The argument is that a better user experience was abandoned in favor of a worse user experience that generated more impressions per user.
The argument is that an experience that Dustin Curtis liked better was a better experience. Maybe the victorious layout really was liked by more people, just as more people clearly like a 4" (or greater) smartphone screen than 3.5".
I have no way of knowing if the author is lying in his reporting on internal conversations that happened at Facebook, but his argument isn't merely that he liked it better. Rather it's that user testing revealed that it functioned better but resulted in less advertising impressions, and that facebook consciously decided to prioritize the latter.
Not sure, I've seen users kick and scream about change and then after all the fuss dies down they end up loving the product even more then before the change. The trick is knowing when your right. (Example: All smartphones need physical keyboards, Apple was right, how is BlackBerry doing these days?)
This sounds contrived. Being the skeptical sort we should all be, there is no reason to believe the sources (if you believe they exist) regarding supposed cynical reasons they didn't proceed with a considered UI.
Maybe Facebook found that people really actually liked the other variant better? Or maybe they were just ambivalent about it, and if we've learned anything about widely deployed social media sites, it's that you need a really, really good reason to change things.
And to add just a bit more on the "contrived" notion: My Facebook feed looks very similar to the first page, with big, colourful pictures dominating my news food. If my network had people posting short twitter-like missives, I suppose it would look like that. Outside of trivial CSS differences, the only real variation is that I don't have the confusing iconography down the left, instead using that massive area of white space for descriptive text.
It wasn't just the style. It would separate content into easy to digest categories. You could pull up a picture feed (from that top-right section) and just see new pictures. It would filter stuff like music/pictures/game shit/etc into categories, and deliver more focused content in each category. The primary News Feed wasn't as cluttered with bullshit. It made it easier to ignore things like game notifications.
Accordingly, we could see the content we wanted to, faster. Which is bad, because we don't forcefully digest as much undesired content as before. Meaning we leave the site faster and don't look at as many ads. And thus, it's more profitable to stick with the shitty News Feed that is essentially your only source of compiled information from your network, outside of group/list feeds that filter content by user, but not type of content.
I was really looking forward to the filter-by-type-of-content direction, but I'm sure it's now something they'll leave in their back pocket, should they start losing numbers directly due to user experience.
When Google originally started doing this it was essentially to open people's eyes to the capabilities of HTML. Lately, however, it has just been excessive. In this case it isn't even particularly clever: Click on stuff and stuff happens. If you had to actually align planets or build real molecules / atoms, then cool, but just clicking on highlighted things is not interesting.
Job's simply asked that Google's recruitment department please stop.
By emailing the CEO of Google. Jobs knew exactly what he was doing, and what the outcome would be. And boy, what an absolutely embarrassing response by Google.
This is a growing anti-web trend -- the tendency of web properties to only self-link. I assume someone somewhere has actual metrics justifying this, but it's the antithesis of what the web is about, but it's exactly why the only links in this article are to other Bloomberg Business Week articles.
I don't think anyone thinks the plane blew up. At some point it likely just ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean.
The simplest possible solution with the facts that we have now is that one of the pilots (one of the pilots wife and children moved out of the family home the day before liftoff) wanted to commit suicide (taking many victims with him), but for some reason wanted to leave a mystery. Perhaps relating to insurance in some way -- hoping the black box would never be found that revealed any of the actions. Their tactic might have been to continue flying into no-return range in such a way that they didn't have to fully admit to what they were doing until it was too late.
It is terribly crass to make someone a villain when they might have been simply a victim, but of all the possible explanations that is all that seems to fit right now. That someone wanted to leave a mystery, and intentionally crashed in a place and way where it was incredibly unlikely that they would ever be found, and it turns out that only a communications handshake and some technical excellence led to it possibly being found.
It is terribly crass, especially when rumor and conjecture about the pilot's personal life (no newspaper of any repute has verified this) is used as a basis for these remarks.
This particular rumor is less vicious that the ones about him being a political fanatic, or a Muslim extremist, but no less sad a reflection of how far the press has fallen.
Given the facts of this case thus far, you might be overdoing it with the outrage. Of course details of the lives of the pilots are being poured over given that every indication includes one of their involvement.
Not outraged, just disappointed with the state of reporting. While I might not agree with your theory, I don't disagree with the need to pore over the crewmembers' backgrounds, or the plausibility of your overall point.
They didn't just get a lot of people to their page. They also got a large chunk of their visitors to pay them. The first part might not be sustainable - and it seems they weren't planning for it to be as this was a one time offer - but it definitely validated something, and also put them in touch with a lot of customers.
Astonishingly concise? SVG is based on XML, I don't think I've ever seen XML and 'astonishingly concise' in the same sentence before, congratulations for being the first. Besides, I've already pointed to another vector format that is far more concise, just by way of example. SVG is versatile, a jack of all trades if you will, but concise it is not.
>SVG is based on XML, I don't think I've ever seen XML and 'astonishingly concise' in the same sentence before, congratulations for being the first.
The rudiments of the vector description is extremely concise. That it is XML is superficially irrelevant, and if you really think the text markers are so important, consider it a highly compressible binary format via GZIP. Ultimately it doesn't matter.
I've never seen any metric that holds SWF as being more efficient than real-world SVG.
"this will strengthen the understanding that this type of stuff is exactly why you want strong unions"
Unions are fundamentally socialist. That isn't using socialism as a bad word, but as a factual description of the fundamental fairness and equality notions of union. In many situations it provides protection and balance between the employee and employer.
Does that really apply to highly paid employees who are actively recruited as standouts? The ones paid far above many of their peers because they're at the high end of the curve?
Unions are the antithesis of the solution. Indeed, the union approach would be the same problem (if not worse). There would be no standouts. No exemplary talents. Unions would mandate the specific lowest common denominator compensation and conditions.
Again, I see the value in some places, but it is woefully ill-suited for this situation.
Professional associations -- ala doctors and lawyers -- is more suitable for this field. Unions are not something most would benefit from.
That's not how M&P unions like the AMA and BMA work in practice your just repeating the union busters propaganda.
You negotiate the "rate for the job" if some one is good and need s more pay well promote them to a higher grade thats why you need to have a proper career track for all you staff.
That forces concepts which are nearly orthogonal in these types of companies (duties performed vs. value-added) to be artificially commingled.
While you could theoretically say that you can fix this by inventing enough job positions to be able to give the most-qualified the best wages, what really would end up happening is that you'd have a unique job position for every person (or in other words, exactly what you'd have without the union).
As a practical example, consider placing your union idea in the context of the NBA. "NBA Point Guard: Paid $11MM". But Michael Jordan was worth far more than $11MM to the Bulls, while even in 2014 Jose Calderon is not quite worth that much to the Mavericks.
So what do you do, split point guard up into "MJ-tier Point Guard: $33MM" and "not-quite-average Point Guard: $6.7MM"? Of course not; you negotiate with each player individually.
That is a straw man jobs in technology are not like professional sports or acting - having said that player unions and SAG/Equity do negotiate minimums so that not all the cash goes to the lucky few.
Piece of unsolicited advice - Stop declaring everything a strawman or propaganda. It does not strengthen your argument.
The situations we are talking about are actually more akin to professional athletes or sought after writers -- employers are actively seeking them out and recruiting them, at escalating wage levels, because they offer potential multiples of value to the company over "just any paper qualified candidate". Compare this to, for instance, auto-assembly or steel-working, where the difference in company value between resources is largely a wash.
We are specifically talking about the tech corridor right now. My home base is in the Toronto area but I seldom deal with Toronto area clients because the environment is dismal here: The pay is terrible, the product is terrible, and the mentality is of the "replaceable cog" variety, every project failing just enough until it's replaced by an innovative product made elsewhere. A union here might make sense because the situation already is pretty miserable. The same is true of the United Kingdom, to respond to another commentator. My comments about union specifically relate to the hyper-competitive, hyper-innovative and excellence seeking, silicon valley area.
I'm not "repeating" anyone's propaganda. I've worked in union situations before. I understand the ramifications of unions. As someone who tends to do quite well in this field, unions would be very deleterious for me personally: Unions are as much if not more about "equality" between union members, even where equality is measured by specious metrics (such as seniority), as it is about the employee/employer relationship.
The AMA is not a union by any traditional metric. It is a professional association. If a doctor is lured to a hospital for enormous sums of money, the AMA has absolutely no say over it. Nor do they dictate that another doctor has to be offered the job because they've been practicing for two months longer. Nor do they dictate that the doctor has to be paid for scale grade 7E because to do otherwise would cause resentment among other doctor's.
It would be great to have a professional association (presuming it didn't become too involved in its own enrichment). No thanks to unions.
The AMA is not a union by any traditional metric. It is a professional association. If a doctor is lured to a hospital for enormous sums of money, the AMA has absolutely no say over it. Nor do they dictate that another doctor has to be offered the job because they've been practicing for two months longer. Nor do they dictate that the doctor has to be paid for scale grade 7E because to do otherwise would cause resentment among other doctor's.
Nor does union have to do all that stuff. You're attacking a strawman.
But unions almost always concern themselves with such things. I may be attacking a "strawman" (ergo, how virtually every union on the planet operates), but humorously the salvation is just as much of a strawman, no?
Its how virtually all Unions don't operate - don't quote the propaganda leveled at craft unionism of the 1800's which has no bearing on real Unions of today.
I don't see any unions representing M&P grades negotiating these sorts of agreements as it woudl not be in the members best interest.
You know the entire uk telecoms infrastructure was revamped with zero fuss about new technology one of the main reasons was all the techies where union members.
And I know one ftse100 CEO was a union member and had been an activist and the CTO of one of the worlds largest phone manufacturers was a member of my branch.
as I said you just repeating folk propaganda based on stories about decades old "craft unions" which have nothing to do with how a union for developers/engineers woudl work
The argument is that an experience that Dustin Curtis liked better was a better experience. Maybe the victorious layout really was liked by more people, just as more people clearly like a 4" (or greater) smartphone screen than 3.5".