On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 1:29 PM, Damien Lepage <damienlep...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> You may have seen this already, if not I believe it's worth investing 1h of
> your life:
> http://vimeo.com/36579366
>
> That's already a good candidate for the technical talk of the year, if not
> the decade IMO.
What is it with people these days and using videos for stuff that
could be far better posted as text?
A "talk" can inherently be presented as text, perhaps HTML with a few
inline images if there are slides.
And text (or HTML) has some HUGE advantages:
* Download size is kilobytes, not gigabytes
* Can be viewed on dialup, mobile, etc. without stuttering, not
working at all, costing an arm and a leg, or etc.
* Google can find it by the full content of the talk, not just what
few keywords someone slaps onto the video's youtube page plus the
inanities added by the inevitable swarm of troll commenters.
* You can search in it yourself with ctrl-F in your browser.
* You can skim it.
* If you're a fast reader, you can probably read it and comprehend
it all in less than an hour.
* You can navigate in it very easily, using normal scrolling, search,
and other browser tools, and see where you're going while you
scroll, rather than having to drag a tiny little thingy across a
tiny little seek bar blind, drop it, and then wait 40 seconds while
a little wheel spins for the Flash player to *maybe* jump to the
spot in the video, whereupon you will repeat the process a few
times with ever finer adjustments; but the player might hang
or snap back to where it was or crash instead.
* You can keep a copy for offline viewing without needing:
a) hacking tools to bypass the attempts by the popular video
sites to be streaming-only,
b) one or another big bloated piece of media player software that
will steal file associations at inconvenient and random times,
and
c) a shitload of disk space.
* No extra plugins etc. needed to view it that guzzle CPU and
memory, crash at inconvenient times, and the like. You can view
it in Lynx (minus the slides, if any) if you want to. You can
view it on a 286 with no graphics card (not no 3D card, no
graphics, period, just 80x24 text mode). You can view it on your
old Commodore 64 with 300 baud modem if you want to and it won't
take sixty thousand years to download on that either.
* You can copy and paste bits of it into a snippets file or
whatever, if there's bits you want to refer back to later that
gave you technical ideas. Or print it out and apply hiliter to
key passages. Or etc.
* If you're blind you can still get screen-reader software to
read it for you. If you're deaf, on the other hand, a video is
quite likely to be completely useless, since streaming framerates
and lip-reading don't tend to mix and none of these things seem
to be closed-captioned.
* Text is easy and cheap to mirror widely around the net and
relatively easy to translate to other languages. Video can be
hosted free at only a handful of sites and is more work to
translate.
What does video get you that text or HTML+images couldn't get you?
* You can hear what the guy's voice actually sounds like.
* You get to see a talking head bobbing around and lips moving in
a jerky, stuttery sort of way.
* You get the pronunciation, but not the spelling, of the obscure
technical/latin words that get used, instead of the other way
'round.
* There can be full-motion video demonstrations of things.
Not worth what you lose, IMO, even if you aren't deaf, and especially
if you are. Full-motion video demonstrations can be separate short
videos embedded in a text+images web page.
Oh, and by the way, your post doesn't even bother to actually say
what, exactly, the talk is about. It implies strongly that it has
something to do with interactive development tools, and it's clear
that something in it wowed you, but that's it, and the URL itself is
completely opaque. Apparently the only way to find out in more detail
what the talk's topic is is to click the link, at minimum, and maybe
you even have to play the video part-way.
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