Slashdot Mirror

Quick rule of thumb:
1. All automation in the past was GOOD.
2. All automation in the future will be BAD.
The is what the public has believed for at least three centuries.

To quote Douglas Adams:

1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

I'll believe text is dead when www.retromud.org and http://www.douglasadams.com/cr... stop resolving.

Text is dead! Long live the most durable and interpretable format ever invented by man!

Small steps, agreed, but every little bit helps. And even if they didn't, I'd be for it just because I've got enough cables and adapters stuffed in my equipment drawers as it is.

Indeed. Douglas Adams: 'Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things':

http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html

You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see but you can't. HHGTTG

Quite some time ago, Douglas Adams "declared war" on "little dongly things"

His article is worth reading

It would have made sense if people adopted the abcdef keyboard (alphabetical)

Douglas Adams answered this one many years ago:

The principle behind the decision to have an alphabetical keyboard is based on a misunderstanding. I believe that the idea is this: not everybody knows qwerty (it's an odd feeling actually typing qwerty as a word. Try it and you'll see what I mean) but everybody knows the alphabet. This true but irrelevant. People know the alphabet as a one dimensional string, not as a two-dimensional array, so you're going to have to hunt and peck anyway.

Typing qwerty is quite natural... on a qwerty keyboard.

I can type by heart on a qwerty keyboard, but if someone asks me out of the blue "What is the letter to the right of the y on a qwerty keybaord?", I am going to need to look at a keyboard to find out.

Or just hit the key without looking...

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Yep thats it. What is even stranger is I typed u in that sentence without even knowing that it was right next to the y.

It would have made sense if people adopted the abcdef keyboard (alphabetical)

Douglas Adams answered this one many years ago:

The principle behind the decision to have an alphabetical keyboard is based on a misunderstanding. I believe that the idea is this: not everybody knows qwerty (it's an odd feeling actually typing qwerty as a word. Try it and you'll see what I mean) but everybody knows the alphabet. This true but irrelevant. People know the alphabet as a one dimensional string, not as a two-dimensional array, so you're going to have to hunt and peck anyway.

I now understand why always having a towel is important.

Nonsense.

Computers with tuna-based storage can't be overclocked.

Everyone knows you can tuna fish, but you can't tuna computer.

On the other hand, there are rumors of the unreliability of salmon-based information storage.

So we've only been waiting for this for over a decade

Douglas Adams would agree, I can't believe that no one linked to Dongly Things

" In fact there already is a kind of rough standard, but it's rather an odd one. Not many people actually smoke in their cars these days, and the aperture in the dashboard which used to hold the cigar lighter is now more likely to be powering a mobile phone, CD player, fax machine or, according to a recent and highly improbable TV commercial, an instant coffee making gizmo. Because the socket originally had a different purpose it's the wrong size and in the wrong place for what we now want to do with it, so perhaps it's time to start adapting it for its new job." - Douglas Adams 1997

So its long past time to use the standard that is inplace.

To the uninitiated:

The phrase "[...] will be first against the wall when the revolution comes" is from HHGTTG (grep through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy).

Also, its author, Douglas N. Adams, has written a piece in which he complains about "Little dongly things", at http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html

So the parent refers to a geek culture hero in more ways than one.

(Also, I hear they have a job opening at XKCDexplained.com, and I'm thinking about applying... :D)

Silly, you don't get the peanuts (for protein replacement) at the chemist, you get them at the pub, as well as the cheese sandwich (to save the microscopic space fleet) and the beer (to cushion the shock of the matter transference beam). The Babel Fish you have to get yourself from the Vogon hold, and your towel, well you just better know where that is at all times, is all.

Didn't they teach you anything at Galactic Sub-Etha Travel Journalism School?

"Now why is this? Well, there's one possible theory, which is that just as Xerox is really in the business of selling toner cartridges, Sony is really in the little dongly power-supply business." - from a somewhat related piece by Douglas Adams

[sigh] [pointing-out-stupidity] 2000-2010 is 11 years [/pointing-out-stupidity]

Now that that is over, perhaps it is best to listen to the sage advice of Douglas Adams.

instead of saying that we have got the end of the millennium (or bi-millennium) wrong, we should say that our ancestors got the beginning of it wrong, and that we've only just sorted the mess out before starting a new mess of our own ["Unfinished Business of the Century" by Douglas Adams, first published in "The Independent on Sunday" November 1999]

Just substitute "millennium" with "decade" and it still rings true.

Also I would like to ask you this question: "so what if we end up with a 9 year decade way back in 1-9AD? What difference does it make to our lives now?"

Doug Adams wrote about it ten years ago, and it still applies.
http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

A couple of years or so ago I was a guest on Start The Week, and I was authoritatively informed by a very distinguished journalist that the whole Internet thing was just a silly fad like ham radio in the fifties, and that if I thought any different I was really a bit naïve. It is a very British trait – natural, perhaps, for a country which has lost an empire and found Mr Blobby – to be so suspicious of change.
(...)
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

Now all we need is a universal standard of (in the words of Douglas Adams) 'little dongly things' for everything else:

http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html

'The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the micro-electronics world is infested) are the external power adaptors which laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the mains AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together you end up with a fairly major industry which exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things none of which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body...It's hard to imagine that some of the mightiest brains on the planet, fuelled by some of the finest pizza that money can buy, haven't at some point thought 'Wouldn't it be easier if we all just standardised on one type of DC power supply?'...I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of pepperoni, he'd probably be able to think of a way of making whatever gizmo (maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I've heard such good things about) it is he's designing, work to a standard DC low-power supply.'

http://douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html

I prefer no Tea

Stop Celebrating!! 1.0 is only a number!! Don't you get it?? The pedants have spoken.

There was no CCA for books, so how did they know you weren't picking up something horrible like Huckleberry Finn? What about going to a museum?

At the time about which we speak, these media weren't new anymore. Everyone has grown up with books and museums around. Thus nobody is seeing them as "bringers of the end of the world as we know it".

(But if you go back in history, you can pretty much find lots of examples of fundamentalists movement burning books to protect the population from their corrupting power)

Back in the comic book scare (or in other recent past scares like role playing games, rock music, etc.) or in the current video game scare, the considered media is new. Only a small fraction of the adult has grown up with them. The children (like always) are really interested into new things. Their parents just don't understand the media. They only see it from outside, and focus on the few negative points that are overhyped by the (classical) media : "beware kids believe so much in it that they confuse their fantasy and the real world", "warning, may contain uncovered nipple", etc.
They see the new media as a corruptor of the soul of their children and the bringer of the end of the civilisation as we know it.

After 50 years, video games will be considered the same way as books. Some other newest media-du-jour will be considered as too dangerous for children. And people in year 2060 will joke about how someone could consider some classical video game as something able to distort reality perception and provoke massive violence.

In short :
- books aren't new any more, they don't get censored much.
- video games are currently new, they'll get the fundie's ire.

For the same argument, read How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet by Douglas Adams
His born iwht/until 30years old/past 30y.o. categories pretty much sum this up.

For those who haven't read Douglas Adams's "The Salmon of Doubt" and the excellent essay on power supplies (a.k.a. little dongly things) here's a link: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html

I stand corrected! Honestly I assumed he was referring to Douglas Adams who was the writer of the Hitchhiker's Guide and Starship Titanic games. My bad.

<Speculation>

If not, if the difference is the same as time or length in a dimension that we aren't able to consciously manipulate or see, then it is possible that we all are floating in roughly the same direction, but since the differences are very small it's impossible to recognize if we are in the same sector as when we started our lives.

All this since there are in theory dimensions that we can't see. Why they are invisible is a different question. It may be that we all are mentally and physically unable to "see" the dimensions or that they are "curled up" or "flattened" in a way that makes them immeasurable. This is just about the same question as if you are on a board (like our universe) on a completely friction-less surface where there is no perception of wind and no reference points. You have every perception of everything on the board, but you can't tell if the board is still or if it's actually drifting at the speed of sound with the wind. If you can't even "see" outside the borders of the board (the universe) you can't really tell if there are other universes out there.

And it's not even possible to say if the laws of physics are general or specific for a universe. It may well be that the laws of physics are the same in any given universe, and that we just are inside a bead of glass. (watch the end sequence of Men in Black to catch this idea...). Just "infinity" is hard to catch up, but it's like living on the surface of a globe - where is the end of the world? And if you walk a straight distance on the surface of a globe large enough - will you ever come home again or will you even recognize that as home?

I think that there is no straight answer, and that Keith Laumer in the "WORLDS OF THE IMPERIUM" may have one approach, and Robert Anson Heinlein had another in "Number of the Beast" (among others), but I think that Douglas Adams got really to the point in the statement "There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.". At least his statement will explain a lot.

But this is still in the area of speculation, and I think that it's hard for the human race to get outside the universe. But I don't say that it's impossible - there may be a discovery around the corner waiting to happen!

</Speculation>

What is most important is that we try to keep our minds open - there may be a grain of truth in every theory that at first sight may appear ridiculous. Notice that the continental drift was considered completely outrageous by many until the end of the 1950's. The continental drift is now a widely accepted fact (but there may still be those that doesn't accept it).

Gandhi once said "Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it.", and this still applies. If you do nothing nothing will be accomplished, and you will be sure that you are unimportant, but if you do something you may have the force to provide a stepping stone for something that will prevail for generations to come.

The End.

A book like Hitchhikers Guide would make a poor game (IMO)

Actually, I thought the game was quite good.

and others agreed:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/mobyrank

More details
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(computer_game)
http://www.mobygames.com/game/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy
http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html

Seeing the massive strains placed on DVD by having FMV, higher textures & polys etc., this is going to be a thorn in their side for the lifetime of the 360.

I don't know if this will be a "thorn" or not. If you are buying the system purely for the graphics then maybe this will be a problem but the current games are already pretty realistic. Sure developers can continue to add realism but is that the primary reason to buy a game or is it more on the plot, play, etc...? Additionally, what about having multi-DVD games that require pre-loading content to the internal hard disk then running off DVD #1? Granted that that solution would not be typical for consoles but it would allow for more "content" if a player really wants it.

Look at the innovative controllers from the Wii and the lower graphic quality and see if everyone is concerned with adding higher textures & polygons. Texture and polygons are nice but I'll take a well thought out game design over graphics any day (of course I'm familiar with text based games too so maybe it's an age thing too - example: (Text Version) or (Semi-Graphical) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

Jim

Douglas Adams had a bit to say on this:

http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html

He makes the point that 12V is a very convenient voltage, in that we can get it from car batteries.

I can read a graphic description of horrible bestiality gang bang child rape and decapitation with a chain saw without having to show ID. But, 30 polygons try to do it doggy style, and it's the end of the world.

Douglas Adams (yes, that Douglas Admas) wrote a piece called "Dongly Things" (it's a bit dated). He agrees with you.

Ah, hell ... I could do that on an old TRaSh/80:

10 print "42"

Those who don't know what the hell the parent poster and I are talking about obviously has not read their Douglas Adams!

Yeah, but it seems he was just taking a bit of anger out on Europe.

If you though HHGTTG was fun you will just LOVE Beurocacy (http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/bur.html).

DNA proved his genius yet again by turning the limitations of the game into the game. I am reluctant to explain further here for fear of spoiling the amazing about of fun that can be had from unquestioningly (and quite intentionally) the most annoying game ever written.

p.s. HHGTTG can be played online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_nolan .shtml

p.p.s. DNA also proved Graphics Adventures could be just as annoying with Starship Titanic

For those who care: http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava. html

Well then, knock yourself out. I, however, am not touching that thing with a ten foot (yellow) bulldozer. ;-)

But what about the magazine publisher? What does she have to sell? What's she going to do now that she doesn't have stacks of glossy paper that people are going to want to hand over wads of greenies to acquire? Well, it all depends on what sort of business you think she's in. Lots of people are not in the business you think they're in. Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programs to their audience, they're in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers. (This is why the BBC has such a schizophrenic time - it's actually in a different business from all its competitors). And magazines are very similar: each actual sale across the newsagent's counter is partly an attempt to defray the ludicrous cost of manufacturing the damn thing but is also, more significantly, a very solid datum point. The full data set represents the size of the audience the publisher can deliver to its advertisers.

Now I regard magazine advertising as a big problem. I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text, which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little stream trickling its way through enormous glaring billboard-like pages all of which are clamoring to draw your attention to stuff you don't want; and the first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the coupons, sachets, packets, CDs and free labrador puppies which make them as fat an unwieldy as a grandmother's scrapbook. And then, when you are interested in buying something, you can't find any information about it because it was in last month's issue which you've now thrown away. I bought a new camera last month, and bought loads of camera magazines just to find ads and reviews for the models I was interested in. So I resent about 99% of the advertising I see, but occasionally I want it enough to actually buy the stuff. There's a major mismatch - something is ripe to fall out of the model.

If you browse around an online magazine (HotWired, for instance, springs unbidden to mind) you will find a few discreet little sponsor icons here and there which you choose to click on. You only get to see the proper ad if you're actually interested in it, and that ad will then lead you directly towards solid, helpful information about the product. It is of course much more valuable for advertisers to reach one interested potential customer than it is to irritate the hell out of ninety-nine others. Furthermore, the advertiser gets astonishingly precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one's interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one which catches people's attention will thrive. The advertisers pay the magazine for the opportunity to put links to their ads on popular pages of the magazine and - well, you see the way it works. It is, I am told by people with seriously raised eyebrows, astonishingly effective. The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive.

He was being a bit optimistic, perhaps, but he's basically summarized the way things stand, or that they seem to be heading. And this was first printed in the original UK issue of Wired magazine, so that was what, a decade ago? The whole essay, What have we got to lose?, is fascinating stuff. Go read it if you haven't come across it before -- you'll be glad you did.

But what about the magazine publisher? What does she have to sell? What's she going to do now that she doesn't have stacks of glossy paper that people are going to want to hand over wads of greenies to acquire? Well, it all depends on what sort of business you think she's in. Lots of people are not in the business you think they're in. Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programs to their audience, they're in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers. (This is why the BBC has such a schizophrenic time - it's actually in a different business from all its competitors). And magazines are very similar: each actual sale across the newsagent's counter is partly an attempt to defray the ludicrous cost of manufacturing the damn thing but is also, more significantly, a very solid datum point. The full data set represents the size of the audience the publisher can deliver to its advertisers.

Now I regard magazine advertising as a big problem. I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text, which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little stream trickling its way through enormous glaring billboard-like pages all of which are clamoring to draw your attention to stuff you don't want; and the first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the coupons, sachets, packets, CDs and free labrador puppies which make them as fat an unwieldy as a grandmother's scrapbook. And then, when you are interested in buying something, you can't find any information about it because it was in last month's issue which you've now thrown away. I bought a new camera last month, and bought loads of camera magazines just to find ads and reviews for the models I was interested in. So I resent about 99% of the advertising I see, but occasionally I want it enough to actually buy the stuff. There's a major mismatch - something is ripe to fall out of the model.

If you browse around an online magazine (HotWired, for instance, springs unbidden to mind) you will find a few discreet little sponsor icons here and there which you choose to click on. You only get to see the proper ad if you're actually interested in it, and that ad will then lead you directly towards solid, helpful information about the product. It is of course much more valuable for advertisers to reach one interested potential customer than it is to irritate the hell out of ninety-nine others. Furthermore, the advertiser gets astonishingly precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one's interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one which catches people's attention will thrive. The advertisers pay the magazine for the opportunity to put links to their ads on popular pages of the magazine and - well, you see the way it works. It is, I am told by people with seriously raised eyebrows, astonishingly effective. The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive.

He was being a bit optimistic, perhaps, but he's basically summarized the way things stand, or that they seem to be heading. And this was first printed in the original UK issue of Wired magazine, so that was what, a decade ago? The whole essay, What have we got to lose?, is fascinating stuff. Go read it if you haven't come across it before -- you'll be glad you did.

They are designed to cater to a group of people who are more creative and right brained.

You got that almost right. A lot of Apple's marketing dollars are aimed at people who think they are creative, or really want to be. It's amazing how many people seem to think that if they buy a Mac, suddenly they'll be all creative and stuff.

Being creative comes from within. Not from the computer you use. After all, 99.99% of the real 'creative types' are using Word and Photoshop, etc. anyway. For most of their day, they might as well be using Windows.

Somebody else summed it up much better than I can here - read the part about the graphics tablet.

(Aside: I have no particular hatred for Macs in general, it's just that my brain explodes out of my ears whenever I hear someone say "Yeah, and of course these guys will need Macs because they're creative...")

Return To Chaos - The Dungeon Master / Chaos Strikes Back Clone

DNA/Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom Adventure (online, java)

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (flash)

NetHack 3.4.3: Main Page

Jardinains! (fun breakout clone)

mono (excellent modern asteroids clone)

I went to one of this guy's marketing seminars which, while interesting in some areas, turned me off totally when he touched briefly on Internet marketing. He was advocating spamming (this was back in 2000) and saying it was OK.

He also gave out a CD with a couple of mailing lists on it and tools for bulk-sending. He claimed the lists were opt-in but a quick check revealed a few addresses that I knew weren't. Additionally, another company I knew that went tried to use the list to send updates about their products and almost had their link vigilanty'd into non-existance.

"Death's to good for them!"

Actually, I just don't see the need to add illustrations to the game. I loved it when it was released and it remains an enjoyable text-based game.

On the other hand, I am thrilled about the new remakes of my favorite early Ultima games . . . so I guess I can see both sides of the argument.

Maybe I wouldn't make such a good SlashPope after all. . . .

enjoy

Java Version, though you need a key. :)

Saw it this morning, actually, for the second time - first was a 95% complete cut similar to the one Simpson saw, the second was the final edit. I went along with my friends Tim Browse (his review) and Sean Sollé (his review) - all of us worked with Douglas at The Digital Village, a company we joined mainly because we were already massive Hitchhiker's fans. (If you need further credentials for me, look here.

We've been involved with the film at various stages. Thus, the disclaimer. However, please also be aware that none of us would be defending a film that crapped all over Douglas's work, especially since it was such a fundamental part of our youth.

Most (though not all) of the spoilers that Simpson reveals in his review are true. Yes, the lying-in-front-of-a-bulldozer dialogue has been cut short. Yes, several key Guide entries are missing. Yes, some of the dialogue isn't as funny as it could have been, and a couple of the gags are corny rather than sharp. (Note: I said a couple. It's nearly two hours of film, there are still tons of good lines in there.)

It's at this point that Simpson's opinion of the movie and mine diverge rather radically, because he seems to think that you can judge the film's merits almost purely on what's missing, in combination with things that don't appear as quite as he'd have liked them. Personally, I loved it to bits. It's not perfect, certainly, and I agree with a couple of his criticisms (though with about 5% of his severity). But I fundamentally feel that it's true to the spirit of Hitchhiker's in so many ways, not just through the storyline and script (which is far, far better than MJ would have you believe) but also through visuals and design that are utter genius, reimagining Douglas's creations in totally new ways that still seem completely in keeping with his intentions. It wears its Britishness in a far more open and interesting way than any previous version of the story - the Vogons, in particular, are a satire of traditional English bureaucracy that borders on Hogarthian.

I could go through MJ's review point-by-point and debunk all the stuff - and there's plenty of it - which he's blown wildly out of proportion, or which is based on utterly blinkered thinking, or which is just plain wrong. But then, that would be succumbing to exactly the kind of checklist mentality that he has, and god, how I hate that. He seems to just want the radio and TV series again, on a bigger budget, thus completely misunderstanding the demands that the different media have. His review reads like he went in with a notepad and took score through the film, subtracting ten points every time a line from the original went astray, and based his final opinion on that. As others have said in this thread, it's exactly the same kind of fanboy nonsense that had LoTR fans doomsaying before its release, and it's just bullshit.

If you're the kind of fan who works that way, who demands pure fidelity to the original and nothing but, then you won't like this movie. However, given that every incarnation of Hitchhiker's has been pretty different (and this movie is staunchly in the same tradition), I'd say that you're a fan who's utterly missing the point. Simpson, in loudly complaining that the film's plot veers wildly all over the place, makes me wonder which "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" he's a fan of, 'cos it certainly isn't one I've ever seen. His review is also the only negative one I've read from a major fan - contrast it with this review from Jens Kellenberg, who runs one of the biggest HHGTTG

I may not read much, but I read my Bible, ..

What created the earth?
-God.
What created god?
-..

What created the earth?
-The big bang
What created the big bang?
-Matter
What created lots of matter?
-physics
What created physics?
-..

I thought you were going to say So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish

This is a really big deal for the newspaper industry.

Consider:

The main source of revenue for newspapers (and some magazines) are subscriptions (which generally cover only maybe 20% of the cost of publication), mass market advertisements, and classified ads. Of these, classified ads are by far the most profitable and desirable: [a] they are very cheap to operate (the customers provide and even pay for all the content), and [b] they are the one form of advertisement that people want to see.

Think about that: all other forms of advertising are a nuisance that people go out of their way to ignore (witness TiVo, banner ad blockers, the ritual shaking of new magazines over recycle bins to drop all the inserts, etc), but sometimes, when a person is ready to buy something -- particularly something big -- they'll buy a whole newspaper or magazine just to pore over the real estate listings, or the automotove listings, or the ads in a photography magazine or the old "Computer Shopper", etc.

Most of the time, people hate ads, but sometimes, we want them so badly that we're willing to pay for them. The newspaper industry has been using this tendency to subsidize their business model for over a century now. They know full well that Craigslist is a threat to that model.

Consider:

About a year ago, NPR ran a piece on Craigslist. In this piece, they talked about the site, and how profitable it is, and how they manage this by using job listings for the San Francisco area to subsidize all their operating expenses still leaving a lot left over as profit. For this piece, NPR interviewed Lisa DeSisto, general manager of the Boston Globe's website, Boston.com, by way of comparing Craigslist to more traditional publications. The reporter claimed that DeSisto sees Craigslist as creating a new market for people that want to sell small things but don't want to pay for a traditional ad; for the soundbite in the piece, she says that "anyone who brings buyers and sellers is a threat, so yes, we absolutely view them as a threat". An honest remark, but a bland one.

A few weeks after that piece ran, I saw DeSisto, and mentioned having heard her on the radio recently. "Oh, that Craigslist thing? Yeah, they are going to kick our asses."

Much more direct and honest, eh?

But it's not just Boston.com, or the newspapers in San Francisco that the current piece talks about -- it's every market that Craigslist or someone like them goes into. Newspaper revenues have been going steadily downward for 20 or 30 years, and they're scrambling to keep up with the drain. They've more or less made their peace with the web, as it's still basically what they were doing all along, and the fact that you're reading their ads and their articles on a screen instead of a sheet of paper isn't all that important to them. But sites like Craigslist suggest that things are going to be much harder for them than they may have realized five or ten years ago: these sites may be able to keep their audience, but their ability to monetize that audience with classified ads is evaporating, compounding the decades-long slump in revenues from subscriptions and not offset by other forms of advertisement. If there is a way out of this, it doesn't seem to be obvious to anybody yet...

Notes:

• I used to work for Boston.com. Adjust salt intake accordingly.
• Some of Douglas Adams's essays touched on these topics nicely, in particular, What Have We Got To Lose?:

  "Over the last few years I've regularly been cornered by nervous publishers or broadcasters or journalists or film makers and asked about how I think computers will affect their various industries. For a long time most of them were desperately hoping for an answer that translated roughly into 'not very much'. ('People like the smell of

Some of the article discussion complains that leaving out the screen is a bad move, but is that necessarily the case?

Maybe not.

In the essay What have we got to lose? (as anthologized in _The Salmon of Doubt_), Douglas Adams gives a fascinating overview of all the cases where a clever new product was born not by adding some dazzling new feature, but by identifying properties that could easily be dispensed with.

Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out rather than thinking of something new to put in. The Sony Walkman, for instance, added nothing significantly new to the cassette player, it just left out the amplifier and speakers, thus creating a whole new way of listening to music and a whole new industry. Sony's new Handycam rather brilliantly leaves out the zoom function on the grounds that all a zoom does is cost money, add a lot of bulk and render every amateur video ever made unwatchable. (They might, while they're following this line of thought, consider marketing a record-only video player, and video companies might consider releasing movies that are actually recorded in fast forward mode.) The RISC chip works by the brilliant, life-enhancing principle of getting on with the easy stuff and leaving out all the difficult bits for someone else to deal with. (I know it's a little more complicated than that, but you have to admit, it's a damned attractive idea). A well-made dry martini works by the brilliant, life-enhancing principle of leaving out the martini.

So... an iPod with no screen. Well why not? How often do you actually look at the screen? Probably not very -- most of the time the device sits in your pocket, and a lot of people just control the thing through Apple's remote control, which of course has already dispensed with the screen, and has in fact left you with something that looks a lot like the device in the article's photo.

But okay, some of the complaints are right -- browsing through even a modest music collection can get tedious when the only controls you have are to skip forward & back by a track. Being able to see what's going on is nice, but do you have to be able to see it when every iPod listener is already ipso facto listening to the device? Think about it: this would be an excellent place to use some kind of audio / speech interface, and Apple certainly knows how to design a system that way, having had a speech interface built into Macs for many years now.

That may or may not be what Apple is up to here, but it seems like an obvious future direction for the suite of products. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, for example, a future version of the bundled headphones doubled as a microphone somehow, so that you could control the device by just saying "iPod, shuffle playlist Beatles", and it would go forth and do your bidding, and you didn't have to dig it out of your pocked or your backpack or whereever you keep yours stashed.

This may seem off-topic, but it is wihin the same genre and while it is great to see new Interactive Fiction (IF), if people are interested there are some of the true classics still out there on the net. While most IF afficianados have certainly played the IF version of 'Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy', if not it is available online at http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava. html . It's not always up, but it is available elsewhere and some links are provided on that webpage.

This is the game that introduced me to the genre, and I've enjoyed it ever since. Can be extremely frustrating at times, but it is rewarding and thought provoking. Hopefully this new beed has come up with some 'easter eggs' to reward creative typing!

I don't remember the Hebrew version much - read it years ago. But probably it's the same as you read. So you say they fixed the mathematical error in the translation? How nasty. ;)

And you're probably talking about those covers, right?