Their dedicated microsite, Next New Billion, is now counting down to two billion views. With the way things are going, they’re likely to reach that milestone sooner rather than later.

It describes the relationship between science and art, mathematics and creativity — essentially left and right brain hemispheres.  This article is a perfect perspective on the types of people we are at Ashe Avenue — creative, like-minded souls who are both thirsty for knowledge and passionate about personal expression.

Read the article, before I get all sentimental and start making a mix tape.

http://paulgraham.com/hp.html

Check out the feature here, and be sure to say “hi” at any of the group’s upcoming shows around the city.

Fred Brooks is probably the coolest old dude there is — that is, if you are involved at all in the world of computer engineering, and a complete geek yourself (hello). I mean, the man has fans. Not just nerdy 30-somethings who work in labs and cubicles, but at a recent talk at Etsy’s headquarters, there were literally young girls who were boarding the elevator with the “ohmahgawdimsoexcited” exuberance of a fans at a Vampire Weekend show. What a baller.

Brooks, nearly an octogenarian, rarely gives lectures outside of his Computer Science classes at UNC Chapel Hill these days. But when he does grace us with his insight, the masses (of nerds) flock to hear his prophetic words.

For those unfortunate souls unfamiliar with Fred Brooks, here’s the rundown: In 1975, after a long and decorated career in systems engineering at IBM, Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month, which quickly became one of the most important works in the history of computer and software design. The book laid out foundations for best practices that are still taught and followed to this day by developers and engineers of all types (myself included). This is especially noteworthy because maintaining this kind of timeless relevance is unheard of in a field where that iPhone 3G you got last year is already worthless.

Brooks’ lecture at Etsy’s main office on June 14th centered on topics from his new book, The Design of Design as well as the basics from Man-Month. He touched on telecollaboration and distributed teams, he discussed roles of project managers and system designers, he weighed benefits of pair programming and XP (Extreme Programming). All sorts of topics that are acutely relevant in the modern setting, but still fundamentally rooted in his now 35-year-old book.

See Brooks’ lecture on “Design of Design,” at Case Western University, from 2007:

If you are any kind of engineer, you’ve probably read (or at least become vaguely familiar with) Man-Month and already know the value of the lessons within. If you are any kind of manager, CEO, marketing person, or project manager please do us tech geeks a favor: read this book now.

This can be a difficult decision to make at the outset of a project, but the main reason to not continue supporting IE6 is simply because it is a limitation imposed on developers and designers.  Until about 6 months ago, dropping support was not as viable an option, as IE6 still had a larger browser usage share than IE7 did (presumably because people were reluctant to implement Vista for years, which has IE7 as default).  But as IE8 and Windows 7 rapidly gained a larger user base, IE8 quickly surpassed IE6 in usage statistics.

While IE6 still maintained notable usage metrics, this trend made dropping support a viable option for many companies including:

• Google (http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/29/google-twists-knife-in-ie6-pulls-support-from-docs-and-sites/)
• Apple (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1072-apples-mobileme-drops-support-for-ie-6)
• YouTube (http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/)

(there are tons of examples)

Also, when this change in trend happened, we made the conscious decision to drop support for some of our other clients at the time. This allowed us to do a lot of new, cutting edge things by pushing the limits of javascript and web design past the capabilities of IE6 — the types of things you compromise by IE6’s unpredictable methods of handling Javascript DOM manipulation, CSS interpretation, cross site communication, security, and transparent image rendering (just to list a few headaches every presentation layer developer has ever come across).

To us, it is considered forward thinking and progressive to follow these types of internet media leaders in helping to escort out the last generation of web browsers in order to make way for more powerful, dynamic, optimized sites that do not have to have creativity restrained by developing within the vastly different (and frankly sub-standard) confines of IE6.  Not designing for IE6 essentially allows developers and designers to create far superior products.  But it takes a real commitment and dedication on the part of the development team to stand by this, and help usher out an old era of bad design with a more forward thinking approach.

Now, all of this makes perfect sense if you are designing or developing a web application. But what if the client presents one of those corner cases where they have a lot of users in IE6?

Our client sent us a letter, essentially saying that certain R&D teams or marketing divisions were on workstations that could not be upgraded from the default IE6/Windows XP configuration because there was either not enough IT manpower to undertake the task, or there was a fear that upgrading to new browser environments would upset the stability of their internal systems.

In this case (as will be the case increasingly over the coming months), our client sent us this letter, but closed it with a different sentiment: that THIS TIME it was okay because they happened to be upgrading at the end of the month to IE8/Windows 7, but we should be more conscientious of this with future clients.

To me that is just proof that as developers, it is OUR responsibility to help push the rest of the world out of these confines and into the New World more quickly.  If it weren’t for us catering to the needs of dinosaur machines, I believe that HTML5 would have already become a common entity (at least from a technical perspective — political reasons holding back HTML5 are a seperate discussion).

For more statistics on browser usage, check out the W3C’s browser stats resources.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp

We’re well aware of the collective creativity behind both VBS.TV and Next New Networks, so it’s great to see them recognized on a national level as two of the best online content producers around. Congrats guys, we’ll see you at the award ceremony again next year!