As for my jab at “designers”, yes I’m thinking of the pixels jockeys, not the ones who concern themselves with user interaction and experience.

And finally, yes, you are correct: it’s when Chen brought up the bit about floating-point — technically correct, but completely irrelevant, in a way that reminds of the joke they always used to tell about Microsoft,

I’m afraid I have no prizes to offer other than bragging rights. Use them well!

Your dried pasta / master chef analogy is perfect, and I am totally going to steal it. You’re right – not just a matter of “resolution of experience,” but also priorities. One man’s lifelong passion is another man’s favorite Kraft Dinner. Mmmm.

These sites all do their jobs quite well, but if you showed them to a web designer, you’d see a conniption fit within seconds.

I beg to differ. Designers like to go about wanking about how design must be effective. Even though most of them *are* really just pixel jockeys who want things to be pretty, they’d have to contain their conniption fits if the design works. And Craigslist, while not pretty, is effective. And PoF too. And Kayak, one of those cheap travel sites, is very clean and tidy in its design… even if it’s not pretty.

My guesstimated facepalm point in the Raymond Chen article:

(These all came from people who didn’t understand how computers handle floating point.)

What do I win?

PS – the Flip’s software is horrendous and deleted my movies.