langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2002-04-17

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Mittwoch, 17. April 2002

"[T]he Oracle contract calls for 270,000 software licenses and maintenance agreements -- more than the number of state workers. Many state workers, such as prison guards, have no need for database software, which manages and updates stored information." — I'm sure they could use some additional licenses to keep track of their existing ones ...

2002-04-17-overdimOra

David Ness: "[create Personal Information Manager]s — PIMs — have been around for a long time. They seem to be re-invented with every generation of computation. And, somehow, they just don't seem to catch on as we'd expect them to. So they die, only to be reborn in another cycle, often by people who don't apparently know much about the earlier history." — to be read in the formidable Piled Higher and Deeper.

2002-04-17-outLookOutLook

"News from our friends at the NEC Research Institute: Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web" — "Research has shown that the distribution of links to all sites on the web approximates a "power law", that is, a small number of sites receive the majority of links and most sites receive very few links."

modelingtheweb.com

modelingtheweb.com/modelingtheweb.pdf

2002-04-17-!winnerTakesAll

Go and read this John Weir interview. [ Ø MLAKE • ]

2002-04-17-jWeir

"Fifty years ago, data management was simple. Data processing meant running millions of punched cards through banks of sorting, collating and tabulating machines, with the results being printed on paper or punched onto still more cards. And data management meant physically storing and hauling around all those punched cards." — A weird kind of "simple".

2002-04-17-dmgmt

David Ness 8255 days AGO
The Weir piece is interesting to me. First, I am curious about what makes the IHT site `formidable'. I guess it looks just fine to my eye, but nothing special---I wouldn't particularly notice it as different from other news sites. Is is performance or look that you are commenting on?

Second, I went to Wier's site and found that most of the examples didn't work with most of my browers. Some of the things he did as demos completely failed to work in my Opera, but some even had difficulty in IE. It's not that I _blame_ Weir for this, BTW, but rather it just makes me wonder if (as Gertrude Stein said) `there's any _there_ there' with clever stuff that ends up not working well across all of the browsing technologies that might be used to browse it.

I mean, maybe `simpler is just better'.

gavin 8255 days AGO
I was initially drawn to IHT (and Weir) because of the interesting dynamic presentation and useful Clippings tool. Most news sites have to offer the same old boring works-everywhere column layout. IHT stands out because they offer some options that work pretty reliably and predictably. Looks great too.

Perhaps the "formidable" lives in the heavy reliance on client-side javascript processing. Complete stories are downloaded and manipulated by client-side javascript, the multi-column vs single column presentations which still know how to "go to next page" by clicking anywhere on the story. The Clippings are more client-side javascript. Perhaps "formidable" also means "won't work for many people." Frankly I didn't give much credence to javascript for anything more than boring rollovers before learning about IHT and Weir.

But yes, in general I agree, "simpler is just better."

funzel 8255 days AGO
So I'm reading the (excellent again) article from david. I was thinking about PIMs too. What would be nice when you could add an ICQ account to Outlook/.... and whenever you change some of your private data, it is send to all interested people via ICQ. Then their PIM is updated. And using ICQ (or whatever) the data on PDAs with ICQ could be changed too.

funzel 8255 days AGO
Oh, and Lemmings don't do collective suicide, this was staged by disney and is a myth ;-) www.snopes2.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm

andi 8255 days AGO
If all browsers on earth would be formidable, IHT would also be...
what i like most about the site is the way you can read the content. it simply lets me read in a more relaxed way.
i hate to have to scroll in any direction.

chris 8255 days AGO
I just happen to like the look and feel (including what I'd like to classify as "attention to details" — which might indeed by regarded as "attention to unnecessary annoyances" by users of unsupported browsers, and others, that being largely a matter of taste).

David Ness 8255 days AGO
Your comments are, collectively, very helpful to me. Because of them I see two immediate tasks: (1) I will start regularly scanning the IHT site to get a feel for what you are talking about; and (2) I will go back into my paper to make clear that it is the behavior of the lemming in the `myth' that I am interested in, _not_ the actual behavior of Lemmings.

Thanks both for the reading and taking the trouble to comment.

funzel 8254 days AGO
I think you're interested in the lemming meme.

David Ness 8254 days AGO
I have been looking for a good example of the difference between a `meme' and and an `idea', so Funzel's suggestion is a particularly nice one---not only does it help with the paper, it helps me understand the concept of `meme' better.

Paul McJones 8253 days AGO
For more on the origins of data management systems including System R, DB2, Ingres, and Oracle, see www.mcjones.org/System_R/ .

chris 8253 days AGO
Paul, thank you very much for that pointer! Indeed, I find all of mcjones.org very interesting.

One Vanilla-related suggestion: If you want to create links, just enclose the URL in stars, e.g. *http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/* will result in www.mcjones.org/System_R/ then.

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