great blog! i've enjoyed reading your stuff since discovering this lately.

unrelated to any of the actual entries: you may need to fix your blogging software. the past few entries have been for 11:59 for the day before you actually posted. also, the 'enter the word' (for leaving comments) is always 'orange'

Don't forget Kathy's great post on the "Kool-Aid Point," where people go religious about your product:

https://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/05/popularity_bree.html

For the most part, Amazon and IMDB reviews are meaningless to me; I don't care what Who-The-Heck-Are-You-Anyway thinks, I care what someone thinks whose thinking I have some context for. (Similarly, anyone reading this doesn't care what I think about Amazon reviews ... :-) )

That said, when contemplating a purchase, I will sort the reviews with least stars first and see what about the product drove people to give it such a bad review. You can occasionally get some useful insights that way.

Same, the "this thing is a piece of crap" reviews are a great resource. They're the fastest way to find out if the vendor doesn't support their product, if it has non-obvious flaws or incompatibilities, or if there are trends in failures. Or whether the majority are just problems clueless dorks and people looking for something to bitch about invent.

I pass up stuff that never gets reviewed anywhere, unless it doesn't cost much, because why take the risk? (If only it was as easy to find reviews of enterprise software online, it would save a lot of grief and wasted dollars.)

I'd say that, coupled with flair, panache, and of course elan -- always elan! -- this remains insightful advice when applied to social interaction. It's a fine ENTP way to live.

Coding Horror has rapidly become one of my favorite reads; thanks for the good times!

> you may need to fix your blogging software. the past few entries have been for 11:59 for the day before you actually posted. also, the 'enter the word' (for leaving comments) is always 'orange'

Strangely enough, this is all by design..

> when contemplating a purchase, I will sort the reviews with least stars first
> Same, the "this thing is a piece of crap" reviews are a great resource

Well, I do the same thing-- but I have to do it for the least stars *and* the most stars, and *then* filter out the weirdos on each extreme.

It's the entire problem in a nutshell.

By the way, Jeff, here's an alternative to the Jon Stewart video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y043aZAsUK4

I was unable to load it at your linked webpage...

And here's a transcript:

https://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/15/cf.01.html

I'm sorry about my sudden interest about an issue from 2004; but hey, I'm a foreigner, I really like Jon Stewart and this was news to me...

>> you may need to fix your blogging software. [...] also, the 'enter the word' (for leaving comments) is always 'orange'

>Strangely enough, this is all by design..

What's that then?

Security by intimidation?

The 'orange' captcha (I hate this word) is an example of a very simple solution that seems to work (or is Jeff deleting all the spam that gets through? ;-)

Jeff, you've actually authored a captcha (I love that word) on codeproject, so what gives with the Turing test whose answer is predictable? Why not just use the server control that you made, instead of using the orange thing? It's like protecting your car with the Club, except your 'the Club' is made out of paper mache! It's probably a successful deterrent, in that the thief will move on...

Just wondering...

I guess this wasn't a very good post topic if all we can talk about is the blog captcha.

This blog is based on Movable Type, which is written in Perl. I don't know Perl. This is the best CAPTCHA solution I could implement with my crappy Perl skills.

And the best part of all? It works perfectly. I have gotten a grand total of two spam comments -- clearly hand-entered -- since I implemented the Crappy Captcha(tm).

You know what Jeff? I bet you don't even need the word to be an image. Effectively you've got a Turning Test here -> copy the colour into the box. No spam bot is going to do that.

Here's a fun scenario:

You are looking at a product that very likely will fill your needs. It's kind of high, and no one you know has one. It's only got 2 raving reviews and 3 bad ones. What do you do?

If you knew that Amazon has sold 3700 of them, those 3 really bad reviews look a lot less bad. I think knowing how many of each item they've sold would make the ratings and reviews more helpful. I don't know that it'll ever happen though, that seems like the kind of thing that retailers may not like getting out.

There's one point to consider in these A vs. B programming religions; that there's a huge investment SOMEONE has made SOMEWHERE, that he doesn't want to lose by switching from A to B. That's why we have Java vs .NET; The windows guys don't want to throw everything away to go Java, and the java guys don't want to be tied to one platform. etc. It goes on and on. Emacs users don't want to learn how to do things the VI way. It's usually NOT the case that A is incomparably better than B; its just that no one wants to make the switch.

There's also the element of having to doubt yourself. By switching from A to B, you're saying "I was wrong for picking A in the first place. I was a fool for spending so much time on A." No one wants to do that; men in particular, we're not wired for it. It takes a lot of confidence to be able to do that, and if we all had a lot of confidence, the world would be a very different sort of place.

Speaking of capatcha's, how about this;

Instead of making us type a word, as us a question, and have the answer be an image. Make it multiple choice. 5 choice, drawn as images, and let us click on the right one. Typing the right one is a pain. Make the answers pictures; "Which fruit is used in tropicana."

If you don't know what tropicana is, tough.

I love this kind of topic because it exposes the psychology and sociology of software development (although, in similiar fashion, many other things as well.)

Too often people fail to dig just a little deeper into the 'why' of something (and religion is definitely a biggie.) For example, why do you preach at the C# pulpit? Why is Linux better/worse than Windows? Why is that HDTV you just bought a piece of junk? What influences have affected your decision? Do you truly strive to see all points of view? Are you attempting to analyze every position with an open mind?

Groovy topic, Jeff.