I've heard of starting the day with a bang but this is ridiculous.
It's about time: after literally decades of discrimination against us non-smokers, finally there's an exploding gag-gift that we can get for our birthdays.
If you can't be creative and adapt to the modern world market and find new methods of selling your product, please get the hell out of the way of the companies and people that are trying to make a difference. The stagnation and lack of creative thinking is inflicting more harm on the consumers and economy than any amount of piracy could ever do. Sink, swim, or get the hell out of the water.
That is in fact exactly what they're doing. What you're not appreciating is that the legal system (national and globally) is very much part of "the modern global market". And that its manipulation is an instance of "be creative and adapt to the modern world market".
The idea that you should produce quality to attract customers is so outmoded and old-fashioned as to be quaint. For decades now it has been clear that creative marketing is a much better direction to go. And yes, manipulation of the legal system is another route to take. And so is deliberate destruction of the competition. Lying through your teeth. Buying politicians.
Corporations have one and only one goal: to make money. In todays world there's a number of avenues to do that. Some are mentioned in the previous paragraph. Some are old. Some are new. None are chosen by "what is best for the customer". That's simply not a concern of any corporation.
Maybe YOU shoud read what you are responding to. I gave you a list of new features in cars.
No, you did not. You are merely confused.
A computerized fuel pump is NOT (repeat NOT) a feature. It is a matter of internal complexity. It is not something that a user can do with a car. It is not a function a user would want to perform with the car. It is not something the car is purchased to do.
People buy cars to perferofm some task. Go from here to there. Haul some stuff in the process. That's it. That's what you do with a car. THE ONE feature of a car is this ability to move. All else is flrill (that is bought with added complexity of the interface).
People buy computers to send and receive email. Browse the www. Share photos. Produce business reports. Manage their finances and file taxes. Download music. Thousands of different features that all have to be represented in the UI. It does not matter what happens under the hood -- the user interface does not get more complex because you put in more ram or a faster processor. Because these are NOT (repeat NOT) features any more than the computerized fuel pump.
You need to stop looking at the car from the perspective of a mechanic and look at it from the perspective of the USER of the computer. The "features" are things like "audio system". And the fuller the feature set, the more complex the interface becomes. A fuel injection system is NOT (repeat: NOT) a feature in todays cars. All cars have it. It is not even mentioned in the ad. It does not influence a single buying decision anywhere. Nobody goes around and brags about it. It does not change one iota about the features of the car: when you depress this pedal here it accelerates and when you hit that other pedal is slows down.
There's a metric bazillion things in todays computers that they didn't have 15 years ago, memory controllers and GPUs and onboard ethernet -- and none of them change the features of the computer which are "when you click this icon you get a web-browser whic will show some page and if you want to change what it shows you click on options | preferences tab to 'general', click on the 'home page' button..." etc etc. Complexity of UI because there is a feature here (where does the browser start) that the car simply doesn't have (it always starts where you last left it). You can strip this complexity from the browser UI by making it work like the car and always start where you last turned it off. Less complex UI, reduced feature set.
And that's only ONE feature of only ONE piece of software that people use on a computer for ONE task. While "accelerating and decelerating and steering" pretty much exhaust the feature list of a car: Automatic transmission caught on exactly because "shifting gears" is NOT a feature - it is an annoyance that most people would like to get rid of because it doesn't contribute to this feature set. People buy computers to browse the web -- they don't buy cars "to shift gears".
You say that you can either have a simple interface or a full feature set, but then as a counter example you use a car. A car is actually a perfect example of a very complicated device with a very simple user interface.
Let me advise you to read what you are responding to. The UI for the car has remained simple because cars have not acquired a single feature in a hundred years. This is NOT about internal complexity, this is about feature sets.
You can have a simple user interface or a full feature set. Period. Your model year 2006 Ford can accelerate and decelerate and you can steer it -- but you could already do all these things on a Model-T. Computers have orders of magnitude more features, functions that they can perform, tasks that they can do -- and thus you need more complexity in the interface.
This is no different for the car: you want some new feature? Like, say, a radio? Then you'll need more complexity in the interface: more buttons to use.
A car does one thing: get you from point A to point B. That needs one simple interface. It can also do a couple other things (like play music). That needs more complexity of interace. A computer can do thousands of things. Millions. And that means you either gloss over all those features and make them unavailable or you allow people to use them and that means they need some interface. And the more complete your feature list, the more cmoplex the UI becomes.
if I have to stare at a blank page while my status bar says "waiting for google-analytics.com" then either I'm going to block google-analytics.com, or I'm just going to get fed up and stop visiting your site.
It really bugs me just how often I have to sit and wait for my browser to contact 5 different ad and stat sites when viewing some web sites - slashdot being one of the big offenders.
If you're using Firefox, you can speed up all that stuff without having to "block" or "filter" anyhting:
http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2005/06/speed_up _firefo.html
(describes how to make FF send requests on up to 30 items at the same time and start showing things on the screen without waiting for everything to come in)
Maybe I'm misremembering something, but as far as I recall, it was Larry Ellison who pushed the "central server - dumb worldwide clients" concpt. Sun has made fine workstations from the word go, why would they care about thin clients?
As far as I can tell, Sun was a hardware shop - they had this unique processor architecture (Sparc) that had certain advantages and certain disadvantage like all architectures and one of the advantages was fast I/O and that made it perfect for networking. On the other hand it was lousy for number-crunching. So they packaged an OS on top of their processor (SunOS, later Solaris) and sold it and made fine money with it because it was a useful product. There's a reason why the majority of the early web ran on sparcs.
In that sense, the www has to thank sun, which was instrumental in its creation.
(But these days they have me puzzled: their hardware is a commodity platform, their OS is open-sourced -- just how the dickens do they pay the bills? Who would still give money to sun and why? What's the business model here? And how does it differ from we.give.stuff.away.using.ajax.dot.com?)
But in the whole stoy I can't see where sun has ever been a mover or shaker in the application-distribution strategy desicions of the people. What have they ever promoted or created that really made someone use "the net as a computer" rather than doing the exact same thing locally? Did I miss some killer-app somewhere?
Read another 2 or 3 posts and you will find that web 2.0 is 60% news hype and justification by bloggers for having a blog (ie, because I get to be part of the next big thing), 39% marketing (we've re-engineered our portal to be web 2.0 compliant), and 1% a broad but somewhat misleading (in that it suggests there has been some sort of new specification or fresh technological development) term used to classify sites with a high degree of user interaction/contribution.
As of a few minutes ago searching blogger for the term "two point oh" yielded this here which agrees with your statements or disagrees with them depending on how you look at it.
The web should be hard!! When I was a kid, we hand-coded in vi, dammit!
vi? You had vi? Hah. We had to toggle zeros and ones into the console with switches. And on bad days we didn't even had zeros.
And we liked it!
Uphill. Both ways. No, wait, wrong rant...
As far as usability, a good way for a site like this to run is to give everyone relatively limited customization. This way the site still provides a consistent look and feel, which is good for usability, but still lets users express themselves through whatever theme they pick. Let the people who know what they are doing design themes, and then give the users a way to customize them to suit their tastes.
One issue that I see here is the sheer dishonesty of the term "Computer Science" -- as the saying goes, "Computer science is to Science as Plumbing is to Hydrodynamics". Most so-called CS folks are at best cheap code-monkeys. And code-monkeys can be had much much cheaper in other countries, sorry.
I work for a company that outsources code-monkey work. The core capabilities are in-house (the DB infrastructure, the information-organization and information-control mechanisms). Then there's a middle layer that can easily be done by someone in India (which DB accesses should be cached and for how long and how can this data be represented internally etc etc) and then there's the GUI folks -- and the less said about them, the better. They're the prototypical "my app runs in Java which makes it better than your app" people. So we throw that to India as well, pay them a moderate-but-healthy amount of money (which means the live like kings by Indian standards) which turns out to be a great motivator and since they're merely implementing things for which there exists a solution already, they are just as fine coders as any kid I could get out of college in the US. I wouldn't trust them with anything business critical, but neither would I trust one of these "CS degrees".
There's room for actual Computer science, but that requires a caliber of brain that most code-monkeys don't bring to the table. Wherever they're from.
And since plumbing has been mentioned as an example many times before (including this post): Plumbing is a pretty difficult job, because every house is different, has a different history, had different kinds of people working on it in the past, and there's never, never any up-to-date documentation on what is going on in any given house. That's why a successful plumber can make 100k+ and he deserves it. That's why plumbers have a real problem getting decent employees, because everybody who thinks they're halfway intelligent goes to college instead of learning to be a plumber. Leaving the dross for professions like plumbing.
So let's distinguish between the vast majority of "CS", which is code-monkeying, which any ten-year-old can learn, practice and even be perfectly good at. Which can easily be outsourced to wherever it is cheapest. And which isn't a respectable field to be in to begin with. And then there's the small (<5%) of CS that's actual computer Science which has never been in any danger of being outsourced to begin with.
Why waste a generation by training them to be janitors or secretaries or programmers? Why not train them to be something more high-level and leave the menial labor (and that includes 95%+ of "CS") to folks with lower aspirations?
(and I haven't even talked about the blatant advantages to a global company to have people working in more than one country. When the folks in Menlo Park come to work in the morning they find what the folks in Pune did in the last night. They work with it, improve on it, then leave it for the India folks again. You get 24-hour productivity without anybody having to do a night shift. What's not to like about that?)
The knee-jerk reaction to lawyers has existed ever since there have been lawyers. This is not a new phenomenon.
Objection. The reaction to lawyers is the result of literally millenia of observation of lawyers. How many centuries do you have to observe someone before your reaction to it is not called "knee-jerk" any more?
People dislike lawyers because lawyers are amoral. That's it. All lawers. No mater how heinous your crimes, no matter how utterly indefensible your acts, no matter how despiccable you may be as a person: give money to a lawyer and he'll wax rethorically in your defense. Lawyers will proclaim and defend any claim ever made, any act ever committed, any atrocity ever foisted upon mankind -- just as long as they get paid to do so.
It is this complete disregard for any kind of ethics, this utter lack of personal integrity in the choice of their actions, that people respond to. There's nothing "knee-jerk" about it: it is a perfectly natural response of a being with even just a shred of morality to be repulsed by a being without a shade of moral governance.
The answer, of course, is more transparency. I think until we have that, the "truth" about what is happening at Guantanamo is impossible to know.
The truth is very easy to know. All you have to do is take your own thought up there one step further and ask yourself: "if the answer is 'more trnsparency', who is it that has been going out of their way to prevent more transparency: the inmates at Guantanamo Bay or the Bush administration?".
I find it an incredibly useful tool to get to the truth on a lot of things: whenever you look at any situation whatsoever, ask yourself "who is profiting from this"?
...which is of course exactly what Ars did.
Ars: write it up matter-of-factly and sprinkle it in with the rest of the serious articles: subtle adult humor./. : quote it, spray-paint it pink, write "OMG PONIES" on it and mix it with other obvious jokes: sophomoric junk.
That might not be true because unless they make it madatory that all adult websites shift to xxx domain, none would shift.
This is not correct. Contrary to the sweaty fantasies of the Christians, adult website owners would love a domain that can easily be filtered by parents. To an adult webmaster, every kid that stumbles in is just a liability -- someone who doesn't have a credit card, can't be hit up for money and only exposes you to legal trouble. Or worse, who lies about their age, gives you daddy's CC, then downloads all your material and when Daddy gets your bill he'll challenge the charge and sue you.
The reason the Christians have a problem with a XXX domain is that it creates a red-light district on the net. A place where you can go an be guaranteed to find something smutty.
And the reason that decent people are against the notion of "forcing" anybody to go into that domain is because any such legislation would immediately be used by the Christians to force sites with information about abortion where teens cannot access them any more.
It isn't really that difficult: the MBA is a big-picture person -- he'll step back and squint and follow the whole thing without much grasp of the details. That's easy. Anybody can be a manager. Because you never need to think about details.
The bs/cs guy drills down into the depths of one such detail. That's easy as well. Anybody can be a specialist, as you only ever have to know and understand one thing.
But how much detail can you see without losing the big picture out of sight? How much of the big picture can you grasp without starting to gloss over details? THAT's complexity.
This article tells you that your employment chances improve if you show some complexity.
Which is really a pretty simple and obvious statement.
(Incidentily I've found it a lot easier to teach a little business and management to techies than the otehr way 'round...)
Slashdot Mirror
It's about time: after literally decades of discrimination against us non-smokers, finally there's an exploding gag-gift that we can get for our birthdays.
That is in fact exactly what they're doing. What you're not appreciating is that the legal system (national and globally) is very much part of "the modern global market". And that its manipulation is an instance of "be creative and adapt to the modern world market".
The idea that you should produce quality to attract customers is so outmoded and old-fashioned as to be quaint. For decades now it has been clear that creative marketing is a much better direction to go. And yes, manipulation of the legal system is another route to take. And so is deliberate destruction of the competition. Lying through your teeth. Buying politicians.
Corporations have one and only one goal: to make money. In todays world there's a number of avenues to do that. Some are mentioned in the previous paragraph. Some are old. Some are new. None are chosen by "what is best for the customer". That's simply not a concern of any corporation.
No, you did not. You are merely confused.
A computerized fuel pump is NOT (repeat NOT) a feature. It is a matter of internal complexity. It is not something that a user can do with a car. It is not a function a user would want to perform with the car. It is not something the car is purchased to do.
People buy cars to perferofm some task. Go from here to there. Haul some stuff in the process. That's it. That's what you do with a car. THE ONE feature of a car is this ability to move. All else is flrill (that is bought with added complexity of the interface).
People buy computers to send and receive email. Browse the www. Share photos. Produce business reports. Manage their finances and file taxes. Download music. Thousands of different features that all have to be represented in the UI. It does not matter what happens under the hood -- the user interface does not get more complex because you put in more ram or a faster processor. Because these are NOT (repeat NOT) features any more than the computerized fuel pump.
You need to stop looking at the car from the perspective of a mechanic and look at it from the perspective of the USER of the computer. The "features" are things like "audio system". And the fuller the feature set, the more complex the interface becomes. A fuel injection system is NOT (repeat: NOT) a feature in todays cars. All cars have it. It is not even mentioned in the ad. It does not influence a single buying decision anywhere. Nobody goes around and brags about it. It does not change one iota about the features of the car: when you depress this pedal here it accelerates and when you hit that other pedal is slows down.
There's a metric bazillion things in todays computers that they didn't have 15 years ago, memory controllers and GPUs and onboard ethernet -- and none of them change the features of the computer which are "when you click this icon you get a web-browser whic will show some page and if you want to change what it shows you click on options | preferences tab to 'general', click on the 'home page' button ..." etc etc. Complexity of UI because there is a feature here (where does the browser start) that the car simply doesn't have (it always starts where you last left it). You can strip this complexity from the browser UI by making it work like the car and always start where you last turned it off. Less complex UI, reduced feature set.
And that's only ONE feature of only ONE piece of software that people use on a computer for ONE task. While "accelerating and decelerating and steering" pretty much exhaust the feature list of a car: Automatic transmission caught on exactly because "shifting gears" is NOT a feature - it is an annoyance that most people would like to get rid of because it doesn't contribute to this feature set. People buy computers to browse the web -- they don't buy cars "to shift gears".
Let me advise you to read what you are responding to. The UI for the car has remained simple because cars have not acquired a single feature in a hundred years. This is NOT about internal complexity, this is about feature sets.
You can have a simple user interface or a full feature set. Period. Your model year 2006 Ford can accelerate and decelerate and you can steer it -- but you could already do all these things on a Model-T. Computers have orders of magnitude more features, functions that they can perform, tasks that they can do -- and thus you need more complexity in the interface.
This is no different for the car: you want some new feature? Like, say, a radio? Then you'll need more complexity in the interface: more buttons to use.
A car does one thing: get you from point A to point B. That needs one simple interface. It can also do a couple other things (like play music). That needs more complexity of interace. A computer can do thousands of things. Millions. And that means you either gloss over all those features and make them unavailable or you allow people to use them and that means they need some interface. And the more complete your feature list, the more cmoplex the UI becomes.
If you're using Firefox, you can speed up all that stuff without having to "block" or "filter" anyhting: http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2005/06/speed_up _firefo.html
(describes how to make FF send requests on up to 30 items at the same time and start showing things on the screen without waiting for everything to come in)
No, it isn't.
It is statistics of browser ID string popularity.
If you do not understnd the difference, you have no chance of ever understanding the meaning of these stats and you may as well not look at them.
Maybe I'm misremembering something, but as far as I recall, it was Larry Ellison who pushed the "central server - dumb worldwide clients" concpt. Sun has made fine workstations from the word go, why would they care about thin clients?
As far as I can tell, Sun was a hardware shop - they had this unique processor architecture (Sparc) that had certain advantages and certain disadvantage like all architectures and one of the advantages was fast I/O and that made it perfect for networking. On the other hand it was lousy for number-crunching. So they packaged an OS on top of their processor (SunOS, later Solaris) and sold it and made fine money with it because it was a useful product. There's a reason why the majority of the early web ran on sparcs.
In that sense, the www has to thank sun, which was instrumental in its creation.
(But these days they have me puzzled: their hardware is a commodity platform, their OS is open-sourced -- just how the dickens do they pay the bills? Who would still give money to sun and why? What's the business model here? And how does it differ from we.give.stuff.away.using.ajax.dot.com?)
But in the whole stoy I can't see where sun has ever been a mover or shaker in the application-distribution strategy desicions of the people. What have they ever promoted or created that really made someone use "the net as a computer" rather than doing the exact same thing locally? Did I miss some killer-app somewhere?
As of a few minutes ago searching blogger for the term "two point oh" yielded this here which agrees with your statements or disagrees with them depending on how you look at it.
vi? You had vi? Hah. We had to toggle zeros and ones into the console with switches. And on bad days we didn't even had zeros. And we liked it! Uphill. Both ways. No, wait, wrong rant...
In other words: googlepages.com.
I think the preferred term is "Ferro-Americans".
Designing, yes. Implementing? Maybe. Maintaining, troubleshooting, operation? Definitely not.
One issue that I see here is the sheer dishonesty of the term "Computer Science" -- as the saying goes, "Computer science is to Science as Plumbing is to Hydrodynamics". Most so-called CS folks are at best cheap code-monkeys. And code-monkeys can be had much much cheaper in other countries, sorry.
I work for a company that outsources code-monkey work. The core capabilities are in-house (the DB infrastructure, the information-organization and information-control mechanisms). Then there's a middle layer that can easily be done by someone in India (which DB accesses should be cached and for how long and how can this data be represented internally etc etc) and then there's the GUI folks -- and the less said about them, the better. They're the prototypical "my app runs in Java which makes it better than your app" people. So we throw that to India as well, pay them a moderate-but-healthy amount of money (which means the live like kings by Indian standards) which turns out to be a great motivator and since they're merely implementing things for which there exists a solution already, they are just as fine coders as any kid I could get out of college in the US. I wouldn't trust them with anything business critical, but neither would I trust one of these "CS degrees".
There's room for actual Computer science, but that requires a caliber of brain that most code-monkeys don't bring to the table. Wherever they're from.
And since plumbing has been mentioned as an example many times before (including this post): Plumbing is a pretty difficult job, because every house is different, has a different history, had different kinds of people working on it in the past, and there's never, never any up-to-date documentation on what is going on in any given house. That's why a successful plumber can make 100k+ and he deserves it. That's why plumbers have a real problem getting decent employees, because everybody who thinks they're halfway intelligent goes to college instead of learning to be a plumber. Leaving the dross for professions like plumbing.
So let's distinguish between the vast majority of "CS", which is code-monkeying, which any ten-year-old can learn, practice and even be perfectly good at. Which can easily be outsourced to wherever it is cheapest. And which isn't a respectable field to be in to begin with. And then there's the small (<5%) of CS that's actual computer Science which has never been in any danger of being outsourced to begin with.
Why waste a generation by training them to be janitors or secretaries or programmers? Why not train them to be something more high-level and leave the menial labor (and that includes 95%+ of "CS") to folks with lower aspirations?
(and I haven't even talked about the blatant advantages to a global company to have people working in more than one country. When the folks in Menlo Park come to work in the morning they find what the folks in Pune did in the last night. They work with it, improve on it, then leave it for the India folks again. You get 24-hour productivity without anybody having to do a night shift. What's not to like about that?)
Objection. The reaction to lawyers is the result of literally millenia of observation of lawyers. How many centuries do you have to observe someone before your reaction to it is not called "knee-jerk" any more?
People dislike lawyers because lawyers are amoral. That's it. All lawers. No mater how heinous your crimes, no matter how utterly indefensible your acts, no matter how despiccable you may be as a person: give money to a lawyer and he'll wax rethorically in your defense. Lawyers will proclaim and defend any claim ever made, any act ever committed, any atrocity ever foisted upon mankind -- just as long as they get paid to do so.
It is this complete disregard for any kind of ethics, this utter lack of personal integrity in the choice of their actions, that people respond to. There's nothing "knee-jerk" about it: it is a perfectly natural response of a being with even just a shred of morality to be repulsed by a being without a shade of moral governance.
(FWIW I found the person I ended up marrying at Cornell.)
As opposed to ... french?
...for some evil-parallel-universe kind of definition of the word "useful".
The truth is very easy to know. All you have to do is take your own thought up there one step further and ask yourself: "if the answer is 'more trnsparency', who is it that has been going out of their way to prevent more transparency: the inmates at Guantanamo Bay or the Bush administration?".
I find it an incredibly useful tool to get to the truth on a lot of things: whenever you look at any situation whatsoever, ask yourself "who is profiting from this"?
...which is of course exactly what Ars did. Ars: write it up matter-of-factly and sprinkle it in with the rest of the serious articles: subtle adult humor. /. : quote it, spray-paint it pink, write "OMG PONIES" on it and mix it with other obvious jokes: sophomoric junk.
This is not correct. Contrary to the sweaty fantasies of the Christians, adult website owners would love a domain that can easily be filtered by parents. To an adult webmaster, every kid that stumbles in is just a liability -- someone who doesn't have a credit card, can't be hit up for money and only exposes you to legal trouble. Or worse, who lies about their age, gives you daddy's CC, then downloads all your material and when Daddy gets your bill he'll challenge the charge and sue you.
The reason the Christians have a problem with a XXX domain is that it creates a red-light district on the net. A place where you can go an be guaranteed to find something smutty.
And the reason that decent people are against the notion of "forcing" anybody to go into that domain is because any such legislation would immediately be used by the Christians to force sites with information about abortion where teens cannot access them any more.
It isn't really that difficult: the MBA is a big-picture person -- he'll step back and squint and follow the whole thing without much grasp of the details. That's easy. Anybody can be a manager. Because you never need to think about details. The bs/cs guy drills down into the depths of one such detail. That's easy as well. Anybody can be a specialist, as you only ever have to know and understand one thing. But how much detail can you see without losing the big picture out of sight? How much of the big picture can you grasp without starting to gloss over details? THAT's complexity. This article tells you that your employment chances improve if you show some complexity. Which is really a pretty simple and obvious statement. (Incidentily I've found it a lot easier to teach a little business and management to techies than the otehr way 'round...)