Andreas Haupt

You most likely already know what a FOUC is. While surfing the web and while using or playing around with apps you are experiencing this annoyance. Facebook has it, LinkedIn has it, web shops have it, your favorite news portal has it and this site your are currently looking at also sometimes suffers from it.

I prefer to resolve this abbreviation to "Flash Of Unready Content". However the "official" resolution is "Flash Of Unstyled Content". There are many variations also floating around like "FOIT" and "FOUT" which focus on specific aspects of this initial flash. Also browser vendors are discussing this matter: "The FOUC Problem".

Wikipedia says:

This definition from my perspective does not catch it and feels a bit outdated. I would rather phrase it another way:

During city strolls there often is no way to evade advertisements. There are some which make you wonder who came up with such a brilliant claim or association.

Then there are the boring and usual ones where your brain is already trained to filter out those as part of the ambient noise stimuli.

Yet sometimes you discover annoying and sometimes even repulsive advertisements which you would like to rip apart just to save others from the involuntary IQ drop that you just suffered.

While usually I'm trying to add the latter to my brain-ignore-list it does not work if the whole city is littered with it. That is why - please bear with me - I have to write this article to regain my inner peace.

After my initial article about the laptop and desktop cooling medieval something interesting happened. Marketers are actually starting to use this feature as a unique selling proposition!

Since those guys might have conducted some market studies on this topic it appears I'm not the only one striving for silent computing.

While there currently is the resolution ("Retina") hype still running (leading to 13" laptops featuring QHD+ displays) this one in contrast could be a game changer. It is easy to understand and a simple argument for a market campaign. Once people know that their daily used office and internet surfing machines could be completely silent they definitely will choose such device over a noisy one - even if it means to sacrifice performance (mostly on the paper anyway) or to pay a higher price.

In software development a common setup is to have the product manager near other business departments for the sake of keeping business knowledge and decision making close to the company root and to install the development teams somewhere else. This setup I will further analyze.

Basically I agree with the guys behind this flow chart as a "guide" for using QR codes.

The main reason is that I already experienced thousands of occasions where QR codes were heavily misused - and this is not limited to codes where I would have to jump into raw sewage to reach them.

However I believe that there are scenarios where QR codes shine as information carriers as long as certain guidelines are respected.

Regularly exchanging smartphones and jumping from one mobile operating system to another is a habit of mine.
After many iterations I thought of which properties my perfect phone would need to have, which usability flaws I could not live with and which phones did come closest to what I desire.

If I would have to name only one thing in the current world of (consumer) electronics which I would declare "medieval" with no doubt I would name the use of cooling fans inside computers, laptops, tablets etc.

It could be that I'm a bit sensitive when it comes to persistent noises in my vicinity but for sure there is no excuse for a netbook with a super tiny power consumption footprint to sound like a Phantom military jet when booting up or saving a Word file.