It’s like that. Requirements specification for writing a requirements specification (excerpt).
Culture clash. LiveJournal gets their very own Snap Shots. You know, those annoying Web 2.0 popups for ad-sponsored content sites. Turns out, it bugs some people, which is understandable. We geeks are snotty:
But here’s the thing: Regular people on the web *love* Snap previews. I know you don’t believe it — I didn’t want to believe it. But it’s completely true. In the testing and feedback I’ve seen, it’s some emotional pull about the fact that links “do something” now, instead of just being on the page. I know we all feel these people are idiots, but it’s our own geek cultural imperialism that makes us think we know better than non-techy folks.
Or just less prone to infectious diseases:
I’m not shocked how many people delight in them. But these are the very same people who download Gator and ‘free’ screensavers onto our computers here at my job, and think they’re wonderful, you know, until they start wondering why their computer is so effing SLOW, and then call IT because they don’t believe me when I tell them their computer will work just fine if they will get rid of that crap with a dose of Ad-Aware and Spybot. There are lots of things advertising partners will want to give these people that they will love that I don’t want on any machine I have to use.
Snap.
Speaking of ivory towers. While we’re busy discussing if Ruby is a better or worse Lisp, what Erlang does right, and what we can all learn from Haskell, the world keeps cranking out one application after another in more practical languages like Visual Basic, ABAP and rumor has it even MUMPS (the language, not the disease). Just a friendly reminder:
- Visual Basic is the #1 .NET language (as reported by Forrester Research)
- Visual Basic is the #1 downloaded and #1 registered Express Edition (topping the #2 position by 20%)
- Visual Basic is the #1 MSDN language dev center and blog in terms of traffic
- The Visual Basic Team blog is in the top 1% in readership of all MS bloggers (I don’t know where I fall in that since I host independently.)
But then again. An XKCD moment, played in real life.
The bug that time forgot. Ever wondered why only root can listen on ports below 1024? Turns out it’s a security feature inherited from a different era. And what was once about enforcing security, is not a big gaping security hole.
Above, Ward Cunningham illustrates what went wrong.
Chipping the web - constancy — Chip’s Quips
