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marklindhout's comments

marklindhout | 13 years ago | on: Life as a Service

Riding? Yes.

Poor attempt at philosophy? No. This merely describes the daily situation here, and I find myself agreeing with most all of what he says. He is very well-spoken, and I believe it resonates with many people from the Netherlands.

marklindhout | 13 years ago | on: Life as a Service

If this guy isn't Dutch, I'm the pope.

These are quite literally exactly the reasons why I'm emigrating.

marklindhout | 13 years ago | on: The Pendulum Swings, Again

>> OSS is very good at innovation and infrastructure, but is very, very, VERY poor at user experience.

I agree with you here. As a designer, I have helped out FLOSS projects with UX design and usability. However, the environment is such that if you would suggest UX could be improved, the response often is that devs feel insulted because you are dissing their code (which is not the case, but they don't see that).

On the other hand, taking a look at WordPress, they invested quite some time in user testing and improving UX by professionals, and that makes it one of the most usable web publishing platforms out there.

So, it would be too easy to say all FLOSS is bad at UX, but most developers don't even see it as an actual discipline, and hence do not see a problem.

Nicer devs, that's the key :)

marklindhout | 13 years ago | on: I Have My Own Internet. No One Else May Go There.

I believe it has value because it puts a question to the nature of the Internet as we now use it. As it is being more and more regulated, where do we draw the line on who we can exclude? How far does that exclusion go?

Ideally everybody should always be allowed access. The Internet is a machine for sharing information, after all, and that is a liberty. Yet current intellectual property-oriented lawmakers implement all kinds of weird half-functional rule to it, changing it.

That, and also taking a look at the Internet as a religion is quite entertaining. He is echoing the splits such as those of the catholic church, early christianity, zoroastrian religions, etcetera.

I found it very good to read about something I never question and love through the eyes of an outsider.

marklindhout | 14 years ago | on: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine in IE

This blog post is misleading. The non-support was specifically aimed at older versions of IE.

And besides, IE has not proven the most reliable of partners, I totally get their move. You never know when your phone's gonna be red hot with IE9 customers because Microsoft decided to update some obscure DLL which breaks CSS line-height in em's or something...

marklindhout | 14 years ago | on: Once

True that. Losing money hurts, and will always be connected psychologically to that 'failure'.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com) in his book “The Black Swan” talks about one of his friends, a stock trader, with a very specific strategy. This strategy involves losing lots of small amounts over time, and once every 6 years or so, one enormous win. He explained that his trader friend needed to check his track record continuously to remind him of the actual benefit of this strategy, because even the small losses were eating away at him. Up to a point where he wanted to give up.

marklindhout | 14 years ago | on: PHP-CGI Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild

I feel this needs to be stressed again: FastCGI implementations are NOT vulnerable to this bug.

I myself run LigHTTPD and PHP through FastCGI, and this was worrying me a lot, until someone pointed me to the Eindbazen site which stated this.

(BTW: Eindbazen is Dutch for "Final boss" in a video game context.)

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