Day: February 27, 2012

Is this the beginning of the “Success by UX” era?

Is this the beginning of the “Success by UX” era?:

At first read I agreed with Cross completely, but you know, there’s still a lot of successful products out there that don’t provide a good user experience. Apple is successful by (mostly) providing very good UX and that’s certainly influencing the current generation of designers, but it’s not the only path to success—and there’s an awful lot of work influenced only by Apple’s superficial aesthetics.

[In the end… it’s not about aesthetics. It’s about making tasks easier to accomplish. And about understanding what people were trying to do when they did something and being smart about how you react to it. the aesthetics are the final piece to a very complicated and difficult puzzle. ]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Stop justifying your lack of ethics

Stop justifying your lack of ethics:

Matt and his moronic clique will never actually consider that hey, if we all publicly boycott shit, the people we dislike aren’t making money, and hey, we aren’t a pack of thieves. Because that dear reader, would inconvenience Matt, and lemme tell you about douchey little millenials like Matt: They won’t do shit that inconveniences them

[The whole piece is on point if, as usual, you have to wade through the invective.]

Source: bynkii.com

Edwin Black: IBM’s Role in the Holocaust — What the New Documents Reveal

Edwin Black: IBM’s Role in the Holocaust — What the New Documents Reveal:

Particularly powerful are the newly-released copies of the IBM concentration camp codes. IBM maintained a customer site, known as the Hollerith Department, in virtually every concentration camp to sort or process punch cards and track prisoners. The codes show IBM’s numerical designation for various camps. Auschwitz was 001, Buchenwald was 002; Dachau was 003, and so on. Various prisoner types were reduced to IBM numbers, with 3 signifying homosexual, 9 for anti-social, and 12 for Gypsy. The IBM number 8 designated a Jew. Inmate death was also reduced to an IBM digit: 3 represented death by natural causes, 4 by execution, 5 by suicide, and code 6 designated “special treatment” in gas chambers. IBM engineers had to create Hollerith codes to differentiate between a Jew who had been worked to death and one who had been gassed, then print the cards, configure the machines, train the staff, and continuously maintain the fragile systems every two weeks on site in the concentration camps.

Newly-released photographs show the Hollerith Bunker at Dachau. It housed at least two dozen machines, mainly controlled by the SS. The foreboding concrete Hollerith blockhouse, constructed of reinforced concrete and steel, was designed to withstand the most intense Allied aerial bombardment. Those familiar with Nazi bomb-proof shelters will recognize the advanced square-cornered pillbox design reserved for the Reich’s most precious buildings and operations. IBM equipment was among the Reich’s most important weapons, not only in its war against the Jews, but in its general military campaigns and control of railway traffic. Watson personally approved expenditures to add bomb shelters to DEHOMAG installations because the cost was born by the company. Such costs cut into IBM’s profit margin. Watson’s approval was required because he received a one-percent commission on all Nazi business profits.

[In an odd coincidence, I was discussing IBM’s role in the holocaust just this weekend. Thanks T., for the pointer to the article.]

Managing Node.js Dependencies with Shrinkwrap « node blog

Managing Node.js Dependencies with Shrinkwrap « node blog:

Put differently, it’s understood that all software changes incur some risk, and it’s critical to be able to manage this risk on your own terms. Taking that risk in development is good because by definition that’s when you’re incorporating and testing software changes. On the other hand, if you’re shipping production software, you probably don’t want to take this risk when cutting a release candidate (i.e. build time) or when you actually ship (i.e. deploy time) because you want to validate whatever you ship.

You can address a simple case of this problem by only depending on specific versions of packages, allowing no semver flexibility at all, but this falls apart when you depend on packages that don’t also adopt the same principle. Many of us at Joyent started wondering: can we generalize this approach?

Strobist: How to Avoid Dealing With the Police When Shooting in Public

Strobist: How to Avoid Dealing With the Police When Shooting in Public:

I know my rights. I carry The Card. But I also know that on the street, the police have the ability to wreck a shoot. This one was not time-sensitive, but many are. And even worse, they can write you up, take you in — and even put you on any of a number of secret lists in our new DHS Secret Police State.

I know this because a very good friend of mine asserted his rights to — get this — a rent-a-cop private security consultant while shooting a twilight shot of a hotel during a commercial job. He made the mistake of being near train tracks where, according to the private security guy, the Constitution was no longer in effect.

My friend won the argument, but lost the war. The security guard/terrorist detection specialist turned out to be a vindictive jerk. The photog is now on an “increased scrutiny list” that adds a long and special wait at TSA any time he flies.

That sucks. And it’s not right — or even legal. But that is the environment we are now in. Like it or not, we have to deal with ignorant bystanders and/or ultimately, uniformed police officers potentially screwing up our shoots. Or worse.

[What a mess. But not a bad plan.]