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Re:Real System Failures by TeMPOraL on Friday July 14, 2017 @07:59AM (#14769112)
Interestingly, those "horribly, hilariously bad PowerPoint" presentations tend to have better content-to-noise ratio than the pretty ones.

This applies to the modern web as well.

Re:Real System Failures by mcguire on Saturday July 15, 2017 @01:55PM (#14777946)
My personal favorite example of a "NASA-style, bad PowerPoint presentation" is a SCRUM meeting involving a deck of slides with ~20 lines of text per slide. The SCRUM master involved was an employee of Accenture, IIRC. [Edit: And yes, the deck by itself had an impressively high information content.]

NASA and its contractors (which, in my experience, do most of the work attributed to NASA) have a weird, self-reinforcing cycle of decision-making by PowerPoint such that slide decks are important, necessary, and ubiquitous and therefore almost universally bad. Tufte's example of of a presentation burying the lede that the Shuttle will get blowed up is just one consequence.

Re:Real System Failures by dfox on Friday July 14, 2017 @09:48AM (#14769738)
What this "NASA-style powerpoint" refers to is the fact that the content would be better presented as normal flowing text instead of set of slides that are overpacked with text.

On the other hand this presentation is not that bad, at least it does not have bullet lists nested five levels deep where text size does not match the nesting levels and such things.