acronym. Just because the New York Times editors are illiterate morons doesn't mean slashdot has to be, to.
You learned this is the fourth grad, guys. Stop embarrassing me.
</off topic>
What did this have to do with the topic?
Nothing to do with TFA, everything to do with the post I responded to.
Take thesis A: "The law must be completely gender blind".
If so, then we need to take the urinals out of all public restrooms and make sure there are an equal number of toilets. We'll have to outlaw "ladies night". We'll have to do away with women's tees in golf, let men cheerlead and women play professional football.
The proposed thesis is a fantasy with no basis in reality.
I'd rather we stop giving priveledges to married (or unmarried) couples altogether. Why should a couple have more rights than me, whether straight or gay? When a married couple have no benefits over unmarried people under the law, there would be no NEED for "gay marriage" or "Civil Unions" and would strengthen marriage itself, which could revert to a religious and spiritual thing as it was for thousands of years. Under this scenario, if your religion (say, you worship the Flying Spagetti Monster) says men can marry men then I would have no problem with it. It's simply not my religion and doesn't affect it or me.
Speaking of which, homosexuals are missing a good propoganda play. When the fundies scream about sin, point out that none of the ten commandmebnts say "thou shalt not fuck an anus" but it DOES say "thou shalt not commit adultery" and "thou shalt not covet" (want somethin that you don't own) and the biggie "thou shalt have no gods before me" when most so-called "Christians" (Bush, Robertson, your next door neighbor) in fact worship money. Also, homosexuals should point out that Jesus said "Judge not, lest you be judged yourself", and "before you try to remove the speck from your brother's eye, first remove the beam (plank) from your own" and, when they were to stone an adultress, said "let he who is without sin cast the first stone".
I'd see benefits to parents of minor children over non-parents, with the priveleges gone when the kids grow up and leave, and sexual orientation would logically have nothing to do with it. I was the single parent of two teenage girls when my evil, adulterous ex left us, and my taxes went up. That's just not right!
Whether that guy's your lover or simply your roommate is none of my business, and I like it that way.
Now this post HAS gotten WAY off topic.
That is like saying "we shouldn't hire Jane because the dictionary says you have to have a willy to be the best *man* for the job".
You shouldn't have to be a man for the job. Your entire post is just silly. Are you possessed by the ghost of Graham Chapman perhaps?
I haven't had formal training in useability, but I have had formal training in design. One of my instructors was fond of twisting a layman's take on art, saying "I know what art is but I don't know what I like."
You're right, accessability isn't the same as useability, but a horse isn't the same as a four legged animal. If your site is not accessable to me it isn't useable by me. If I'm deaf and your site is only graphics with no "alt" tags, it usn't useable to me.
If you're 100% sure no blind people are going to read your site, then yes, it doesn't need to be JAWS compliant. But few sites are like that. And it isn't hard to make a site JAWS compliant.
Your sig: "If only we could make stupidity more painful..."
Ignorance can be cured, stupidity is forever. Why make stupidity painful? Better to make ignorance painful.
They say "ignorance is bliss". I think this needs to change.
Having worked for the gov't and knowing that some documents that I have signed and worked on should be redacted, this scares the crap out of me.
Which is exactly what is wrong with the Federal government, you God damned coward. Grow a fucking spine or resign and let someone less cowardly do what needs to be done.
You do realize Americans are being beheaded, bombed, shot, and tortured in Iraq because of your and your colleagues' cowardly incompetence?
Yeah go ahead and mod me flamebait, but I'm a USAF vetran who volunteered for South East Asia during the Vietnam war (and had my SSN stolen out of some asshat's computer, probably this guy) and fucking pussies like him make me want to puke.
they expect computers to work like a friggin' toaster
When using a toaster, you have to know not to wash it in the sink, and not to try to get the bread out with a butter knife while it's still plugged in.
If I'm a carpenter (I'm not) and my job requires the use of a ladder, electric saws, hydraulic nail guns, etc, I'd damned well better not only be able to use them but to use them safely.
Sure, lots of this crap shouldn't be classified, but if they "redacted" the location of troops in Afghanistan this way, dozens or more people could die.
Your analogy doesn't fit the circumstances. I don't have to know how an electron gun works to watch TV, but I have to know where the "on" button and channel change buttons are. And not to take the back off and touch anything inside even if shut off.
These spooks threw away the remote control and TFM and have no idea where the "on" button is. They're carpenters who peer down the barrel of their nail gun, and pull the trigger wondering while doing so.
You don't have to know how your tools work, but you have to know how to use them and use them safely. It doesn't matter if you're a carpenter, a lawyer, or a CIA spook.
Well, you kids and your newfangled wooden shit. Why back in my day when you were jumping from ball to ball trying to not be born a nerd we were using abacuses. I've been working on upgrading mine quite a while now, still.
I have a head start on not only you whippersnappers and your wood compooters, these new kids are using sand, melting it and putting germanium and other shit in it. Is that dumb or what? I'm amazed the damned things work at all!
They're talking about their sand computers becoming sentient and aware if they get complicated enough. HAH! Do you kids have any idea how many beads I have on my abacus?
I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?
Oh, the wooden woman. You know what she wooden do... Oh wait, this is slashdot, never mind.
You're a useability expert and JAWS won't read your designs? WTF???
No wonder the web sucks so bad. Do you use teeny tiny fixed fonts and animated crapola as well? Do you have "click here" as link text? Do you have links you have to mouse over before you can tell they're links?
I'm no useability expert by far, but I know a shitty web site when I see one. Give me a link to one of these sites you've done useability testing on and I might believe you're not trying to fill us all full of shit.
I wish I had mod points. Slashdot ISN'T an example of "design for a technical elite" even if its audience IS a bunch of nerds. The design itself is quite clean and useable.
No it isn't. "Blogosphere" and "vlog" are far worse.
But I agree the "word" (heh) "blog" is pretty damned stupid. I ise the word "blagh" on my journal (which is terribly out of date, I've been too busy getting drunk and chasing women (unsucessfully, of course:) to do much blaghing lately.
This should make you feel better: Ralph Blog, the god you pray to at the porcelain altar. In that light, "blog" is pretty descriptive!
Do the people who plant IEDs have IED? Are these devices IED? Did they go to IED? I doubt they went to IED and I'm pretty sure they didn't attend the IED! I'm also fairly sure they didn't go to IED.
Acronyms are for lazy, stupid people. IMO. YMMV. HAND.
Why should I design for or even think about my grandmother's tastes if I'm doing a coding blog, or a baseball blog
If you're doing a coding blog, people want to read about coding. You don't need to worry bout Grandma, because there's little chance Grandma's coding. But the coders aren't there to look at your cute design, they want to read about coding, preferably without going blind. "Click Here" is bad link text on any page, whether for a 12 year old MySpace user or a ninety year old baseball fan.
But if you're doing a baseball blog, you should design for everybody. Granny is a Cardinals fan. Don't use six point fixed type that breaks Firefox's incredibly useful Ctrl-+. Don't blind me with flashing animated shit that will give a normal person epilepsy.
Much of useability is common sense - but as Walt Kelly's Pogo once noted, "it ain't so common no more". Black text on a dark gray background? Unless it's a goth site, your page SUXXXXX0rZ and bad.
Your page design should follow your audience, and with a baseball blog, granny IS the audience.
I view Nielsen as someone who has taken a good idea and turned it into ideology.
No, he's taken RESEARCH and published the results. When the results changed, so did his guidelines. E.g, he no longer says long pages are bad (someone please tell C|NET!)
Our old blogs and emails are what OUR children will be reading when we die. And they're going to say "OMFG what a bunch of stupid primitives those morons were!"
OK, not "all", a few of you seem to have your heads on straight. But most of you seem to be deeply in denial. I don't blame you; most of your blogs are likely BAD (Sorry, Joe, but your page is entirely unreadable).
Nielson's views have changed as his research (real research using scientifically sound principles). For example, in the last century he advocated, based on studies of users, that long pages were bad design. Folks didn't know how to scroll, and long pages ate some of the primitive browsers (and computers) of the time.
He's changed this. Scrolling is now part of computing, and computers can handle it. Someone please tell ZD Net and CNET and the Chicago Tribune!
I'm a former art student (note that page was written 8 years ago, and yes, not having line breaks between paragraphs IS bad design). Admittedly my instructors were minimalists. One design principle they taught is universally ignored these days: Form follow function.
One poster above mentioned designing for your prospective audience, and that's exactly correct.
My old, long-gone (it's still in the wayback machine) Quake site broke quite a few design principles, but the broken rules were broken for concrete reasons... well, usually. Some things got complaints from readers, like the animated Strogg dancing to the Quake theme. I eventually moved the music to a different page. And got rid of one of the Stroggs.
Content is king! Nobody goes to your site for the way it looks. The Prisoner's number two was right- "we want information". (and porn;)
Some of you even deny your own perceptions. Nielson is exactly right; if it's animated, it's an ad and is dismissed. I know I'm like that, and eye tracking studies show that everyone else is, too. He's done the fcking research! There's no way you can contradict that, except by pointing to conflicting research. I haven't seen any of you do that.
My old Quake site was pretty popular, considering how sparsely populated the web was, and that it was a niche site. I had a Google Pagerank of 7. Its "cheats" page is still widely plagairized (I should hire a lawyer?) and I attribute a large part of its success to the fact that I wanted it to be useable. When people wrote bitch letters, I listened and considered what they were saying.
I got a lot more letters saying how much the site rocked than how shitty it was, and quite a few mentioned how easy it was to find INFORMATION (and humor and music and gossip and links and... and...).
Slashdot has always been pretty useable.
If you have a web site or blog, you ignore useability at your own peril. Nielson has done his homework. Few of you seem to have. The major newspapers certainly haven't.
I'm sorry, what did you say?
This slashbot is lacking a humor circut and you call that "insightful"? How about -1, fucking obvious?
Bah, that liberal NYT... Just stick to Fox News, newbie. Fair unbalanced!
I get awfully damn tired of people trying to redefine words to suit their own ends.
Does that include the word "gay"? (bright and pleasant; promoting a feeling of cheer; "a cheery hello"; "a gay sunny room"; "a sunny smile" [syn: cheery, sunny]")
Which now also means homosexual, despite the fact that half of all homosexuals gaily attempt suicide. What's wrong with "homo"? It's an insulting term. Ironically, calling someone "gay" is now usually an insult as well; good job fucking up the language for no reason whatever, fellows. I still wonder how we allowed our language to be hijacked by a very small minority for their own ends.
These same folks are now trying (with much success) to redefine "marriage", again to their own ends and to my detriment - I can't find a woman either, although I'm hetero. I want to marry my right hand and deduct it as a dependant. I'm deeply in love with my hand, we're very happy together.
But you're right, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, the real question is how good an encyclopedia it is.
Which means that you win and we lose, as this stipidity will put our nation at a disadvantage compared to countries who don't have these restrictions.
The corporations who own the politicians here don't care about the country or its future, only their own lucre.
Oh well, it was nice being a superpower while it lasted.
Only the government can "censor" anyone.
That is purely a distinction of semantics and misses the point completely.
That aside, though, the major corporations own both our political parties lock, stock, and barrel. These people are the government. Therefore it is censorship.
Really... $40-60 for a game may not be cheap...
Look what it cost to shoot a major motion picture compared to the cost of producing a game. Ten milliion for the game vs a hundred million or more for a movie. But the DVD costs half what the game costs.
The published specs are not the same thing as what the system needs to talk to it...
My LG phone is a buggy piece of shit. I guess I'm using the wrong video card in it?
They see a BSOD or the machine reboots
Then their OS is not robust. I've never seen that on the mainframd at work, nor have I seen it in Linux at home (not saying it never happens, flaky hardware will make any computer flaky)
I really doubt you've ever even looked at either a programming language or any source code...
Does SAS or Nomad count?
software is expected to be cheap
I wouldn't call anything from Oracle "cheap." For that matter, sixty bucks for a damned game isn't cheap, either. $500 for MS Office is cheap? WTF do you call expensive??
Oh, you mean cheap to write, my bad.
released fast
I don't expect or want... oh. The developer. Gotcha.
run on all kinds of platforms
But I only have one plat... oh.
The answer to shitty software is simple: we should have an assumed warrantee; it shouold be coded into law that if your product, whether a car or a toaster or a database, should do what it says on the box and in the advertisement, or my money back plus ten percent for my trouble. Security hole pops up in XP? Microsoft has to fix it, and be liable for any damages its defective piece of shit causes.
I'm not singling out Microsoft, you all write bug ridden pieces of shit.
Sadly, at least in the US, it won't happen, as our governemnt is owned lock, stock, and barrell by the corporations. You're not likely to get beef without hormones or antibiotics or e-coli for the same reason.
1) Development cost will be a lot more
I can live with Microsoft and Oracle making fewer billions. No problem.
2) Development time will be a lot more
Well, Duke Nukem Forever and LongVista should be completely bug-free then.
3) Hardware will be restricted. You are not going to be running this on any random hardware
I don't buy it. So long as everything is standard and functioning properly I can use any brand of gasoline or spark plugs in my car. A new video card shouldn't be a crap shoot, all of its specs should be published, it should be an OS issue; the web browser shouldn't care what brand of hard drive I'm using.
4) Other software will be limited. Only apps fully tested with your app can run on the same system
Again, I don't buy it. My software shouldn't depend on your software unless your software is the OS.
5) Slower performance.
Bullshit. Write cleaner, tighter code. My old XT had a 5 mz processor and it ran a spreadsheet just fine. I'm typing this on a machine with an 1800mz CPU, that's almost 400 times as fast. Blame everything except your own laziness and incompetence and greed, eh?
Every single point you made was an excuse, a copout.
The thing is, if your hypothetical bridge were software (and it's quite simple compared to software) people would expect to be able to put the same design anywhere and have it work
My car just works, and I posit it's a lot more complex than your database.
people would expect to be able to put the same design anywhere and have it work, drive tanks over it and not have it collapse, have terrorists explode bombs under it
No, we expect tit to do what it was designed to do, without breaking. If your database has a limit of a million records, I have no cause to complain that it won't take the 1,000,001st record. I do have cause to complain if it won't take the 500,000th.
For what this stuff costs it should work. Period. And developers should stop making excuses and copping out and admit that they don't write good software because they don't have to.