"Ye olde days of Netscape and IE version 4 are thankfully behind us"
Unfortunately, Netscape and IE 4 are still very much with us. Aside from intranet projects, I've still not yet been involved in a project where I could "ignore" version 4 browsers. Like it or not, browser adaptation rates are slowing year by year.
This slowing of browser migration is part of what makes the whole browser mess so intolerable. I guess it depends on your outlook, but I simply can't abide leaving 10-20% or more of site visitors out in the cold by targeting post-4.0 browsers.
While Netscape/Mozilla hasn't been thrilling me of late, I think the only really important thing about the resurgence of the Browser Wars is that with a multitude of truly viable browser options available to users, perhaps we'll start to finally see some adaptation of standards that *work*.
No, I'm not talking about W3 standards. While those are a good thing in theory, they're only good in practice when BOTH of the major players in the market embrace them in the same fashion.
For example, while CSS is great for type control (in the main), it sucks for element placement because by the time you go through all of the necessary browser workarounds and browser detects and different versions of the same content, you may as well have just built the damned thing using tables.
All this talk about how Mozilla rocks and IE blows, or vice-versa, is completely beside the point. We can't have a better Web until the two dominant forces in the Browser Universe start applying standards in the same fashion.
Of course, O'Reilly would be bummed, because they'd no longer have to publish books like the CSS Pocket Guide (which delineates in great detail the myriad ways in which different tags are supported by different browsers).
I'm still pessimistic, but overall if Netscape finds a way to regain enough marketshare to become viable again, it may encourage Netscape and IE to compete solely on the basis of features not tied to the rendering engine.
The Vegas line on this one is PARC by 5. I mean, just look at the depth of this team. They were breaking new ground with graphical user interfaces, they had some serious talent, they weren't motivated by the constraints of the marketplace. The MS 2001 team had big bucks, but I'm just not sure they had the drive and motivation. You know, heart counts for a lot in these matchups.
Seriously, though - I know that Nielsen is trying to stimulate discussion about the role of HCI labs and generate interest in the history of HCI. But ranking HCI labs over "history" just seems a bit silly to me.
Based on replies I'm seeing in this discussion, a lot of people figure the X-Box is doomed to failure, just like UltimateTV, Bob, and Chrome. That's exactly the sort of attitude Microsoft wants its competitors to have.
"Ha ha! Microsoft is screwing up! The big bad Beast of Redmond got into a market it knows nothing about!"
This is different though. Microsoft regards this as a strategic endeavor. The X-Box is not just a game console, it's their point of attack in a war to secure dominance of your living room eyeballs. They already have your office eyeballs and your home office eyeballs (well, maybe not those of Slashdot readers, but most everyone else's). Now they want to make sure that when you turn on your TV or set-top box, it's to use Microsoft products.
This is more than a game console. It's an economic battleground, and Microsoft donsn't give up easily.
Pre-commercial Internet wasn't exactly Paradise
on
Life on The Net in 2004
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· Score: 5, Insightful
q% years the Net has changed very quickly from a great place for geeks and nerds into a highly commercialized marketplace in which everyone is making a grab for your wallet.
Ah, yes! Before everyone else showed up, the Net was this fantastic Geek Heaven, where all things were possible. You could download naughty pictures from the Delft University sever. You could engage in endlessly stimulating MUDs with fellow dungeon-crawling geeks. You could send e-mail! Hell, you could even use Gopher to snag files. It was Heaven on Earth!
Snap out of it! There was no Slashdot (founded in 1997, decidedly after the invasion of "other people"). There was no Gnutella. No Everquest. No online newspapers. No online banking. No ordering that hard-to find computer game or book or whatever in the dead of night when you live miles from the nearest store that carries what you're looking for.
There was less of a connection between "geeks" and "normal people", meaning that people who liked to tinker with computers were shunned far more than they are today.
It wasn't Heaven, just as this predicted 2004 won't be Hell.
I've been wondering about the Treo (and the Kyocera phone/PDA) for a while now, but haven't seen anything beyond the normal insufficient reviews in the technology press.
Your review answered a lot of my questions and of course stimulated discussion. It's appreciated!
Damned movie studio guerilla marketing!
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1, Troll
First the "fakeumentary" for Blair Witch, now this. The "Time Machine" film marketing people have gone too far, I say! Be on the lookout for the upcoming "interview with the 'real' Green Goblin" they'll be using to hype the new Spider Man flick. I'm also told they've dredged up Meriadoc Brandybuck for an exclusive "tell-all" expose of Samwise and his relationship with Frodo.
Origins of the technology date back to 1916
on
When Looks Can Kill
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· Score: 2
As many others have noted, this stuff has been around for quite some time. Operationally, it was first fielded in the Cobra gunship during the 1970s.
The modern HMD is not a new concept. Its invention has been attributed to Gordon Nash, a British researcher, who explored alternative methods of providing additional information to the aviator in the 1950's (Adam, 1995). Marshall (1989) traces the concept of using the helmet as a platform for a fire control (weapon aiming) back to 1916, when Albert Bacon Pratt developed and received patents for an integrated gun helmet, perhaps the very first helmet-mounted sight (HMS). This concept was revisited in the Helmet Sight System (HSS) used in the U.S. Army's AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter in the 1970's. Task and Kocian (1995) cite the U.S. Navy's Visual Target Acquisition System (VTAS), developed in the 1960's, as the first fully operational visually coupled sighting system. [However, the system was abandoned due to lack of sufficient missile fire control technology.] For Army aviation, the AN/PVS-5 NVG was the first pilotage imagery HMD (first tested in 1973), and the IHADSS was the first integrated HMD (fielded since 1985).
Simply, an HMD projects head-directed sensor imagery and/or fire control symbology onto the eye, usually superimposed over a see-through view of the outside world.
Re:Those who read it area already clued in
on
Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 2
Of course you're right. I didn't mean to imply that the book wasn't a worthwhile read, or that "clued-in" managers didn't need to continue educating themselves. My point was simply that the vast majority of people who really should read this book won't.
Those who read it area already clued in
on
Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Here's something about managing: the people who take the discipline of leading an organization seriously (yes, it's a discipline, and a difficult one) are always searching to learn more. They want to be better managers.
Most managers, however, are not necessarily trying to become better managers. In organizations both large and small, management training often consists of a 30-minute exit interview with the person you're replacing (if you're lucky).
Someone's a good accountant? Make them head of accounting. Got a really kick-ass salesperson? Make her head of sales. One of your Java programmers knows more than the rest of the team? Make him your CTO. After being promoted to such a position, with no real leadership training, how could you not assume that you're just a natural born leader?
Unfortunately this approach just doesn't work. Cultivating leadership in any organization is difficult, time-consuming, and doesn't offer immediate dollars-and-cents results that the bean-counters can quantify. The fact that there is so much literature on leadership shows the very real dearth of good organizational leadership training in the corporate world.
The managers who read this book are likely improving their management skills, but they're not the ones who need to read it. Unfortunately, the ones who do need to read such books never will, because they know they've already got that "management thing" all figured out.
Egads... Apache 1.3 is about to expire, so it hooks up with The Gimp and wreaks havoc, running through the filesystem looking for the kernel, so it can extract revenge, or at least look for a way to avoid death.
What's interesting to me about this debate isn't so much the particulars of it, but what the presence of the debate itself reveals about how we view goverment in this country.
You can't get much more local than city government. We're not talking about behemoth state governments or the federal government here. And yet here we are debading whether it's unfair for one of the smallest units of government, one of the entities closest to the people who elected it, to offer us services for our taxes.
The privatization of government services seems to have gone so far that we now seriously consider almost every city government function replaceable by private contractors (security services, health services, and so on), yet for local government to "intrude" into an arena now dominated by huge for-profit entities is somehow taboo.
Government is often painfully inefficient - I say that because I've worked in government. But it baffles me that when the people from our own neighborhoods whom we elected to help our cities run better actually offer something superior to what private industry can offer, we run screaming that the free markets are being sabotaged.
My saga with Interland convinced me that I should take every opportunity to share the tragic story, in hopes that it would keep others from having to undergo the same sad fate.
The short version is that I signed up for a domain transfer to Interland. Everything went fine (that is, they were very efficient at ringing u the sale on my credit card). Then, the troubles started. Various snafus at their end made the domain transfer take not one, not two, not three days - but NINE.
To make matters worse, their POP server went down repeatedly. Their "helpful web-based admin tools" didn't work properly - for example, WebTrends worked, but only sporadically. Server response times were atrocious - I regularly ran traceroutes from a variety of locations and found response to routinely be 2x slower than most other comparable sites.
Tech support failed to respond to any of my above complaints, but each time I received a handy message from their automated system, telling me that the problem had been resolved. How had it been resolved? There was no problem in the first place, so everything is OK!
Finally, I elected to end my misery. I switched to another host, which has given me none of the above-mentioned difficulties. I complained yet again to Interland and they finally promised to send a refund for the unused portion of my 1-year contract.
I faxed in the appropriate form over two weeks ago, and haven't been credited the amount due. Why am I not surprised?
I actually know quite a few people who are "tempted" by Macs, but not enough to switch from PCs. When I ask them why they stick with PCs, most of them give me answers like this: "Well, I know they're really well-designed, and they are very innovative, but everyone else uses PCs."
So these people have considered Macs, but they're nervous about it. They want their fears to be calmed. Most of them don't seem to know, for example, that there's a very capable Mac version of Office. They don't know that they can run accounting, database, and other "non-creative" applications on Macs.
I'm not saying that Macs are the choice for everyone, nor am I saying that every PC user has contemplated buying a Mac, but I do think that a much larger percentage of the population has at one time or another thought about purchasing a Mac.
Hard-core "I don't want to use a Mac, ever!" PC users are not the audience they want to solicit. It seems to me it's a very smart move on Apple's part to obtain feedback from the large number of people out there who are on the fence, but stay with Windows out of habit.
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I definitely agree with your assessment of SF culture, and since I live in Santa Cruz, I agree about the presence of many hippies.;-)
But SF and Santa Cruz aren't in Silicon Valley - just ask anyone who lives in San Francisco or Santa Cruz, and they'll definitely tell you that they don't live in Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley is crowded, expensive, and generally lacking in culture. I think most people who have lived in any major metro area and then have lived in the Valley can attest to that.
There are also plenty of other areas that have the combination of nice weather, great universities, and educated populations.
But Silicon Valley is different in that the venture capital community there is not nearly as risk-averse as it is in many other places. While this leads to catastrophic failures (like the dot-bombs), it also leads to successes like Intel and Apple.
Another key factor is that in the Valley, having been involved in a start-up failure is not seen as a black mark - it's seen as proof that you've been tested, and that you've probably learned some lessons.
In my opinion, this willingness to experiment, learn from mistakes, and move on, is a hallmark of Silicon Valley business. I'm no fortune-teller, so I don't know if it will be enough to pull the Valley out of its current probems. But if the Valley recovers, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
The problem with your approach is that the bare minimum quality works in the short run, but it's very difficult to get out from under that hole once you create it.
Also, you assume that moving as quickly as possible is the polar opposite of moving forward with a process in place. My counter to that is that a good process can actually save you time, even in the short run.
I've been at places where everyone is in such a hurry to move fast, to get product out the door, that they had to do the same things over and over again because of duplication of effort, mistaken assumptions, and so on.
Hell, look inside 90% of the burnt-out hulks of once world-beating dot-com companies in the Valley and you'll hear the same tale over and over again - "we were in such a rush, nobody knew what was going on, when the senior developer left, we had to redo everything from scratch.." etc. This isn't just hearsay - I've seen it first-hand.
I'm not trying to argue with you, but just ponder that the choices might be less binary than you present them. There is a middle ground between complete failure and moving as quickly as possible with the bare minimum of quality.
Perceived value of "overpriced apples"
on
Apple @ MacWorld Tokyo
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· Score: 5, Insightful
One thing I've never understood about the PC-Mac price comparison is this: Ten years ago, $4,000 bought you the computer you really dreamed of, the one that could do "everything". of course, "everything" didn't include high-end digital photography, digital moviemaking, ripping MP3s, or playing the kind of immersive 3D games that are available now.
$2,000 got you the machine you could afford -the one that you could use Office and Quicken on, play most middle-of the road games, and if you were willing to wait a long time, dabble in graphic design and multimedia.
Now the machine you really want still costs $4,000, but the machine you can afford is down to $1,500, and it does far more than even the best home computers did just two or three years ago.
The fact that there are $500 commodity PC boxes available is nice, but does that mean that the $1,500 iMac no longer has value to the person who purchases it?
It seems to me that rather than comparing the prices of PC and Mac CPUs and peripherals, we ought to be comparing overall value to the consumer - i.e., is this machine doing everything I want it to do, for a price that I find worthwhile?
If you love your Mac, but you don't love PCs, there must be more perceived value in the Mac for you. If that's the case, isn't it intrinsically worth more to you than a less expensive PC?
That's an interesting thought, and I see where you're coming from, but in my experience a good system that documents institutional memory is worth its weight in gold. Why? Because when those people you hired leave, there will be no record of how they did what they did.
You pay the piper now, and it takes less time and money, or you pay him later, and it takes a lot longer and costs a whole lot more money.
It seems to me that the "right people" (aka - process-oriented people) in the company you worked for before were likely more focused on process than on results. But there is a happy medium where the process leads to better results.
The promise of a greater chunk of the market seems to appeal to many H-P shareholders. Of course, the fact that that market is rapidly becoming commoditized seems to have been overlooked (at least, by half of the shareholders). I'll bet the ones who voted against the merger will be plenty pissed if it goes through.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, Netscape and IE 4 are still very much with us. Aside from intranet projects, I've still not yet been involved in a project where I could "ignore" version 4 browsers. Like it or not, browser adaptation rates are slowing year by year.
This slowing of browser migration is part of what makes the whole browser mess so intolerable. I guess it depends on your outlook, but I simply can't abide leaving 10-20% or more of site visitors out in the cold by targeting post-4.0 browsers.
No, I'm not talking about W3 standards. While those are a good thing in theory, they're only good in practice when BOTH of the major players in the market embrace them in the same fashion.
For example, while CSS is great for type control (in the main), it sucks for element placement because by the time you go through all of the necessary browser workarounds and browser detects and different versions of the same content, you may as well have just built the damned thing using tables.
All this talk about how Mozilla rocks and IE blows, or vice-versa, is completely beside the point. We can't have a better Web until the two dominant forces in the Browser Universe start applying standards in the same fashion.
Of course, O'Reilly would be bummed, because they'd no longer have to publish books like the CSS Pocket Guide (which delineates in great detail the myriad ways in which different tags are supported by different browsers).
I'm still pessimistic, but overall if Netscape finds a way to regain enough marketshare to become viable again, it may encourage Netscape and IE to compete solely on the basis of features not tied to the rendering engine.
Hey, a guy can dream, right?
Seriously, though - I know that Nielsen is trying to stimulate discussion about the role of HCI labs and generate interest in the history of HCI. But ranking HCI labs over "history" just seems a bit silly to me.
"Ha ha! Microsoft is screwing up! The big bad Beast of Redmond got into a market it knows nothing about!"
This is different though. Microsoft regards this as a strategic endeavor. The X-Box is not just a game console, it's their point of attack in a war to secure dominance of your living room eyeballs. They already have your office eyeballs and your home office eyeballs (well, maybe not those of Slashdot readers, but most everyone else's). Now they want to make sure that when you turn on your TV or set-top box, it's to use Microsoft products.
They're willing to spend money for a long time in order to make this happen.
This is more than a game console. It's an economic battleground, and Microsoft donsn't give up easily.
Ah, yes! Before everyone else showed up, the Net was this fantastic Geek Heaven, where all things were possible. You could download naughty pictures from the Delft University sever. You could engage in endlessly stimulating MUDs with fellow dungeon-crawling geeks. You could send e-mail! Hell, you could even use Gopher to snag files. It was Heaven on Earth!
Snap out of it! There was no Slashdot (founded in 1997, decidedly after the invasion of "other people"). There was no Gnutella. No Everquest. No online newspapers. No online banking. No ordering that hard-to find computer game or book or whatever in the dead of night when you live miles from the nearest store that carries what you're looking for.
There was less of a connection between "geeks" and "normal people", meaning that people who liked to tinker with computers were shunned far more than they are today.
It wasn't Heaven, just as this predicted 2004 won't be Hell.
Your review answered a lot of my questions and of course stimulated discussion. It's appreciated!
As the US Army puts it:
The modern HMD is not a new concept. Its invention has been attributed to Gordon Nash, a British researcher, who explored alternative methods of providing additional information to the aviator in the 1950's (Adam, 1995). Marshall (1989) traces the concept of using the helmet as a platform for a fire control (weapon aiming) back to 1916, when Albert Bacon Pratt developed and received patents for an integrated gun helmet, perhaps the very first helmet-mounted sight (HMS). This concept was revisited in the Helmet Sight System (HSS) used in the U.S. Army's AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter in the 1970's. Task and Kocian (1995) cite the U.S. Navy's Visual Target Acquisition System (VTAS), developed in the 1960's, as the first fully operational visually coupled sighting system. [However, the system was abandoned due to lack of sufficient missile fire control technology.] For Army aviation, the AN/PVS-5 NVG was the first pilotage imagery HMD (first tested in 1973), and the IHADSS was the first integrated HMD (fielded since 1985).
Simply, an HMD projects head-directed sensor imagery and/or fire control symbology onto the eye, usually superimposed over a see-through view of the outside world.
Most managers, however, are not necessarily trying to become better managers. In organizations both large and small, management training often consists of a 30-minute exit interview with the person you're replacing (if you're lucky).
Someone's a good accountant? Make them head of accounting. Got a really kick-ass salesperson? Make her head of sales. One of your Java programmers knows more than the rest of the team? Make him your CTO. After being promoted to such a position, with no real leadership training, how could you not assume that you're just a natural born leader?
Unfortunately this approach just doesn't work. Cultivating leadership in any organization is difficult, time-consuming, and doesn't offer immediate dollars-and-cents results that the bean-counters can quantify. The fact that there is so much literature on leadership shows the very real dearth of good organizational leadership training in the corporate world.
The managers who read this book are likely improving their management skills, but they're not the ones who need to read it. Unfortunately, the ones who do need to read such books never will, because they know they've already got that "management thing" all figured out.
One Rutger Hauer is enough, thank you!
Wait a minute.. are you sure this wasn't supposed to be posted on April Fool's Day? ;-)
You can't get much more local than city government. We're not talking about behemoth state governments or the federal government here. And yet here we are debading whether it's unfair for one of the smallest units of government, one of the entities closest to the people who elected it, to offer us services for our taxes.
The privatization of government services seems to have gone so far that we now seriously consider almost every city government function replaceable by private contractors (security services, health services, and so on), yet for local government to "intrude" into an arena now dominated by huge for-profit entities is somehow taboo.
Government is often painfully inefficient - I say that because I've worked in government. But it baffles me that when the people from our own neighborhoods whom we elected to help our cities run better actually offer something superior to what private industry can offer, we run screaming that the free markets are being sabotaged.
Ah, how far we have come.
The short version is that I signed up for a domain transfer to Interland. Everything went fine (that is, they were very efficient at ringing u the sale on my credit card). Then, the troubles started. Various snafus at their end made the domain transfer take not one, not two, not three days - but NINE.
To make matters worse, their POP server went down repeatedly. Their "helpful web-based admin tools" didn't work properly - for example, WebTrends worked, but only sporadically. Server response times were atrocious - I regularly ran traceroutes from a variety of locations and found response to routinely be 2x slower than most other comparable sites.
Tech support failed to respond to any of my above complaints, but each time I received a handy message from their automated system, telling me that the problem had been resolved. How had it been resolved? There was no problem in the first place, so everything is OK!
Finally, I elected to end my misery. I switched to another host, which has given me none of the above-mentioned difficulties. I complained yet again to Interland and they finally promised to send a refund for the unused portion of my 1-year contract.
I faxed in the appropriate form over two weeks ago, and haven't been credited the amount due. Why am I not surprised?
So these people have considered Macs, but they're nervous about it. They want their fears to be calmed. Most of them don't seem to know, for example, that there's a very capable Mac version of Office. They don't know that they can run accounting, database, and other "non-creative" applications on Macs.
I'm not saying that Macs are the choice for everyone, nor am I saying that every PC user has contemplated buying a Mac, but I do think that a much larger percentage of the population has at one time or another thought about purchasing a Mac.
Hard-core "I don't want to use a Mac, ever!" PC users are not the audience they want to solicit. It seems to me it's a very smart move on Apple's part to obtain feedback from the large number of people out there who are on the fence, but stay with Windows out of habit.
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Sun, Oracle, H-P, Cisco Systems, Applied Materials, AMD, Sybase, Informix, Adobe, Adaptec, intuit, Autodesk, PeopleSoft...
I'm just naming off big guys, most of whom had to be around for a while in order to get that big, no?
But SF and Santa Cruz aren't in Silicon Valley - just ask anyone who lives in San Francisco or Santa Cruz, and they'll definitely tell you that they don't live in Silicon Valley.
There are also plenty of other areas that have the combination of nice weather, great universities, and educated populations.
But Silicon Valley is different in that the venture capital community there is not nearly as risk-averse as it is in many other places. While this leads to catastrophic failures (like the dot-bombs), it also leads to successes like Intel and Apple.
Another key factor is that in the Valley, having been involved in a start-up failure is not seen as a black mark - it's seen as proof that you've been tested, and that you've probably learned some lessons.
In my opinion, this willingness to experiment, learn from mistakes, and move on, is a hallmark of Silicon Valley business. I'm no fortune-teller, so I don't know if it will be enough to pull the Valley out of its current probems. But if the Valley recovers, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
The problem with your approach is that the bare minimum quality works in the short run, but it's very difficult to get out from under that hole once you create it.
Also, you assume that moving as quickly as possible is the polar opposite of moving forward with a process in place. My counter to that is that a good process can actually save you time, even in the short run.
I've been at places where everyone is in such a hurry to move fast, to get product out the door, that they had to do the same things over and over again because of duplication of effort, mistaken assumptions, and so on.
Hell, look inside 90% of the burnt-out hulks of once world-beating dot-com companies in the Valley and you'll hear the same tale over and over again - "we were in such a rush, nobody knew what was going on, when the senior developer left, we had to redo everything from scratch.." etc. This isn't just hearsay - I've seen it first-hand.
I'm not trying to argue with you, but just ponder that the choices might be less binary than you present them. There is a middle ground between complete failure and moving as quickly as possible with the bare minimum of quality.
$2,000 got you the machine you could afford -the one that you could use Office and Quicken on, play most middle-of the road games, and if you were willing to wait a long time, dabble in graphic design and multimedia.
Now the machine you really want still costs $4,000, but the machine you can afford is down to $1,500, and it does far more than even the best home computers did just two or three years ago.
The fact that there are $500 commodity PC boxes available is nice, but does that mean that the $1,500 iMac no longer has value to the person who purchases it?
It seems to me that rather than comparing the prices of PC and Mac CPUs and peripherals, we ought to be comparing overall value to the consumer - i.e., is this machine doing everything I want it to do, for a price that I find worthwhile?
If you love your Mac, but you don't love PCs, there must be more perceived value in the Mac for you. If that's the case, isn't it intrinsically worth more to you than a less expensive PC?
You pay the piper now, and it takes less time and money, or you pay him later, and it takes a lot longer and costs a whole lot more money.
It seems to me that the "right people" (aka - process-oriented people) in the company you worked for before were likely more focused on process than on results. But there is a happy medium where the process leads to better results.