(Canadian here, but the ads are similar and we get lots of US channels.)
>At most, they would say "our fuel consumption is X lower than the nearest competitor".
This is what usually happens. It's only when a competitor is so well-regarded that people wouldn't even consider the company running the ad that they mention names.
For example, fuel econonmy and the Prius and almost inseparable in people's minds thanks to good marketing, to the point that someone shopping for an efficient car would probably not even consider Ford unless you challenged their assumptions with a surprising fact (that the Ford had better MPG than the Prius).
It's like the "Droid does" ads (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e52TSXwj774) - the iPhone was so dominant that they basically had to say, "You think that Apple/Toyota is the best in this field? Well guess what, we're better!"
In the prius example, my hunch is that when doing tests the the generic terms (things like "nearest competitor") failed to elicit comparisions with the prius. Prius already has a not-a-regular-car cache so my guess is they had to use prius as the generic term. Or they were specifically targeting people that were already seriously considering the prius. Prius may be on the way to becoming another kleenex.
My head is more often buried in code than in the product's UI. Our QA team has a better nose for when interaction or UI details are off than I do. In general, they spend more time using the application, and have a better instinct for when a given behaviour is wrong.
Some of the bugs they report would fall under the automatically testable category, but many don't.
I suspect that dogfooding is more effective at companies where the product itself is useful to developers or is a consumer app. e.g. Basecamp, FogBugz, Facebook, Netflix, Gmail, etc.
Agreed. Adobe doesn't make much money off of the Flash Player, just the Flash IDE, so they'd be thrilled if they could offload Flash Player's functionality and the horrible reputation it gives them and just focus on creating a good IDE.
Originally it was the curtains, not a bathroom door, and it is from "I’ve Got Nothing to Hide and Other
Misunderstandings of Privacy" [1]. A very nice read.
Not sure why this is downvoted. If the argument "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" is a bad one (which it it), it's also a bad argument to use against the gov't.
I think there are very good arguments to hold our public officials accountable, but they stand on their own merit.
There is a fundamental power imbalance between the government and an individual. This is why the privacy of the individual is paramount, while the privacy of the government should be minimal. The master here should be the individual and the public official a servant.
A second point would be that the time you spend automating tasks has other payoffs, in the form of learning and inspiration.
For instance, I suspect that part of the inspiration for Appointment Reminder came from Patrick's own realization of how valuable the automation of small tasks can be (chasing down missed appointments, in this case).
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To go off on another tangent, this is akin to eliminating technical debt from your workflow. By taking time to "refactor" certain tasks by doing them in a more efficient way, you get a net savings going forward. You can increase your ability to take on new tasks by increasing the efficiency of existing ones.
In keeping with the refactoring theme, if you have tasks that don't scale well, you may need to spend more time on them in a crisis. For example, in the event of a site outage you might suddenly have a deluge of support emails. Having support tickets be automatically created would save you n*60 seconds of copy/pasting.
It may be worth noting that although the expedition was a failure, that was pretty much a matter of bad luck with the behavior of the ice floes.
And as awful an experience as it must have been for the men involved, it's also worth noting (perhaps especially in this context) that not a single person lost his life, owing largely to some incredible leadership from Shackleton, and amazing skills from much of his crew.
It's pretty obvious that your intent was innocent. But the fact that you didn't realize how awful a headline that is sends a different message.
On the other hand, it's not just you guys -- i.e. you're no worse than the avg. tech company, FWIW.
This is a classic example of the techie "we're a meritocracy, so we couldn't possibly be sexist" thinking that's so common. It's not the pat on the ass and glass-ceiling kind of sexism, to be sure, but it's the STFU 'cause no one's grabbing your ass kind of sexism.
It's pretty obvious that your intent was innocent. But the fact that you didn't realize how awful a headline that is sends a different message.
An apt way of putting it. Thank you. I wasn't familiar with the historical quote, and I only saw the headline on Hacker News. My initial reaction was, "Oh, good grief. Do we have to go through GenderFail, SmutOnRails, etc., every 15 minutes? I hate this conversation. It must be even less fun for female hackers, who can't win either way."
It shouldn't be an awful headline; that's the sad thing. I submit that those taking issue with it (i.e. those pointing out a potential offence) are actually part of the problem.
One solution would be t encourage as many innocent headlines as it takes till it simple doesn't matter whether you say men, women or Martian - it just means people.... (unfortunately that means people will be offended, so possibly not the sanest approach)
Ascribing an intent to someone who clearly doesn't mean it is just not cricket :)
> Ascribing an intent to someone who clearly doesn't mean it is just not cricket :)
Sure, but it betrays a certain cluelessness. I.e. It's not so much that this is an outrageous headline -- ZOMG off with their heads, public apology, blah blah.
It's more a case of -- if they're clueless about this, then what else are they clueless about -- especially from the POV of a prospective female employee.
E.g. I know of a sweet old grandma who described the colour of her sofa as "nigger brown". She had no ill intent, and I don't ascribe any to her. BUT ... it's evidence that she may have other ideas that I may not agree with -- especially if she's my boss.
Evidence of cluelessness is ... at the very least ... evidence of cluelessness.
BUT ... it's evidence that she may have other ideas that I may not agree with -- especially if she's my boss.
The cluelessness there is simply a lack of understanding that modern society is not the same as older society. You could, of course, take offence at what she said. But that is disingenuous.
However; if she treats you differently, directs it at you, makes it a bad thing - that is a problem to address. Sadly; by addressing every perceived offence it trivializes the issue and persists the problem.
Treating someone differently because they have attitude incompatible with current society (with the caveat, of course, that it is someone from the older generation) is problematic.
It is not right to consider things such as this as cluelessness. Because the cluenessness is in the people taking offence at very little. Actually; I can understand those taking personal offence. And indeed support a reasoned plea for more sensitivity.
But I can't agree with those pointing out possible or perceived offence. Sure, if there is intent to be sexist or imply female developers are not welcome, I am with you. But as there is not, this is simply creating a problem that does not exist. The cluelessness is in believing there is a problem here; there is only a problem if one is created.
I'm sure such things are done in good faith; but it is casing more problem and masking genuine offence.
There is never anything wrong in a word. Only in the intent.
There is never anything wrong in a word. Only in the intent.
I have no horse in this race at all. But to suggest (as the above quote suggests to me - I hope I'm misreading!) that words have no power, or choice of words doesn't matter, is naive in the extreme.
Don't think it's obvious, if you just look at the headline. Is the integrity of the quote more important than looking non-biased against women programmers?
I usually come out pretty strongly against programmer-culture misogyny, however subtle, but here we're talking about a pretty famous quotation and I would answer to your question, "yes". There's a difference between sexism and historically-weighted badassness.
One could argue there's a literacy-filter being applied here more than a gender-filter.
> Yes, absolutely. It also pre-selects for those that have a sense of humor.
Why do minorities need to have a sense of humour about themselves? I do, but why do I have to to get into your club?
FWIW, I've made countless raunchy jokes that would have gotten me flagged by HR in a staid shop. The thing is -- I take responsibility for that. I.e. if I offended someone it's not necessarily because they have no sense of humour.
Because if the majority can't universally dismiss someone else taking offense as "having no sense of humor", then they run the risk of admitting that they might have said something wrong, or that they could have said it in a better way.
Dangit, answering rhetorical questions again...
Personally, the funny part to me is people arguing that the "integrity" of a quote that's already been hacked up must be "maintained".
The men who posted the ad would have laughed their socks off if a woman responded. Sure, it's immensely inspiring, but I wouldn't have been allowed to go on that expedition back in the day and it kind of makes me feel like I wouldn't be allowed to work at AdGrok as well, or at least looked down upon ("A woman programmer? Psh! Get back to the kitchen.")
Unfortunately for the purposes of this argument, am male. I would say that I'm OK with the quote for artistic purposes, perhaps vary the call to action in other contexts to avoid arousing any problems of bias...
>At most, they would say "our fuel consumption is X lower than the nearest competitor".
This is what usually happens. It's only when a competitor is so well-regarded that people wouldn't even consider the company running the ad that they mention names.
For example, fuel econonmy and the Prius and almost inseparable in people's minds thanks to good marketing, to the point that someone shopping for an efficient car would probably not even consider Ford unless you challenged their assumptions with a surprising fact (that the Ford had better MPG than the Prius).
It's like the "Droid does" ads (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e52TSXwj774) - the iPhone was so dominant that they basically had to say, "You think that Apple/Toyota is the best in this field? Well guess what, we're better!"