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 | Stop the next war before it starts End the Occupation |
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| Stop the next war before it starts End the Occupation |
| last updated:28 Jul 2003 09: 31 Webword time, or 28 Jul 2003 14:31 UK time |
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| Webword Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 27 Jul 2003) | View Other Weeks |
| Mailinator | Thu 24 Jul |
| No Signup. No waiting. No SPAM. Just email - your email - anytime you want it. No time wasted signing-up, just send an email to any address @mailinator.com. Your email address already exists. Get your email sent here, THEN come check mailinator. Your mail will be waiting. Forget giving out your real email address. Forget giving out your information. Forget spam. So, the next time someone suspicious asks for your email... make up a mailinator address on the spot and give them that. Then come here and see what they sent. Its that easy. Its that fast. Its like flicking a booger at spam. (Comments: Via White Noise.) |
| Thu 24 Jul 09:21 | Joshua Kaufman | That is some of the most annoying copy I've read in a while. |
| Thu 24 Jul 14:05 | Derek R | While I think it's a grand idea to have publicly available email which anyone can view or use, the name 'mailinator' is, I feel, difficult to remember and hard to spell. Why such a hard Latin-based brand-name for a service for-the-masses? They should have dumbed-down their image to something like 'nomail' etc. |
| Fri 25 Jul 04:38 | ilteph | see also spamgourmet.com |
| Sat 26 Jul 13:56 | Anonymous | Sites start to block mailinator.com addresses in 5..4..3..2.. |
| July Bandwidth Report | Thu 24 Jul |
| As of June 2003, most users in the US connect to the Internet using dial-up modems of 56Kbps or less. 51.4% use 56Kbps modems, 9% use 28/33.3Kbps, and 2.9% use 14.4Kbps modems. In total, 63.3% of home users in the US connect to the Internet at 56Kbps or less. |
| Fri 25 Jul 08:06 | Calybos | So why do so many sites STILL have useless animations, bloated graphics, and annoying Flash intros? Are the surviving e-retailers still so eager to drive away customers that they just refuse to sacrifice their pretty little gewgaws for the sake of allowing people to actually USE the frickin' site? Seriously... is the problem that usability issues are not being communicated to the top levels of decision-making, or is it that the developers are still mistakenly assuming 'everyone has a high-speed connection like I do'? Or maybe a little of both? |
| Fri 25 Jul 08:52 | daniel szuc | I think many of these sites are developed with the fast connections and developers thinking with the 'users are just like us' mentality. Developers forget or are not instructed up front as to who the actual users are and how to develop with them in mind. I also think it often depends on the experience and maturity of the people on the development team. Younger developers or fresh graduates tend to like playing with all the cool gizmos and toys and are less impressed when you bring all of this back to the basics i.e. centred around the user tasks or aiming for simplicity. |
| Fri 25 Jul 09:16 | Darin | A lot of it is just the level of understanding of current technology and its limitations by the client. I'm working on a redesign of our corporate site and focusing on speed and usability to the user/customer. Many managers I've shown it to think it's 'bland', because they're used to seeing all of this crap out there on their T1 at work. The current site was done a while back when some ad agency sold them on what I call the 'baby mobile effect', where you show a baby a mobile with things moving and bloated graphics and they go 'Oooohh!'. But when I show them that most of our customers who use the web to do any transactions or look up information are on 56k or less, they change their thinking some. Some you can never convince no matter how hard you try. It's a utility site, so the user isn't there to play a Flash game or watch some pretentious splash screen, they just want their info or complete a transaction and get out of there. In its current build, the text and links load in 4 seconds and the entire page loads in 12 seconds on a 22k/sec connection. It does have color and graphic content, but it's optimized or uses stylesheets. Sure, if it's a site for a movie or a rock band or something of the like I can see where the use of rich media/Flash is appropriate. But for most sites the text-based content still rules the day. |
| Adobe's Robert McDaniels responds (again) to Nielsen criticisms of PDF | Tue 22 Jul |
| Many of the PDF Usability Crimes you cite have nothing to do with Acrobat or PDF but are the result of poor design choices. Most of same arguments about poor navigation, large file sizes, and excessive text blocks can be used to describe poorly designed HTML as well. There are some very valid reasons for using PDFs online as opposed to HTML. |
| Wed 23 Jul 08:58 | Philip Chalmers | Nielsen and McDaniels have both confused the situation by overstating their cases. A lot of Nielsen's comments hit at poor use of PDF rather than deficiences of the tool (lack of navigation aids, long sequential text passages). McDaniels is right to answer these points, and to point out that PDF is often best for 'official' documents where the user must not be able to tamper with the content or layout. But as a viewer (unwilling) rather than composer of PDF docs I don't like seeing them on my screen, and McDaniels either avoids the more serious of Nielsen's points or exaggerates the importance of partial remedies: You have to wait for the plug-in to load and then you see nothing until ALL of the first page has loaded. In all PDFs I've seen the layout is fixed (like fixed-width HTML tables) and does not re-flow. So zooming in or opening the navigation pane (if provided) causes horizontal scrollbars in the text. PDFs are designed for printing, and their page-breaks often disrupt the flow of the content. The fonts I've seen in PDFs are optimised for printing and look fuzzy on screen. So I think: PDF may be the best or even the only choice for 'official' documents where a prescribed layout and / or tamper-proofing are required. For any other purpose HTML is likely to be better - and you can still print HTML pages if you want. |
| Wed 23 Jul 14:14 | Anonymous | Pity more hasn't been done with .CHM help format. |
| Wed 23 Jul 19:32 | Ryan | McDaniels has zero credability on this issue. Ask a Microsoft employee about Word usability and he could come up with 1,00+ reasons why Word is esy to use. Just like using PDFs for online use, the people that do it everday know it sucks. Personally and proffesionally I agree with Nielson, PDF sucks for print. Acrobat and the plug-in crash all the time! Only an Adobe employee would argue. lso, its noteworthy that most of the pro-PDF points made by McDaniels were all from the developer's POV; not the user's. |
| Thu 24 Jul 00:57 | Lee | Acrobat Reader is stable? I know that fat PDF files often freeze my browser. And Acrobat Reader 6 is a bloated joke. PDF files serve some limited purposes, such as delivering forms in the format required by the government, simple brochures that you WANT people to print out, ebooks, protecting content that you don't want copied. But too many people don't know flip about preparing a PDF file for use on the web--graphic designers who make PDF files from Quark files are the worst offenders, followed by marcom types in love with non-standard fonts (and plenty of them) and know nothing about optimizing images. So, PDF files are neither all bad nor all good. I would rather see a defense of the PDF format on the web by someone other than an Adobe employee. It's kinda like Ford rising to the defense of the SUVs that saved their corporate behind. |
| Engineering Centred Vs User Centred | Wed 16 Jul |
| How many buttons do you really use on your remote at home? |
| Thu 24 Jul 00:11 | Jack | You could probably lose the eject button as well. Am I the only person who thinks the eject button on a remote is completely silly? Push eject, out pops the DVD tray. Now what? |
| WebWord Comment | Tue 22 Jul |
| Why do so many people think that Dells core business strength is selling cheap computers? That isnt a strength at all. It is simply an effect of their actual strengths: supply chain optimization (i.e., negative cash conversion cycle), intense product line focus (e.g., value personal computers), and customer interface tools (e.g., direct sales via web site, with configurator). |
| Wed 23 Jul 09:21 | Anonymous | Who are these people you speak of? |
| Wed 23 Jul 10:18 | John S. Rhodes | Carly Fiorina |
| Wed 23 Jul 10:21 | Simon | OK, John, maybe a different question. Which *intelligent* people do you speak of? ;) |
| Wed 23 Jul 12:39 | Anonymous | Perhaps Carly is purposely trivializing Dell's business model.. |
| Why No One Lives Forever | Sun 20 Jul |
| We should not pursue life extension in and of itself. That, in my opinion, is a potential disaster. If all youre doing is extending life without improving the quality of life, the price we may pay is an increase in frailty and disability. Wed essentially be making ourselves older, longer. I cant think of anything worse. |
| Mon 21 Jul 03:20 | Mac | Quality not Quantity |
| Mon 21 Jul 09:37 | Anonymous | Yeah, sure, let's ask you all again when you're on your death bed. |
| Tue 22 Jul 10:06 | Anonymous | Poppycock! You only say no one lives forever because you've lived less than 100 years and forever hasn't happened yet! How do you know how long our oldest people live? You don't! |
| Tue 22 Jul 13:01 | Anonymous | There also seem to be lots of other potential negatives, including: A larger aging base, which may require many younger workers to subsidize medical treatment and social security benefits Less turnover, which may make it harder for younger people to find jobs (or perhaps the exact opposite, lots of older workers that nobody wants to hire) Stagnation of ideas, with academics staying longer in posts and maintaining the old guard (wasn't it Thomas Kuhn that said that something to the effect that sometimes you have to wait for the older scientists to die off before some scientific revolutions happen?) |
| Wed 23 Jul 10:19 | Logan | Yes, let's kill everyone at age 30. That's much simpler. You people make me sick. |
| Does IT really matter anymore? | Thu 17 Jul |
| (The Age) Carr argues that Information Technology - like the steam engine and electricity before it - has made the transition from strategic opportunity to commodity input. All the pieces are standardising, becoming interoperable and becoming public. When everyone can see how things are done in IT, he argues, no one can use IT to gain a strategic advantage. |
| Tue 22 Jul 10:11 | Anonymous | I have my IT people opening doors for customers. They moonlight as Wal-Mart greeters. Our web designers make good book ends. Oh, and they take out the trash. |
| Free | Sun 13 Jul |
| Everybody needs to start their own fire |
| Mon 21 Jul 01:36 | shahid maqbool | i am boy aasadiq abad |
| Mon 21 Jul 01:39 | shahid maqbool | assaadsdfsdgfsdf hjjkj |