*Безымянная овца

На Stack Overflow есть отдельный подсайт для обсуждения самого Stack Overflow, называется, разумеется, meta.stackoverflow. А там есть отдельная ветка с мемами сообщества, их историей и (иногда) обсуждениями.

Catchphrases and concepts that spread from person to person are known as memes, which, courtesy the Internet, can now explode across the Earth like a highly contagious virus (hence “going viral”). As with their IRL counterparts, some infectious diseases are global (pandemic), while others are endemic to specific regions.

Stack Overflow and now even more predominantly Meta Stack Overflow have seen more than their fair share of these pathological social constructs spread through the user base. They are now ingrained units of our collective culture as SOpedians (a term which I hate, by the way).

Майкрософт выпускает футурологическое видео о будущем:

“Microsoft this morning is premiering a new video that shows how the company believes technology is poised to evolve over the next five to 10 years, based on the trends its researchers and engineers are seeing in software, devices, displays, sensors, processors and intelligent systems.

It’s a follow-up to the popular “Microsoft 2019″ video, developed in 2008 and first shown publicly in 2009. The latest video builds on some of the themes from its predecessor and takes everything further.

As the new video opens, special eyeglasses translate audio into English in real-time for a business traveler in Johannesburg. A thin screen on a car window highlights a passing building to show where her meeting will be the next day, based on information from her calendar. Office workers gesture effortlessly to control and reroute text and charts as the screens around them morph and pulse with new information.

And on and on from there, making our modern-day digital breakthroughs seem like mere baby steps on the road to a far more spectacular future.”

(via The future is amazing, and Microsoft has video to prove it - GeekWire)

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Джон Грубер на это ответил парой ехидных постов, общий смысл которых можно свести к тому, что «надо не визионерство устраивать, а продукты нормальные делать»:

I’m not arguing that making concept videos directly leads to a lack of traction in the current market. I’m arguing that making concept videos is a sign of a company that has a lack of institutional focus on the present and near-present. Can you imagine a sports team in the midst of a present-day losing season that makes a video imagining a future championship 10 years out?

The designs in these concept videos are free from real-world constraints — technical, logical, fiscal. Dealing with constraints is what real design is all about. Institutional attention on the present day — on getting innovative industry-leading products out the door and creating consumer demand for them — requires relentless company-wide focus.

— John Gruber: The Type of Companies That Publish Future Concept Videos

An update with location vs. a check-in

This was a bit more difficult to resolve. Like I mentioned, many of our first iterations involved attaching your location to a status update. At first it seemed like the logical route. We didn’t need to create a different item in the Facebook ecosystem, and people could just quickly turn it on and all their status updates would be geocoded.

But it feels like more work. Sure, it could just be turned on, and then always be on, but that conflicts with the always sharing argument.

It can be argued that checking in is new and requires more work, but when you walk yourself through the process of a check-in versus a status update plus location it becomes a lot clearer.

In a status update plus location world you start with a status update. You first have to come up with something to say. It’s a blank canvas. You write something and then think, “Oh, I should add some location data to it.” If, say, it was sticky once you turned it on, you’d have to do the opposite. Should I share my location with this? All of a sudden a simple status update has a lot more choices. It’s not a quick and easy update anymore.

In a check-in world you’re automatically given a prompt. You start with the place you’re at, and you share your location with your friends. That’s it. At its most basic a check-in is something like, “Tom Watson is at Serpentine.” You don’t even have to write anything at all. Adding more information to this story is important for those reading it, and we encourage users to do so. At its core, it’s simple to start using. Simpler than a status update plus location.

It’s also important to emphasize a check-in as a prompt. It takes away the fear of the blank text box. There’s no pressure to write anything, and the act of checking in gives you something to write about.

Моё любимое про шушеру там тоже есть!

Along with hovercars, hoverboards, and robot slaves, video-chatting is one of the four harbingers of the Future, as foretold in basically every sci-fi book or movie ever made. So far it’s the only one we’ve figured out, and, honestly, it’s kind of a bust.

No one wants to sit there politely staring at their grandma’s furrowed brow while she spends 20 minutes pecking out “Are yo waering the sweter i sdent?” when they could be watching porn and smoking a bong at the same time. That’s the whole reason we came up with “chatting” in the first place. The only thing those little webcams are good for is cybering. Seeing boobs. Badgering girls for hours and hours until they take their shirts off. We asked our photo editor Patrick O’Dell to get some of his lady friends to try on some lingerie for his vid-cam in the name of “fashion.” (But it was all about tits.)

The site is incredibly simple: you enter any English phrase you can think of, and it uses Google’s automated translator to convert it into Japanese. And then it translates it back into English. And back into Japanese. At each step along the way, the words you began with gradually take shape to form something entirely different and (hopefully) awesome. The retranslations continue until you reach what the site calls ‘equilibrium’, when the English and Japanese words translate back and forth into exactly the same thing. Fortunately, it usually takes at least a few steps for your words to reach equilibrium, and the resulting sentences are often hilarious.

Military term for an operation in which multiple things have gone wrong. Related to “SNAFU” (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”) and “FUBAR” (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair).

In radio communication or polite conversation (i.e. with a very senior officer with whom you have no prior experience) the term “clusterfuck” will often be replaced by the NATO phonetic acronym “Charlie Foxtrot.”