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."
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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; ...
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: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.
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.
Re:Damn I'm good (Score:1, Interesting)
We should use that to make a cute cartoon about how much it sucks.
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.
Re:Can't leave well enough alone (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Probably a Consultant (Score:3, Interesting)
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 that lynx isn't supported.
Plugins? They require flash, period. Flash is almost as basic these days as HTML. If your browser doesn't support flash, than half the leading web sites are already inaccessible to you.
The reaction to this change is chidish. "Worst design since Vista?" Please. Yes, the web site is feeble, but so was the old one. The old one was easier to use if all you wanted to do was catch up on the strip, but you can still do that on the new site. Though I find it easier to just subscribe to the RSS feed, and haven't been to the site in months. Of course, they don't get a lot of revenue from the RSS feed, so they decided they needed a way to drive more traffic. Curse them for their evil greed!
Re:One of those things is not like the others (Score:2, Interesting)
There is a study for you that contridicts the CO2 theory. I am not sitting here debunking the fact that CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas...that is well known and documented. What I am questioning here is does CO2 indeed raise the Earth's temperature?
A fact is that there is no sound scientific data that climate change and CO2 correlate. Indeed, all the studies are either inconclusive or say the opposite. Studies of icecaps indicate that before every iceage the earth's CO2 levels were much higher then at any time...so mankind's influence through CO2 has probably more chance of generating an ice age, but to be honest, I don't believe our influence will do that. Especially if people become educated and greener, we will stop mankind's shameful hurting of the earth.
"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."
Now you say these models which are based on CO2 warming the earth are scientific basis? Statistics are always right?
Look up the Truman/Dewey election. Was that sound scientific evidence there that Dewey won the election? It was well within the range of the error...and yet Truman won. How many examples must I give you about statistics and how they can be misused before you will see the light?
Global warming is not science, its like creationism Vs evolution. You state a belief and get modded up, and I provide scientific evidence to the contrary and get modded no where.
As for statistics being the basis of sound science! No, the basis of sound science is the scientific method where you start out with a hypothesis and try to prove it through proofs, not statistics that are easy to mis-use both intentionally and in-advertantly. Take a statistics 101 and find out what I am talking about. Causation, correlation are all terms that will help you out here. CO2 does not even correlate with the earth's climate, and yet we build models based on the premis that it does. I provided scientific proof, which you seem to have missed. You just stated your belief. I am still waiting on your science that shows a correlation of higher CO2 and higher temperatures on the earth.
Or if we want to argue about global warming some more: tell me why the New York Times has changed its views on the earth's climate 3 times in the last 100 years?
Around 1900 the newspaper stated that we were on the verge of an Ice Age.
1930: We were in the grip of global warming and the heat wave would burn us out.
1970's: We are on the verge of an ice age and should watch out.
Today: Global warming.
Like I said, no one knows the future. Anyone claiming to is doing something dangerous in statistics which is called extrapolation. In statistics no error margin can account for extrapolation....