Real usability testing is not market research. It's measuring how well people did on tasks, not what they said they liked.

On the other hand, it's hard to blame TFA for their usability testing methods when Gnome, Unity, and KDE have done no usability testing at all. (And then tell their users that they're wrong for liking their old workflows...)

The Wii has a pretty good Netflix client/interface.

Had a pretty good Netflix interface. On my Wii, Netflix somehow silently upgraded itself about a month ago to a new version. The new version has no new features, but is significantly slower, less informative, and outright buggy.

Agile programming is not a lie. It works, and the company I work for has the customers, profits, and happy non-burnt-out engineers to prove it. But it's not easy to do right, and certainly isn't cheap if you're hiring the right people.

Head back to Wikipedia for a bit... Feynman was not talking about all of psychology, but mostly parapsychology. Reading minds, bending keys, that kind of thing. He was also speaking in a time where non-religious (or loosely religious) mysticism was fairly common and even mainstream compared to today. Psychology is a much different field nowadays than it was almost 40 years ago.

Psychology isn't a science. It's a pseudoscience.

Hey, there's a scientologist in our midst!

So if psychology isn't a science, then classical conditioning doesn't exist, despite the huge volume of evidence that says it does? There's no value in trying to understand how human reasoning and memory works? We can't learn anything at all about how brain damage causes changes in day-to-day behavior?

Fact: Anything researched and studied according to the scientific method is science. That there are some researchers who draw conclusions without appropriate methods or sufficient evidence, or that some areas are difficult to conclusively test does not cast the entire profession as pseudoscience.

Of course not! It would be illegal to force people to work without pay.

In some (most?) states, you may be asked to work beyond your normal work day if you are a salary employee and they are not legally required to pay you overtime. Either that, or I've worked for a couple of very illegal companies over the last few years.

I worked in the IT department of a large financial firm a couple years ago where we had a rotating week-long on-call schedule. You worked your normal 8-hour day and then there was about a 50/50 chance that you'd get called in in the middle of the night to fix something that someone messed up during the day. And there was the 3 a.m. maintenance window on the weekend. Throw in a couple of all-nighters for equipment moves and disaster recovery tests every couple of months for good measure.

We didn't get paid overtime for any of this. Or extra time off. The department manager's position was that our salary was already calculated to include compensation for after-hours work and that there would be no "free rides" for something that we knew was part of our job.

I worked there for less than a year.

Age of conan, 33 GB. LA Noire13 GB. Mortal Online, 30 GB.

That is stuff ordinary people do

Take it from me, PC gamers are not ordinary people.

Let's face it, the slashdot moderation system has been broken for a long time.

How can you know that, having a 2.5M uid?

Slashdot's moderation system, although hardly perfect, is still about a thousand times better than the trollfests that pass for commentary systems on 99% of the websites that allow visitor contributions.

I have to wonder, however, if the folks doing the market research realize just how adverse Dr Who fans will be to a big budget movie. One of the appeals of Dr Who is the low production value of it,

I don't have any numbers handy, but it always looked to me like the newer Dr Who shows had amazing production value. Most two-part episodes looked to me like they could have had the budget of a full-fledged Hollywood flick. The special effects are pretty spot-on. The sets are huge, detailed, and plentiful. Yes, you can sometimes notice when a set or prop has been repainted for a different episode. (I particularly liked being able to recognize when the same neighborhood street was used for two different episodes in the same season.) They could do with more extras in some scenes, that's pretty much the extent of my complaints.

Now contrast with the average American prime-time drama where the bulk of their 43 minutes is pretty much summed up by inane banter that bounces back and forth between 5 or 6 sets maximum.

But honestly, if it were a Dr Who movie, I could care less about the production values. I just want an entertaining Doctor and a really good science-fiction story. They achieve that, and I'll be happy.

I double my productivity by meeting people and sleeping with them at the same time

How many people here know the $5 debit card fee is a direct response to Congress stupidly passing a law that targeted only very large banks like BofA forcing them to cap how much they could charge as a processing fee to retailers.

Oh man, I hear you. Those poor big banks, right? The ones that get to gamble with the economy, get bailed out by taxpayers, and continue to post record annual bonuses to their executives. Retail stores, restaurants, and gas stations all around the country sure have those big banks bent over the counter now!

The problem of security is slightly improved, if you run each thing on separate virtual machines on the same hardware. You should in theory get relatively fast interconnects. If you VM is any good, that is. But you're still losing efficiency, unless you're doing "zones" or something like that.
And it's 3x the headache to manage 3 separate instances of OSs, for what is in effect just one top level system anyway.

Well, nobody (or at least, nobody sane) does it like that. There is no non-trivial datacenter that virtualizes the different components of their server stack on the same physical machine just because they think it's going to buy them any extra security. They're going to have a web server farm over here, some application server blades over there, a database cluster on the other side of the room, and perhaps a row dedicated to SAN, document storage, backups, and so on.

Virtualization is more typically used as key part of a larger system to rapidly deploy new hosts on demand and take better advantage of the incredible power of today's hardware by partitioning it down into smaller chunks. The only time "security" enters into it is the fact that you always separate hosts based what they do and who should have access to them, which you would do with physical machines anyway.

Why, at a technical level, is this so bad?

It plainly shows where Apple is going with Mac OS X, and that is to a much more controlled environment where end-users can only install Apple-approved software on their own machines. It makes sense that this would happen after Lion introduced a lot more iOS-like features to OS X. All those pundits who said the merging of iOS and OS X would never happen, guess what? It's happening now.

"But," you protest, "this doesn't stop you from downloading and installing applications from the web!" And you're right, it doesn't now. But that won't be true in the future, otherwise there would be ZERO point to sandbox only Mac App Store applications.

If in five years, if Apple does not have a MacBook or iMac (or future equivalent) that requires jailbreaking for the user to have total control of their own machine, I'll eat my hat.

Really, Fedora? I used to like Fedora because they weren't afraid to ship current versions of software and always tried to new newer, better ways to build a Unix-like OS. I liked how the Fedora community was organized and how the package management system worked. I liked Ubuntu because it took a solid, sane Linux distribution (Debian) and made it into a user-friendly, everything-just-works OS that practically anyone could use.

But now I'm starting to believe that all of the mainstream Linux distros have lost their fucking marbles. Between adding more and more layers of pointless abstraction, the KDE4/Unity/Gnome 3 bullshit and this, I don't know what to think anymore. It's like they've all totally given up on improving a good thing and are now changing shit just to change it. Did the Linux world somehow absorb a massive influx of middle-managers and HR drones when I wasn't looking?

Christ, it's enough to make me switch to BSD and start drinking.

There's probably nothing you can do. You don't say what the project is about, or what you might possibly need support for, so I'm forced to assume that you're going to be running CentOS/RHEL in a common configuration on commercial-grade hardware. And if that's true, then your boss is right.

But more importantly, recognize this: the CIO is your boss. He made a decision, you questioned it, he reaffirmed his position, end of story. You deploy CentOS. If or when you need support for the OS (and not the application you're paying for), the blame will have to come back to him since it was his decision. And unless you weren't smart enough to get it in email, there's a paper trail too.

Now make way for the comments from other bitter Slashdotters who will tell me I'm wrong because they've allowed themselves to be scapegoats for their bosses' inept decisions.