ihumanableusable in any place a human can be used

Fucking arbitrary decision, but a good one!

Rant time, oh it’s Friday rant time! You see we are making progress on our project at work up to the point that I will be traveling to beautiful Indiana next week to get some specialized training and toolkits. It’s a big deal for our project and we are all very happy, I’m glad to get to be an important part of all this and actually look forward to it. I will be heading out there with two other guys from the company and they will be leaving on Wednesday while I stay until Friday. Here comes the fun part, how to drive around after Wednesday?

Rent a car! I hear you shouting at your computer (don’t worry I can’t really hear you, you are just very predictable). Well it may shock you to find out that I’m only 24 years old and because of the actuary tables I am not allowed to rent a car. You see you have to be 25 years old to do certain things, like rent a car or hotel room or get a nice break on your car insurance. Less than 25 and you are a hellbent young rogue ready to destroy any car you get your hands on. It doesn’t matter that I’ve spent the last 6 years working hard studying at University to get 2 degrees or designing software for a Fortune 1000 company, no the table says 25 years old and by the hammer of Thor we are going by the table.

Now there is a monkey wrench, one I’m sure we’ll get settled and figured, but it’s not the first time arbitrary decisions have been made that have negatively impacted me, and it probably won’t be the last. On this current project we deal with messages and messages have many pieces parts, in the old system you could have thousands and thousands of different pieces parts. In this new system you are limited to about 1,000 unique parts, it has been a challenge trying to figure out how to get everything to work. Is there some reason for this, NO! its completely arbitrary, they just chose a large number, and in the next iteration of the product that limitation will be lifted.

I remember hearing a story from a fellow developer about how new software was installed that all webforms had to send their data to so that it could be sanitized (despite the fact that it was already being sanitized by our program). This new cog in the machine had a limit of 100 fields per form, now only in the dreams of a fevered madman would you need more than 100 fields. Well it did, it was a complicated form dealing with complicated government requirements and to make it easy for the user it was dynamic and beautiful and everyone loved it. Then they had to completely break it, make it work in chunks and find some clunky workaround so that it would never submit more than 100 fields, the users hated it, the developers hated it, everyone hated it. Some digging went forth and the 100 field limit was completely arbitrary and you know in the code somewhere was something like this.

  FormField fields[100]; //No one will ever need more than 100 fields

This arbitrary decision causes a world of hurt. Now we don’t want to go down the super configurable, just change this XML file which will regenerate this XML file which will be used to partially populate this .properties file which will be dynamically…. fuck you. Just that if you have limits there better be good fucking reasons, or else remove them.

If you are going to limit me to 140 characters there better be a good reason, oh because of the inherent limits imposed by SMS, fine Twitter I understand perfectly. You can’t open two spreadsheet with the same name even if they are different files, what are you doing Excel?!

The next time you are about to code something that will result in a clearly arbitrary error message down the road, you better have a good reason to. There better be some sort of machine limitation or design limitation or something, because its not the limit that pisses people off, its their arbitrary nature.

look a bird, now I'm deciding I guess

I keep seeing commercials on TV, I’m sure you have to, where there is one person and another person asks them a question, the commercial then goes something like this:

• Normal Person: Hey want to get lunch
• Freakazoid: Lunch from the latin luncha for eating during the daytime
• Normal Person: Huh?
• Freakazoid: Oklahoma abbreviation OK, OOOOOOklahoma where the wind goes…
• Normal Person: I said “huh?” not “ok?” you stupid fuck

These terrible abortions have been shoved onto the world by Microsoft to promote bing. The idea here is that using Google / Yahoo / etc. causes such a delude of useless results that querying a normal search engine is like talking to the freak from our vignette. The alternative bing is a decision engine and by using that you can “stop searching, start deciding”.

First off for full disclosure, I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft, I think they make expensive sub-par software. On the other hand though, I program in .Net and work in XP and Vista everyday, I also own a Mac and have ubuntu installed at home. I use Microsoft products, there are some that I even like, but their corporate culture and quality control bugs me. If you want to write a snarky comment about me being a linux-head or a mac-fanboy or a windoze-m$-hater, feel free to.

The whole “Decision Engine” thing is what pisses in my Corn Flakes, its such nothing market-speak. They synergized outside the box with a shifted paradigm to come up with Decision Engine. Here is the thing though, what the fuck does it mean? Does it mean that it will make decisions for me, is it a big step forward in finding stuff on the internet? So I decided to do a completely scientific comparison of bing and google.

The first step in this was searching the term “ok” as this is the most annoying example from the bing commercial. Here are my completely scientific results.

bing	bing search of ok
google	google search of ok

Bing’s first result is for Oklahoma! Think about that for a second, and now here it is again because it bears repeating, BING’S FIRST FUCKING RESULT IS THAT OK IS AN ABBREVIATION FOR FUCKING OKLAHOMA! You’d think after the commercial they would have thrown something into their indexing algorithm. Google correctly points me to a wiki article about the term “okay” before suggesting Oklahoma. But let’s move past the obvious and focus on the fact that besides bing fulfilling their own prophecy, what about bing helps me decide? Nothing, they are the same page layout, they are the same thing, they do the same fucking thing.

But what is there to decide, maybe this is user error, maybe I should ask it something it could actually answer. I want chinese food for dinner, let’s see what happens when I search bing and google for “chinese food near me” (note: I made sure to sign out of each so that neither would have an advantage knowing my location from an account).

bing
google

Here Google clearly wins, Bing thinks I want to know about chinese food in Maine (ME) and proceeds to tell me all about it. Google makes the same mistake but then also uses some google magic to determine that I live in Columbus, OH and provides some chinese food that is actually in this state.

I don’t want this to turn into a who’s better at this query or that query type thing. Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture, bing doesn’t help you decide, it is a search engine. And that’s the whole point of this post, fuck your market-speak Microsoft. Don’t obfuscate, innovate. If you want to take down Google go spend some of your money to design something that is actually better. Bing as it stands today is a moderately effective search engine with pretty pictures, nothing more.

There is plenty of room to innovate, there are things people could do to help me make decisions, but Bing doesn’t do any of this. Search engines could start leveraging social networking information to understand the person that I am and tailor my results, they could allow the end-user to vote results up and down for a query so that the group prunes the result set, they could do some research and development and come up with something that would blow my mind.

The problem with Bing isn’t that its not a good search engine, its that its not a good decision engine, its not any kind of decision engine, its a fucking search engine. Microsoft is famous for and probably makes a ton of money off of sprinkling marketing fairy dust on their shitty shitty products, so they won’t stop, it just pisses me the fuck off. Stop with your dumb commercials with annoying fucks rambling like idiots because you’ve completely revolutionized searching and you no longer present results in a big list sorted by your concept of relevance, until you actually revolutionize searching, like Google did with their pagerank algorithm.