Comment Re:The real question... (Score 1) 217
Yes, but the value in sites like
Yes, but the value in sites like
I don't know where you come from, but the typical users I encounter manage to put all what you listed on their desktop.
They tend to absolutely resist to learn more then the minimal basics, no matter how easy or accessible you make the UI.
Guess it's the 7 things rule: people can remember about 7 things at once / put them in context. Everything else is logical abstraction and training, and most users are not capable of the first and very reluctant to the second.
Go do volunteer basic computer literacy session for your local senior center. Don't try to convert them to linux or get them using Firefox or anything dumb like that. Just ask what their problems are, and how you can help. You will quickly understand how broken and unintuitive computer software is.
Honestly, the only positive thing I see coming from this plugin is maybe this will wake Microsoft up and force them to focus on their Javascript performance in future browsers. IE8 is definetly better at rendering sites than it's predecessors. Now it just needs to have the script performance kicked into overdrive.
I don't think this will, but there's a much more compelling reason: Office Web Apps, which is mostly HTML/JS, with a few Silverlight bits (and even those have HTML/JS fallback). I've tried them now that they're in limited beta, and they work noticeably faster in Chrome and even Firefox than they do in IE8 - and Chrome/Firefox version isn't missing any features, either, so it's plainly better. I have no doubts that relevant teams in Microsoft are well aware of this, and understand how embarrassing it is, so I'd imagine there's a lot of pressure on IE team now to significantly improve performance - specially for JS - in the next release. Now that they have acceptable level of standard conformance (CSS 2.1 is finally fully supported, thank God), focusing on performance is the next logical step.
When you think high tech, well networked states, you don't tend to think of there.
You evidently don't know how big the Moon is, or how much momentum is in its orbit around the Earth. Indeed, the Moon doesn't quite orbit the Earth, but rather the Moon and the Earth orbit one another around a center quite a ways away from the Earth's center. Or you just don't know how much energy can be produced by a nuke plant - a very tiny amount compared to what's needed to push the Moon out of orbit into the Earth in any appreciable amount of time.
But if you want to keep carrying on about some fact free paranoia, that's your business. Lunacy, but your business.
There is a difference between observing users and listening to users. The way to do usability testing is to watch lots of users work with the product and pay attention to the most common problems they have, but not necessarily to listen to what they say. If they say "I don't understand feature X", then fine. If they say "You know what would make this better, you should add feature Y", then you should probably ignore them. Users know what they hate, and they sometimes know what they don't understand, but they hardly every know how to design good software.
TFA is absolutely correct that the developer should watch and stay quiet during the process. (If you've ever been a developer in this situation, you know how incredibly painful and incredibly useful it is.) But the goal of the testing process isn't for the user to give you solutions, it is for the user to shine a spotlight on the problems. Once the problems are clearly understood, the developers (and designers) have to go back to work to figure out solutions.
JAVA will be removed from the *NASDAQ-100 composite index*, but will continue to trade as normal until the company is actually acquired. This point was even mentioned in the press release, so extra points for getting it so (so!) basically wrong.
(Man,
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker