Dilbert Goes Flash, Readers Revolt 486
spagiola writes "The Dilbert.com website just got an extreme makeover. Gone is the old, rather clunky but perfectly functional, website, replaced by a Flash-heavy website that only Mordac the Preventer of Information Services could love. Users have been pretty unanimous in condemning the changes. Among the politer comments: 'Congrats. Vista is no more lonely at the top in the Competition For The Worst Upgrade In Computing Industry, this web site upgrade being a serious contender.' You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design."
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:uhhh hello... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm truly shocked by your scientific acumen.
The Climate Crisis is not that the environment is changing. It's that it's changing far, far too fast.
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Re:uhhh hello... (Score:4, Informative)
Uhm, wrong way around. It uses about ten times as much energy during its life-time than by manufacturing...
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One of those things is not like the others (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fallacy alert (Score:4, Informative)
Just because the earth warms and cools naturally doesn't mean that human beings can't frig with the same mechanisms, and make it warm unnaturally.
The global cooling scare of the 70s was based on a few concerned scientific papers, and a lot of imaginative reporting. The press knows a good story when they see one. There was no scientific agreement on the issue - just a few papers.
The evidence for anthropogenic warming is there for anybody to look up. I spent some time trying to find the basis for the claims on "skeptic" websites. I have not found a single sound skeptic website, which actually backs its claims up, and is not full of sh1t.
Furthermore, key websites on the skeptic side of things, are run by industry lobbyists and shills who were involved in the tobacco industry mis-information campaign.
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Re:One of those things is not like the others (Score:4, Insightful)
There is debate on the exact amount attributable to humans, and that is all.
Sound science it is. Statistics are the basis of sound science, and if you think no fact can be construed from statistics, than pretty much all science is bunk.
Why is it experiments are repeated, do you think? for the fun of it? Why are papers littered with p-values and "statistically significant" and error bars and so on and so forth?
Hint: statistics are not a magical way of fudging data. On the contrary.
Re:One of those things is not like the others (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.mruzik.com/CO2.html
There is a study for you that contridicts the CO2 theory.
Yeah, right. It's a pile of misleading statements to fool people who don't know any of the science. I think it's quite telling that you choose to cite a self-published web page which spends half its time deriding "left wing wackos", instead of citing any scientific studies. It's quite plain that your agenda is political in nature, not honest scientific skepticism.
Water vapor amplifies existing warming trends, but it cannot cause them; it is a feedback, not a forcing. You can't increase the average water vapor content of the atmosphere without first raising its temperature — otherwise, any excess water vapor would quickly precipitate back out. That's why you need forcings like long-lived greenhouse gases, solar irradiance, etc.
It's true that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere has less of an effect the more you add, because the adsorption bands start to saturate. This gives rise to the well known logarithmic relationship (Beer-Lambert law) between CO2 concentration and its radiative forcing. But it is nowhere near full saturation, which is why the curve is logarithmic rather than asymptotically constant. This is verified in laboratory experiments, in line-by-line radiative transfer codes, and IIRC in satellite observations of the atmosphere.
It is simply ridiculous to claim that CO2 causes cooling; it is at odds with both theory and observation. CO2 and warming exist in a feedback system: external influences (such as the orbital variations which set the timing for the ice age cycle) cause warming (or cooling), and CO2 amplifies that warming or cooling: warming brings more CO2 out of the oceans which leads to more warming; cooling has the opposite effect.
It is indeed quite possible that clouds contribute a negative feedback (cooling effect) in response to global warming, but that has nothing to do with the warming which is due to CO2. It just means that clouds may slow the warming beyond CO2's effect alone. There are a number of such feedbacks, both positive and negative. (Water vapor has already been mentioned as a positive feedback.) The instrumental temperature record indicates that the net feedback is significantly positive.
Let me know if you want any citations to journal articles regarding these topics. You can start with the latest IPCC report, Working Group 1.
A fact is that there is no sound scientific data that climate change and CO2 correlate.
The very web page you cite notes the strong correlation between climate change and CO2 in the ice core record. (It goes on to claim, incorrectly, that the causation is backwards, but it admits the correlation.)
Indeed, all the studies are either inconclusive or say the opposite.
Oh really? What "studies" are those? Certainly none of the ones documented here [ucar.edu].
Studies of icecaps indicate that before every iceage the earth's CO2 levels were much higher then at any time...
As I said, this doesn't mean that CO2 causes ice age. CO2 helps to warm out of ice ages, finishing what orbital variations and other climate forcings started. You can't get the large amount of warming observed in the ice age cycle if you ignore the greenhouse effect of the excess CO2. Eventually, the orbital cycle shifts into a phase of declining solar irradiance (well, it's more complicated than that; where the sunlight is concentrated and the extremes of variations contribute at least as much as the raw insolation itself), which causes temperatures to drop. A few centuries to a millennium after that, the CO2 starts dropping too, which hastens the cooling.
How many examples must I give you about statistics and how they can be misused before you will see the light?
Whee, statistics can be misused. So can mathematics, experiments, observations, and t
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Sounds scientific basis is not what global warming has...what it has is computer modeling that supports a theory that its possible that man-kind will increase the temperature of the earth by CO2 emissions.
I love it how people toss out the phrase "computer modeling" as if that somehow makes the science uncertain.
No, global warming is based on fundamental and uncontroversial physical facts concerning the adsorption spectra of atmospheric constituents such as carbon dioxide. These facts were known long before computers as we know them even existed.
When you perform data mining on large amounts of data,
The evidence for global warming is not based on "data mining large amounts of data", it is based on trends in the observed climate, and the physics which predicts
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Since we changed the interface our website has become 1051% more popular. It's sticking.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Only Scott Adams could come up with such a great parody. That's one way to get your cartoon talked about - screw it up in a way that only a PHB would love. Get on the front page of Slashdot. Energize your audience!
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As far as I am concerned this simply takes Dilbert off my morning coffee list where it has been for 10+ years. The new webshite does not work in konqueror and does not work in firefox. In both cases the idiot who wrote it misdetects them as not having flash.
Actually, much of it is accessable. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Actually, much of it is accessable. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Actually, much of it is accessable. (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks for pointing this out, I had just removed my cronjob to fetch-dilbert-and-set-as-wallpaper-script, probably need to rewrite it tough.
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Nothing stopped me from accessing the site in windows or in penguin mode. But then I stopped thinking Dilbert was funny a 100 years ago.
Re:Actually, much of it is accessable. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Actually, much of it is accessable. (Score:5, Informative)
I thought the old site was dated but after just glancing at the new one, I definitly want the old back.
No I'm not time wasting, it takes Outlook and Eclipse about a minute+ to load, more than enough time to pop open an IE tab and glance at Dilbert.
Re:Actually, much of it is accessable. (Score:5, Informative)
I thought the old site was dated but after just glancing at the new one, I definitly want the old back.
No I'm not time wasting, it takes Outlook and Eclipse about a minute+ to load, more than enough time to pop open an IE tab and glance at Dilbert.
Here ya go. It's SYNDICATED, people. That means, dilbert.com isn't the only place to get it. Woo~.
Re:Actually, much of it is accessable. (Score:5, Informative)
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Where I work flash is blocked from installing
Solution: Buy a USB flash drive, install Firefox Portable from portableapps.com, and install flash into that browser. Works wonders for libraries, work, etc. and it technically doesn't break any rules (depending on how draconian your IT dept. wants to be). It's also great for privacy by keeping your browser cache/history sandboxed to the USB stick. I never leave home without mine.
Granted, flash SUCKS when it is used for anything where it is unnecessary such as freaking DILBERT. But it's still nice to
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I think the PHBs suspected the Dilbert site was a security breach because all of their latest and greatest ideas showed up in Dilbert.
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And frankly, what with all the annoying blinking animated ads on the new page, viewing this without flash is definitely the better way.
Re:Actually, much of it is accessable. (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.comics.com/comics/dilbert/archive/index.html [comics.com]
Excuse me while I emerge myself in the synergistic experience of the new flash interface, and step into the 21st (maybe even 22nd) century, while leaving you the prisoners of the old web 1.0
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It's funny, but it's not worth it. He also has an irrational love of Microsoft at times, such as when he thought that Bill Gates would make a good president.
Because, you know, it's not like the rest of the world minds having the USA push them around. And it's not like Bill is known for being good at that kind of business, or anything like that...
Suffice it to say, I didn't feel like it was worth the bother to continue reading it.
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Not worth it....
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Did it get reverted back or something?
I don't understand the outrage. For comparison, this [jlarocco.com] is what it looks like for me.
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Can't leave well enough alone (Score:5, Insightful)
My award for "sticking with what works" goes to craigslist.org.
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Re:Can't leave well enough alone (Score:4, Insightful)
Wisdom is knowing when to rip out the kludge, and knowing when it isn't really a kludge and to leave it the #$@# alone.
Re:Can't leave well enough alone (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can't leave well enough alone (Score:4, Insightful)
Designing something is deceptively simple. Maybe it is simple, and that's what makes it hard. It's easy to do something bad, and hard to recognize something bad when it comes out of your self.
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Hey, don't lump all web designers together. At our studio our focus is on standards-based design - valid XHTML combined with CSS for design and unobtrusive JavaScript (via jQuery) for behavior. We avoid Flash at all costs, not because we can't use it, but because it's non-standard and almost everything people use Flash for can be done using XHTML +
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Re:Can't leave well enough alone (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can't leave well enough alone (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can't leave well enough alone (Score:4, Funny)
Great Grandparent: How can I get the old Slashdot back?
Grandparent: Disable Javascript. All the old behaviour comes back.
Parent AC: Somehow your attempt to be helpful is "blatently obvious" and irrelevant.
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New PHB managers always want to "make their mark" by making changes. I'll bet that's what is going on. The act of changing stuff is more important to them than the merit of it. It's like a wolf pissing on a log to mark its territory. We're seeing e-piss here.
Dilbert stopped being funny a decade ago (Score:3, Insightful)
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No, you're not.
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I was curious to see what he thought of Dilbert and ran into this post concerning comic strips that have outlived their day (yes, Dilbert is one of them): http://joshreads.com/?p=924 [joshreads.com].
The best paragraph was describing For Better or Worse: "Trapped between a huge, dim, slav
repeat old stuff for a new generation (Score:5, Insightful)
That's OK, it's just a genreational change.
Each generation is arrogant enough to ignore the collected wisdom of what's gone before, so it makes the same old mistakes. Hence Dilbert is just as popular with the new "breed" of readers as it was with the last lot. The reason is they get just as frustrated with the same bosses making the same mistakes as their forebears. No doubt in 100 years time, people will still be grousing about the incompetence of their superiors and Scott Adams, or his grandchildren, will still be making money out of it.
In a lot of places, it didn't change (Score:5, Interesting)
As a consultant, I can tell you that some of the projects I'm dragged into, the things I see, and the things I piece together, often make Dilbert look tame. At any rate, I see everything from Dilbert:
- Wally clones? Check. Armies of them.
One managed to work for 3 years to make a trivial module, that later someone else rewrote in 6 hours from scratch. The rewrite was also 40 times faster, when benchmarked on a large-ish data set. And that's just one of them. He also heavily obfuscated his code, with over half the techniques from "How To Write Unmaintainable Code." (If you can believe that variable names like Pete, Eve and Steve are anything else, I have a bridge in Sahara to sell. And that's just one of the dozens of sins of that code.)
I've also seen people whose day consists at least half, of doing the grand tour of all floors where they know someone, to find people to talk to. Probably the saddest case was one whose morning, from 9 to 12 consisted of making a list of what pizza each team member wants to order for noon. Now you're probably going, "wtf, that doesn't take 3 hours even for 100 people." Well, let me explain: not just going around and quickly noting what they want. He went and started a whole debate on the pros and contras of ordering a Calzone, or maybe a Quatro Stagioni this time. And, hey, did you see that today they have a special price for Pizza Margarita? With each and every person individually.
- Evil secretaries? Check. E.g., in one project they lost their best programmer, a contractor, when the secretary at the company that supplied him, cancelled his medical insurance just before his wife went into labour. Apparently, for no reason whatsoever, she just called the insurance company and said that he's getting a private insurance somewhere else. The guy understandably went "fuck you very much" and quit.
From what I hear, it was also quite the uphill battle to get her to do anything, including actually get the overtime paid that the client had already paid for.
Last I've heard, she got a promotion.
- Mordac The Preventer Of IT Services? Check. At times it feels like one in 3 guys in IT make it their goal in life to prevent everyone else from getting their job done.
A particular one, well, wasn't even consistent about what he wanted, except that it's the opposite of what you want. To one team and project it was "you're not getting queues unless they're all on the same queue manager", to another one in the same time interval it was "you're not getting queues unless they're on different queue managers". To one it was "you're not getting anything if you work with message timeouts, because it defeats the whole idea behind reliable messaging!", while to another one it was "you're not getting queues from me unless you set timeouts on the messages! I don't want you to fill the whole partition with old messages!" Etc.
One DBA argued that it's not his job to tune the production database.
And it doesn't seem to be entirely unheard of, that some company's internal IT department sets such outrageous prices for any service, that it would be cheaper to burn a large file on a CD and send it by _taxi_ to the other end of the country, than to use their network and their servers. In one place management was actually proud that their IT department is the most productive department in the company and makes the biggest profits. As if that's something positive, and not an undue burden on the other departments.
- Incompetent managers and incompetent management decisions? Oooer. I could fill a tome with those alone. But let's just say: some managers were keeping the above parasites employed. It's not even the biggest management sin I've seen, but it's enough to make me wonder, you know?
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically I'm talking a guess that all that changed there is that you got a new job sometime in the 90's, where that doesn't happen any more.
Eve and Goatse (Score:3, Funny)
I don't know of any protocol described with the participants being called Pete, Eve and Steve.
Eve == eavesdropper. I haven't read the entire book, so I just made an ass^W educated guess based on the presence of Eve.
Plus, what's wrong with calling them, say, "sender" and "receiver"?
Because you never know when your code might be reviewed by someone wiht Goatse on the brain. If you're at work, don't look at the giver [goatse.cz] and especially the receiver [goatse.cz].
Re:Eve and Goatse (Score:4, Funny)
Plus, heck, the guy was at _this_ competence level:
He wrote a method And called it like this: And was genuinely surprised that it still prints "test". He debugged that for a couple of days and tried a few... innovative variations, before coming over and asking.
Another incident involving him, was his going, "Arrgh! Java's Hashtable is broken! I added a new value with a different key and it replaced the old one!" I go over and look, he's looking at the bucket array of the Hashtable with the debugger. "Look," he goes, "my old value was here, and now it's the other value."
"Ah, we had that bug too in a program at the previous company I worked for!" chimes in Wally #2 from the next desk. "We had to manually set the capacity to avoid it!"
I try hard not to scream.
"Ok," I say, "expand that 'next' element please. I want to see what's in it."
"Oh... there it is..." goes Wally.
"Well, set the capacity anyway," Wally #2 doesn't give up, "at the old company it really replaced the old value."
What had happened? Ok, you know already, but for the benefit of other Wallies reading this: it's a linked list. The new element with a different key didn't replace the old one, it was simply added to the front of the list for that bucket.
(And if you think that's bad, another team actually went and implemented a new key class with a surrealistically-inefficient custom hashCode(), to avoid the same "bug in Java." They went and changed the whole program, from one end to another, with that stupidity. Kinda funny because it was provable that it didn't really "solve" anything. There's mathematically no way to hash a long string into a 32 bit number, and then pack it into only 31 buckets or whatever, without the possibility of collisions.)
Anyway, I'm just saying, don't think that that guy was some crypto-guru who had memorized all the little sketches with Alice and Bob. He didn't know how calling by value works, nor what a linked list is, so advanced stuff like crypto was sadly way out of his grasp anyway.
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If only they fixed the bug that happens when you moderate, then you try to comment, the dialog warns you that the moderation you did it will be undone and you can't get out of there....
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No Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's what I sent them earlier on when discovering that part of the site even does not support Linux:
And that's just one of my gripes. The new UI is clunky; the site is slow; ...
Re:No Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
No previous or next button on any of the pages...
BRILLIANT!
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What still sucks is the browsing the strips, why not just add previous/next/random in? Dilberts website sucked before too, don't forget that.
If you want something good, check out xkcd.com, the only thing I miss being better there is the archives.
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Re:No Linux? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, a good, unintended slashdotting ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Admittedly when it replaces an image it's not too much bigger, but when it's all over the site like it is there, I can almost guarantee the footprint of the site is much larger than it was previously.
Damn I'm good (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a freaking static cartoon! What possible asinine reason could there be to screw up such a simple concept? I saw this the other day and so, like Doonesbury, won't be visiting it any more due to their use of Flash.
Re:Damn I'm good (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a freaking static cartoon! What possible asinine reason could there be to screw up such a simple concept? I saw this the other day and so, like Doonesbury, won't be visiting it any more due to their use of Flash.
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We should use that to make a cute cartoon about how much it sucks.
What flash? (Score:2)
Probably a Consultant (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't these PHB clowns realize that it's content that draws people to a site, and excessive bandwidth, insecure plug-ins required, inane registration requirements, and slow downloads that drive them away again.
Scott Adam's personal e-mail address is well-known (remember to put 'Dilbert' in the subject line to slip past his spam filter). One can still complain to him directly.
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Don't these PHB clowns realize that it's content that draws people to a site, and excessive bandwidth, insecure plug-ins required, inane registration requirements, and slow downloads that drive them away again.
Oh, jeez, get over yourself.
New content? That's exactly what they are providing. Most of the changes implement rich media (mainly animated cartoons) and user mashups. The results are pretty lame (corny voice acting and user-written punchlines are not my cup of tea), but it is new content. And it probably will grab a few new users from the Garfield crowd.
Excessive bandwidth? They're not doing HD video, they're just doing a few simple flash applications. It's 2008, for crisakes. Next you'll be complaining th
non flash dilbert (Score:5, Informative)
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Ouch (Score:2)
Re:Ouch (Score:4, Insightful)
at least they didn't use silverlight? (Score:2)
Thanks, Microsoft?
...intellectual property on the web (Score:2)
So I guess they don't want people e-mailing the current strip around at work anymore, if it is relevant to a manager or situation on the team. And they don't want people saving one out as desktop background, or keeping a copy of their favourite ones.
Re:...intellectual property on the web (Score:4, Informative)
It would've been easier to just leave it a gif as before.
Now I have to change my script (Score:2)
It's call irony (Score:2)
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At Least it's not Silverlight (Score:5, Funny)
Come over to the dark side (Score:5, Insightful)
SO, this website redesign proves that Dilbert has become the PHB. A design not help the customers or users, but to help the bottom line. How does it hep. Well, for one, it put Dilbert on the front page of /. after I don't know how long. It is an marketing gimmick, nothing more. Dilbert is irrelevant, and when one is irrelevent, there is little else to do but employ gimmicks. OTOH, I am sure it will work. Admas will sell some of his collected blog entries, people will reminisce about the good old days, and many will complain simply because they cannot understand that a business must generate a good profit.
In future news... (Score:4, Funny)
Double standard... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't use JavaScript, problem solved (Score:5, Informative)
Allow JavaScript to run and the whole thing blows up in your face and splatters flash everywhere.
Official RSS Feed (Score:5, Informative)
probably about linking and stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Shoulda Used Quicksilver (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Shoulda Used Quicksilver (Score:4, Informative)
Yeesh. And here I thought Slashdot had at least SOME comic book fans.
Flash [wikipedia.org]
Quicksilver [wikipedia.org]
It's a play on words around the whole "flash vs silverlight" thing, but apparently the mods here just figured someone was making a Microsoft joke or something.
Site works in Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
On a side note, this is what is extremely frustrating about this really, the fact that they didn't limit it to Windows and Mac because of technical reasons, they ARTIFICIALLY limited it. This is actually worse in my opinion.
Less Sucktastic Page (Score:5, Informative)
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Welcome to year 2000.
Those of us with more modern widescreen monitors prefer content that doesn't require a 1600 pixel wide screen. Because we like to multi-task and have multiple windows open without one crowding the screen. There are very few applications that I run full-screen, especially browsers or other text display programs. The text lines g
Re:What a bunch of grumpy old cave trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not that we hate new technology. Its more that we hate when simple technology that is accepted as a standard is replaced by complex buggy technology that isn't as widely available yet performs the exact same function. With the exception of the animated strips, there is absolutely no need for Flash to be used on this site--all Flash does in this case is make the page load slower and increase the chances that the page will not render correctly (ie, if the client doesn't have Flash).
Now, that being said, the Dilbert Archive [unitedmedia.com] is, of yet, unchanged.
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On the other hand, why shouldn't it?