A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)

The script uses a feature of HTTP/1.1 called pipelining; proponents of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 want people to believe it has problems because it does not fit their commercialised web business model. As demonstrated by the script below, it has no problems. It's a feature that simply does not suit the online ad industry-funded business model with its gigantic corporate browser, bloated conglomeration web pages and incessant data collection. Here, only 2 TCP connections are used to retrieve 141 images. Most servers are less restrictive and allow more than 100 requests per TCP connection. Pipelining works great. Much more efficient than browsers which open hundreds of connections. IMHO.

    (export Connection=keep-alive
    x1=http://www.minimizedistraction.com/img/vrg_google_doc_final_vrs03-
    x2(){ seq -f "$x1%g.jpg" $1 $2;};
    x3(){ yy025|nc -vvn 173.236.175.199 80;};
    x2   1 100|x3;
    x2 101 200|x3;
    )|exec yy056|exec od -An -tx1 -vw99999|exec tr -d '\40'|exec sed 's/ffd9ffd8/ffd9\
    ffd8/g'|exec sed -n /ffd8/p|exec split -l1;
    for x in x??;do xxd -p -r  $x.jpg;rm $x;done;
    convert x??.jpg 1.pdf 2>/dev/null;rm x??.jpg

    ls -l ./1.pdf

Without arguing against that your marketing team was just following industry trends blindly, I would claim it's hard to imagine a product where increased engagement is not a benefit to the business.

Being top-of-mind as a product and a brand is a big advantage, and even with no direct sale, ad revenue or referrals happening from the engagement, you will see increased conversions from word-of-mouth and increased resell/upsell on the product or associated products.

Lately Microsoft has decided to stuff ‘news’ and similar distractions in Windows and they might listen to criticism because they get paid anyway.

A slideshow isn't meant to be read in the absence of a speaker giving a presentation. It exists to support the speaker in their presentation. If the intent is to offer a resource which can act as a substitute for attending a presentation, a slideshow is an inappropriate choice.

A good lecture typically makes effective use of a slideshow. Lectures are mostly non-interactive, but this needs no apology, contrary to what the article seems to imply. Perhaps other kinds of presentations should be more interactive, but I don't see that non-interactivity is always a failing.

Similarly, a good slideshow can make effective use of bullet-points. Bullet-points don't always mean you're skipping over important detail, or that you've failed to properly structure the content.

> The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA

Right. A slideshow is not a substitute for a proper write-up, it's just a presentation aid.

In some contexts you might get away with not doing a formal write-up, but certainly not in a life-and-death context like the one mentioned in the article.

> For serious presentations, it will be useful to replace PowerPoint slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, images together.

I can see that might work well, but I can see this might degrade into just rewriting a technical paper to fit the flow of the presentation. It might make more sense to just say For more detail, see the formal paper. Certainly a slideshow is not a substitute for a proper paper, but even a handout will presumably lose some of what the full paper has to say. If the full information is already there in the paper, why not refer people to it?