puppybeard's comments

> It passes boredom

So does cutting your toenails

> It maintains friendships, > It resurrects old friendships, > It sparks new friendships

No, people do those things. It's a medium for that interactions, but hardly the only one.

> It’s extendable, > It’s integratable

Those are both pretty clever. The quality of work that utilises this capacity may vary, but that's not FB's fault.

> It’s a social news feed

Yep, quite cool for that

> It’s a world news feed

Only if you consider celebrity gossip to be world news

> It’s a chat platform

It's a horrible chat platform

> It’s a media sharing platform

Love that side of it

> It’s a company of talented hackers

Their mobile apps suggest otherwise, to be honest

> It’s a place where small business promote themselves

Pretty cool for that. Used wisely, it's a great return on investment, based on what I've seen people I know doing. My sister is a wedding photographer and she gets tons of jobs through it.

> It’s the only place that some businesses promote themselves (not even a website)

That's true, but I find that to be a pretty horrendous user experience. The Wall / Info / Page structure for company pages is just dire. Even web pros like me have trouble getting the info they want.

> It’s Google’s big problem to solve

I dunno. General Motors have stopped advertising with them, and I've heard a lot of people say the return on investment isn't great on FB ads compared to google ads.

> It has created a massive queryable, crowd-sourced, graph of people, places, and things of the world

That's very unattractive to me, I don't like the thought of the shared details of my life being someone else's commercial product.

> They’ve captured 1/7th of the world

If you think having lots of customers online is a mark of quality, I suggest you listen to Bruno Mars' "The Way You Are", the highest selling song on digital, ever. Popular means successful, it doesn't mean good.

> They asked for all of your info, and you gave it to them

How is that supposed to be attractive? And a lot of people actually give fake info, speaking as someone whose facebook profile is named after a tractor and shows up as the wrong gender.

tl;dr = "Turns out people who've been doing this longer than us actually know what they're talking about"

> "Because FF and Chrome are cross-platform, I and my fellow developers can test on our OS of choice."

Speaking from experience, you can't always. Having done a lot of browser-testing, I've seen the same version of the same browser behave differently on the same OS. Between OS's there are more discrepancies.

Most of your users are going to be using Windows, so test on Windows first.

Graceful Degradation - look it up.

The baseline compatibility should be "functional but not necessarily beautiful".

Not wasting time getting pixel-perfection in IE is wise. Blocking IE is retarded.

The fact that you haven't even considered using Chrome Frame says a lot about your dev skills. Or, you know, lack of.

I would say this list is a bit shocking, but I own a Kindle, and I've never highlighted a flippin thing. I don't see myself ever getting in the habit either.

Looks like the data set is quite young, I'd be surprised if their info is older than a year.

It might. It might also suggest that he hasn't developed any embarassment about thinking out loud and openly contemplating various aspects of our lives. That's not a bad thing if you're in the storytelling business.

Aye, he's a lot more deriviative than he lets on.

I quite Like Jon Blow's creative activity, but my god the author of that article must never play any game that costs less than €50.

Blockbuster games have as much intellectual requirement as blockbuster films. The films advertised on billboards aren't typically the ones that advance the medium creatively. Games are no different.

The problem with Braid is that it wasn't that innovative. Nice art style, sure. But is a 2d-platformer so revolutionary? Time-based play elements weren't new either.

So it was a well-built, good looking game, based on established mechanics, with a great story. Not a revolution in gaming though.

There are far more progressive games out there, which are far further removed from the world of the Blockbusters. On that basis I'd say that Blow is nice to have around, but he's no messiah, and not as essential to the medium as is suggested. I'd go so far as to say his attitude actually propogates the stereotype of the surly, antisocial gamer.

Some examples:

Amnesia - pure distilled terror in a way no other medium can achieve, a proof of the unique value of games

Minecraft - a game with no purpose, pure zen, which stuck two fingers up to fancy graphics (and it's sales proved the market for such games)

Child of Eden - an absolutely beautiful game which connects the player with music

Anyone want to add some of their favourite progressive games?

You have a good point. All the skills listed are good things to have, but you wouldn't look for half of them in my current job, a lot of it would be useless.

And an understanding of design and usability is vital, even though we're not the designers, and most jobs I've seen require that, but it's not even mentioned in the article.

As someone who works with Linux and Windows, I agree with what you're saying here.

I hate Putty though. I use Aptana for writing my code, and quite like the built-in terminal in that for SSH. You may already have tried Aptana, but I find that I use Notepad++ only for quick jobs these days, rather than longer coding sessions, so it seems to make my life easier.

Aye, I'd agree that the things shouldn't be too net-dependent. It should be a simple matter to pre-load the things with a full curriculum of textbooks, in electronic form.

I don't see anyone arguing that OLPC is the complete solution to education impoverished children. It might even be a bit cyber-utopian for my tastes, I don't think computers are the answer to every question. But then I do think that gettign books to kids helps their education, and nobody argues that. So if you can load one of these machines with 100 books, that's better again.

Is it the best way to spend $200 for a kids education? Not if it's the only money you're spending, but it could well be part of a broader imporvement.

I had one class that taught anything about computers in my teenage years (the laughable ECDL course), and I got kicked out on the first day. Nothing I knew about computers manifested in any of my exams in other subjects, but I loved the things.

Now I have a good job working with code, which I enjoy.

The abstract of the actual research:

"Although many countries are aggressively implementing the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, there is a lack of empirical evidence on its effects. This paper presents the impact of the first large-scale randomized evaluation of the OLPC program, using data collected after 15 months of implementation in 319 primary schools in rural Peru. The results indicate that the program increased the ratio of computers per student from 0.12 to 1.18 in treatment schools. This expansion in access translated into substantial increases in use both at school and at home. No evidence is found of effects on enrollment and test scores in Math and Language. Some positive effects are found, however, in general cognitive skills as measured by Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a verbal fluency test and a Coding test." - http://www.iadb.org/en/research-and-data/publication-details...

So, rather than it being a failure, all we're told is that, after 15 months, maths and reading don't show improvements, but other areas do. So overall, it's positive.

But hey, what's an attentive reading of scientific studies worth against a link-baiting article that can be knocked up in ten minutes?

Yep. What makes this apology convincing, compared to some others, is that they were improving their system, rather than fucking with people's data without their consent.

I regard them as instructions to be processed by something which can actually evaluate those instructions, like a browser. Writing css and html is no more programming than writing a word doc is. The resulting file has information and layout but it's totally static.

I wouldn't call them a language, and they're the main part of my job.

Mozilla Developer Network already is the replacement for W3Schools. Even for experts, it's a great reference.

https://developer.mozilla.org/

You'd have to be very green to find w3schools to be any use, and even still, it would you bad advice too often.

Speaking as someone who develops html and css professionally (among other things), no they aren't programming languages. To call them as such would suggest some sort of logic, which unfortunately isn't present.

It takes maybe two years using them professionally most of your working days to become an expert. Everything after that is monotonous, repetetive drudgery.

Html5 is a disorganised mess and the wonderful css3 is vendor-prefix hell. I know a lot more of both of these languages than a sane person would want to, and I need a new job. The DOM is a handicap. The front-end of the web is broken.

I like the look of it, and I like the idea behind it. It's not for me, but it's still nice.

I don't see how it's supposed to be a Panacea though. Are there people out there who have great difficulty blogging?

Honestly, I got as far as hovering the link, saw it was a .pdf by the status bar, and was instantly alienated.

What decade was this fictional start-up created in? 1870?

Yeah, if I installed Windows 8, I'd probably take the time the time to learn how the new things work. Just because something is new, doesn't mean it's bad.

What I don't like is how consumption-oriented Metro is. It doesn't matter how slick it is, I don't want to be bombarded with notifications when I sit down at my pc. But of course, I can avoid it entirely, which I probably will. Windows 7 should do me for the next five years, easy.

Etsy wins.