Archive for April, 2008
Haha - love it. Seriously though - Facebook valued at $15 billion and people claiming there isn’t a tech bubble? The job market has gone nuts with designer and developers over the past few years and now the only candidates we get want North of $100k with less than a years experience “reskinning wordpress”. I was the *only* web developer when my IT crowd went into tertiary education; and now next to all of them after finishing their Computer Science degrees are switching across to web dev as it’s where the money is.
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So I just finished watching the second season of “Jericho” today - a fantastic (at least in my opinion :p ) series surrounding a small town in the US of A (or is that AS of A? - Subtle reference to season two 
) post a nation-wide nuclear attack on various US cities. It is a witty post-apocalyptic drama which explores some very interesting concepts and philosophies in a post terrorism world; and it’s setting (small town called Jericho) brings an emotional warmth to the series without sacrificing its provocative and challenging ideas and situations.
For those of you who aren’t aware of Jericho’s history, it was originally cancelled by its network in the US (CBS) at the end of its first season due to poor Nielsen ratings (More on those later). By that stage the series had picked up a significant fan base which didn’t appreciate the sentiment. In the final episode of Season One in a very dramatic scene one of the characters responds to another town that has declared war on Jericho “Nuts to you”. So what did the fans do in response to its cancellation?
They rallied together and sent more than TWENTY TONNES of unshelled peanuts to the CBS head office. See the video below for day three of the deliveries:
Seems to be a lot of hype in the media lately re the collapse of Microsoft Windows to its “foe” Apple MacOSX. Apparently Vista has been a complete failure.
Wow…. If Vista is a complete failure - with triple the market share of OSX - what exactly does that make Apples flagship product?
Seriously though - I hate big evil money grubbing corporations as much as the next guy. Problem is - the company many of you have chosen to rally behind under this banner is no better (and in many respects a lot worse). That’s not to say Apple is rubbish compared to Microsoft - but at least get the facts straight if you’re going to try sell me on them being such a better company than MS.
The funniest thing about it is that despite not being a fan of either platform - I manage to see the actual advantages Macs have over Windows boxes; they are nice to look at and you get to belong to a clique - somewhat akin to the alienware gear in the “PC” world (although you do know that Mac’s are “Personal Computers” right? And you also know that the reason windows can now run on them is because they are identical in hardware?). That doesn’t mean I don’t think Macs should exist - far from. I think there are lots of niche markets for various platforms and that for anything in life there is no single solution to rule them all. But - you mac people need to stop feeling so insecure about the rest of the world not using Macs. Enjoy your niche clique for what it is and stop feeling you need Windows to collapse to prove that you were right all along.
Frankly I have no idea what the future holds for the windows platform - Linux is coming in leaps and bounds towards being a solid all-round platform and who knows if the king will finally be knocked off its high horse. I do promise however that if any operating system manages to take that crown - it wont be MacOSX. Why would people replace one “evil” organisation for another? And whether you like it or not price vs performance will always be a key factor for majority market share - something that Apple’s core philosophy is against competing in. Apple is reaching market saturation of its niches - a fear that most investors of APPL stock have started sharing over the past 4-5 months.
At least the Linux crowd aren’t hypocrites.
Fantastic article that Charl sent through to me today that ALL web designers and developers should read so they get an informed idea of both how the industry works and the reasoning behind the decisions from the web giants - Martian Headsets - Joel On Software.
Quote the article:
The consumer is not an idiot. She’s your wife. So stop laughing. 98% of the world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.” They don’t give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic “standard” that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don’t want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.
So you see, we have a terrific example here of a gigantic rift between two camps.The web standards camp seems kind of Trotskyist. You’d think they’re the left wing, but if you happened to make a website that claims to conform to web standards but doesn’t, the idealists turn into Joe Arpaio, America’s Toughest Sheriff. “YOU MADE A MISTAKE AND YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BREAK. I don’t care if 80% of your websites stop working. I’ll put you all in jail, where you will wear pink pajamas and eat 15 cent sandwiches and work on a chain gang. And I don’t care if the whole county is in jail. The law is the law.”
On the other hand, we have the pragmatic, touchy feely, warm and fuzzy engineering types. “Can’t we just default to IE7 mode? One line of code … Zip! Solved!”
Without the standards Nazis the web would still be as it was in the 90s - but they also need to understand that the web for the most part is by the people for the people and nobody will get any traction with breaking the web for the sake of “cleaning it up”. *IF* the browsers decided to be strict with standards by default - all that would happen is the average user would download the new browser, test their favourite sites, see it all broken - and BLAME THE BROWSER; not the site - for the resulting ugliness. At which point they would revert to their old browser and the standardists would be back to square one.
The only way to approach this from both sides is transitionally. Provide a token for standardists who want full features to enable them for their sites and default to non-standards for all other sites. Whilst standardists might not like this approach - it will give them the full featureset without breaking the web; and they will find that EVENTUALLY more and more developers and designers will get sick of not working with standards and create all new sites with this standards friendly approach. Once the overwhelming majority of sites (at least all the popular ones) have been written this way the default behavior can be at this point switched without the average joe wondering why the majority of sites they visit on a day to day basis all of a sudden dont work with the new browser.