I discovered last night that Microsoft's web servers display an error for the URL http://www.microsoft.com/.net. Now, I may be a bit demanding but don't you think that a company like that should support tacking ".net", "office", "visualstudio", etc. to their base URL?
As a side note, using any additional path element that starts with a "." causes the same error. Requesting http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio and others provide a reasonable error page that at least allows you to search on the site.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Why do we treat email differently than a phone call?
Jason at 37signals.com asks "Why do we treat email differently than a phone call?"
I think the answer is a lot simpler than the dozens of commenters imply: we treat email differently because text can be manipulated in ways that audio content cannot.
I could record all the phone calls I take or make but what would be the point? I couldn't go back and search through them, it's impossible to "scan through" a conversation to see the interesting/important bits, etc.
Although it's true that you could do all of this with transcripts of phone calls the fact remains that transcribing those calls is a Herculean task; either you need a dedicated secretary or you need to be very understanding of the mistakes made by your voice recognition software. All of this doesn't even get into the difficulty of either the secretary or the software dealing with accents, voice modulation and so on.
A lot of the meaning in a conversation (even on the phone) comes from things other than the actual words used. With email, the entirety of the conversation is captured. You see what you saw when the email first arrived.
Bottom line, we treat phone calls and email differently because the two media (voice and text) are divergent in so many aspects.
I think the answer is a lot simpler than the dozens of commenters imply: we treat email differently because text can be manipulated in ways that audio content cannot.
I could record all the phone calls I take or make but what would be the point? I couldn't go back and search through them, it's impossible to "scan through" a conversation to see the interesting/important bits, etc.
Although it's true that you could do all of this with transcripts of phone calls the fact remains that transcribing those calls is a Herculean task; either you need a dedicated secretary or you need to be very understanding of the mistakes made by your voice recognition software. All of this doesn't even get into the difficulty of either the secretary or the software dealing with accents, voice modulation and so on.
A lot of the meaning in a conversation (even on the phone) comes from things other than the actual words used. With email, the entirety of the conversation is captured. You see what you saw when the email first arrived.
Bottom line, we treat phone calls and email differently because the two media (voice and text) are divergent in so many aspects.
Monday, August 01, 2005
Ignorance and judgement
David Toub blogs about snobbery, elitism and "atty-tood". Sadly, I think most elitism and snobbery comes from simple ignorance. Most people lose at least some part of their superiority when they are (properly) exposed to the thing that they deride.
In the world of programmers nowhere is this more prevalent than in the language/editor/platform wars. A lot of these wars are started in various fora by somebody who has a certain degree of knowledge about the language/editor/platform whose virtues they extoll (enough to know which features to laud at least) but little knowledge of the competing technologies.
Although editors and platforms may indeed provide different features, languages, like music, can say anything to those who want to listen. Sure they have different flavours; that's why I prefer Python to Ruby (down in the back row). But at the end of the day they are all capable of moving the machine to do the same things (notwithstanding the fact that some languages cannot do certain things for architectural reasons).
Those who refuse to acknowledge certain basic qualities of these forms of expression (music, languages, fashion, painting, sculpture) do so out of ignorance and myopia. And prejudice is never far behind ignorance and judgement.
In the world of programmers nowhere is this more prevalent than in the language/editor/platform wars. A lot of these wars are started in various fora by somebody who has a certain degree of knowledge about the language/editor/platform whose virtues they extoll (enough to know which features to laud at least) but little knowledge of the competing technologies.
Although editors and platforms may indeed provide different features, languages, like music, can say anything to those who want to listen. Sure they have different flavours; that's why I prefer Python to Ruby (down in the back row). But at the end of the day they are all capable of moving the machine to do the same things (notwithstanding the fact that some languages cannot do certain things for architectural reasons).
Those who refuse to acknowledge certain basic qualities of these forms of expression (music, languages, fashion, painting, sculpture) do so out of ignorance and myopia. And prejudice is never far behind ignorance and judgement.
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