It was not my intention to come across as superior or smug. I just find it interesting that there's so much intrigue surrounding a marketing medium. TV was designed to make money by selling ads. Why is it so shocking that a network would use technology to market their brand wherever possible?
Oh, and by the way, when it comes to irritating people with delusions of grandeur and smugness, nothing compares to computer geeks who think they are so superior then just about everyone and then whine, whine, whine about how they can't get a girlfriend. Am I ranting?
And for the record, I don't have a shitty TV, I have a very nice one.:p
...if you don't watch TV. Not that I'm making any judgement on anyone who does watch TV but since I don't, the whole "ethical dilemma" is wholly lost on me.
I have a TV with no antennae so I can't get any stations even if I wanted to and I have never owned cable. I do have a VCR (still saving up for the DVD player) to watch movies and occasionally have friends tape episodes of Simpsons or XFiles for me. If I to veg out in front of a screen, it's a computer monitor.
Does Linus give it a seal of approval? That's what I want to know.
- tokengeekgrrl
Re:Mixing different ideas
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 2
I cannot see any threat to either of the rights of free speech or free press in the combination of these firms.
Your're right - there is no threat in purely philosophical terms; however, the reality of free speech and press has nothing to do with the ability to speak and everything to do with the ability to be heard.
If massive mega-companies own and restrict the mediums that transmit free speech, the only people who have real free speech are the ones the mega-companies allow to broadcast.
What i can't figure out is why everyone hates AOL so much?
I had an AOL account, for the duration of the free trial month, in order to test a web application on the AOL browser. The application kept breaking because AOL would not address the bugs its browser had - yes, I contacted them directly to give them bug reports - so I continued to receive complaints from AOL users. I told them to complain to AOL but nothing changed. There are many websites that have to maintain separate pages because AOL will not adhere to any quality standards in their product. That's my most compelling reason for hating them. Then there's the fact that the very nature of their service, sequestering their subscribers in a contained and antiseptic environment, is the very antithesis of the internet.
As for Time Warner, there's not much to say. They're just a whorehouse, pimping shoddy and sensationalist "journalism." AOL already uses much of Time Warner's media so there is no gain in content access unless Time Warner decides to restrict their content to AOL.
AOL and Time Warner, 2 tasteless companies that have less taste together.
Well, I'll go ahead and make the claim that since ZDNET and MSNBC have a "Content Exchange Alliance," they cannot possibly be objective in their evaluation.
It's more than a pretty good question - it's a really disturbing question. I would think that in New York, of all places, the police have more important problems to address, like say...oh actual crimes, as opposed to playing gopher for a big corporation who has plenty of money to hire and send someone to fix the company's error.
I guess Mayor Guiliani is just as bad as Mayor Willie Brown here in San Francisco when it comes to catering to big companies at the expense of the taxpaying public. (Please excuse the rag-on-my-mayor tangent - I'm in a really blah mood...must be Monday).
...will Compaq rise to the quality of Be or will Be be dragged down to the mediocrity of Compaq?
I associate Be with a high quality product, but I am not so inclined with Compaq. I have always had performance problems with Compaq and am wary of the marriage.
You have got to be kidding me. There was a design-your-own CD web site, that I believe no longer exists, started by the company Oompala years ago and long before CDNOW ever started offering custom CDs.
This ranks up there with the guy who tried to patent html forms.
tokengeekgrrl
The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him Is aristocracy.
Or atleast that is what my experience has been. The people controlling the money, aka non-tech saavy management, fall for the marketing line, buy up Microsoft NT serves and various third-party applications that are buggy and completely incompatible with everything else, hand it off to the IT dept and say "make it work or else." When a tech tries to explain why it won't work, management can't relate because they don't really understand how any of it works in the first place and run back to the marketing people who tells management everything they want to hear so management comes down on the techie for not being competent.
I wish this was a fairy tale but that is precisely what happened at my last job. A brilliant programmer was reprimanded by management because he couldn't make a NT/Access-based application work with the UNIX/Informix Sgi server. He quit. Then I had the pleasure of having to deal with management spending $50,000 on a BETA NT-based media search engine and was told to "make it work" with the UNIX/sgi web servers. The software was buggy and futile and was not designed to do what we wanted it to nevermind how inefficient it is to have a search engine outside of the database from which the web sites were driven. I told my manager that and he told me that wasn't acceptable and I had to make it work or he would look bad and get in trouble for pushing for the software purchase. I wasted more time on it as people continued to scream at me for a functional search engine that didn't crash. I ended up building a search engine into the Informix database on my own that worked great and then got reprimanded by my manager for not keeping him in the loop. Needless to say, I don't work there anymore, the NT-based search engine is no longer being used and my database search engine is still online.
Moral: non-tech people should not be making tech purchasing decisions.
- tokengeekgrrl
The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him Is aristocracy.
I'm just a bit paranoid about the government being influenced by any group that's large enough to screw the internet over a bit more. I am, too. I received complaints from this one person about how the agency web site wasn't fully ADA compliant for MONTHS. I explained to this individual that alot of what we put up are whole documents and we are not going to convert them all into HTML just to satisfy a few people. I know that on the state level, there is a focused awareness that the value and usefulness of the internet is directly proportional to the amount of restrictions it has on it. I just hope the feds know that.
I'm up for the XML idea myself --... That's the way to go. I have already attended some XML seminars. We are definitely making plans to move towards XMLifying everything.
But the gov't often times do have inappropriate interfance of private businesses... I know - it's really unfortunate. I work for an agency that supports the state judiciary, focusing on developing case management systems, efiling, and increasing public access to public court information, (via web applications in order to relieve the duties on the overworked court clerks), and have nothing to do with the legislature that passes such intrusive laws.
Peace.
tokengeekgrrl
The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him Is aristocracy.
I think it's up to the site whether they want to have it easily accessible by many groups, not the government. Just seems like YAGRI (Yet Another Government Regulation on the Internet)
1) The ADA was inspired by a citizens group who lobbied for its passage so this is not the standard government interference scenario.
2) The National Federation of the Blind, not the government, has filed the lawsuit.
3) I work on a state government web site and we have ALT tags on everything and are almost fully ADA compliant; however, full compliance is not an absolute requirement. We have to achieve compliance to the best of our ability which means if we don't have the money, time or resources to maintain it, we are not obligated to do so although we have done the best we can.
Given that government state agencies are only required to be in compliance as is within their capability, I would think it could and should be aruged that many commerical web sites depend on technology that cannot be reduced into text elements that is required by the screen converters the blind uses and to force them to do so would be inappropriate interference of private business.
Just my 3 cents.
- tokengeekgrrl
The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him Is aristocracy.
Ahhh...someone who has some understanding as to how government works. While I understand the concern over government involvement, I believe that the state agency I work for should be using as much open source technology, wherever needed and whenever possible. Recently, we migrated the web servers from Netscape to Apache - woohoo! - and it's amazing how much more stable and easier to maintain it is, not to mention cheaper since there are no exorbitant licensing issues to negotiate!
We are also working towards incorporating XML to keep our data portable. Currently, we are running Solaris but I'd like to move to Linux in the future because open source software is cheaper and easier to maintain. We are continually understaffed in IT and can't afford to be supporting various flavors of 3rd party proprietary software. With open source software, I can go online and find answers to questions if needed as opposed to being forced into a (substandard) support contract with a software company. So, open source software really is the best way for government to go, from my perspective, and should be given preference just based upon cost, maintenance and resource issues.
Just my 2 cents.
tokengeekgrrl
The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him Is aristocracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and by the way, when it comes to irritating people with delusions of grandeur and smugness, nothing compares to computer geeks who think they are so superior then just about everyone and then whine, whine, whine about how they can't get a girlfriend. Am I ranting?
And for the record, I don't have a shitty TV, I have a very nice one. :p
Regards.
- tokengeekgrrl
I have a TV with no antennae so I can't get any stations even if I wanted to and I have never owned cable. I do have a VCR (still saving up for the DVD player) to watch movies and occasionally have friends tape episodes of Simpsons or XFiles for me. If I to veg out in front of a screen, it's a computer monitor.
- tokengeekgrrl
- tokengeekgrrl
Your're right - there is no threat in purely philosophical terms; however, the reality of free speech and press has nothing to do with the ability to speak and everything to do with the ability to be heard.
If massive mega-companies own and restrict the mediums that transmit free speech, the only people who have real free speech are the ones the mega-companies allow to broadcast.
- tokengeekgrrl
I had an AOL account, for the duration of the free trial month, in order to test a web application on the AOL browser. The application kept breaking because AOL would not address the bugs its browser had - yes, I contacted them directly to give them bug reports - so I continued to receive complaints from AOL users. I told them to complain to AOL but nothing changed. There are many websites that have to maintain separate pages because AOL will not adhere to any quality standards in their product. That's my most compelling reason for hating them. Then there's the fact that the very nature of their service, sequestering their subscribers in a contained and antiseptic environment, is the very antithesis of the internet.
As for Time Warner, there's not much to say. They're just a whorehouse, pimping shoddy and sensationalist "journalism." AOL already uses much of Time Warner's media so there is no gain in content access unless Time Warner decides to restrict their content to AOL.
AOL and Time Warner, 2 tasteless companies that have less taste together.
- tokengeekgrrl
Oh, and merry christmas.
- tokengeekgrrl
I guess Mayor Guiliani is just as bad as Mayor Willie Brown here in San Francisco when it comes to catering to big companies at the expense of the taxpaying public. (Please excuse the rag-on-my-mayor tangent - I'm in a really blah mood...must be Monday).
- tokengeekgrrl
I associate Be with a high quality product, but I am not so inclined with Compaq. I have always had performance problems with Compaq and am wary of the marriage.
- tokengeekgrrl
This ranks up there with the guy who tried to patent html forms.
tokengeekgrrl
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
I wish this was a fairy tale but that is precisely what happened at my last job. A brilliant programmer was reprimanded by management because he couldn't make a NT/Access-based application work with the UNIX/Informix Sgi server. He quit. Then I had the pleasure of having to deal with management spending $50,000 on a BETA NT-based media search engine and was told to "make it work" with the UNIX/sgi web servers. The software was buggy and futile and was not designed to do what we wanted it to nevermind how inefficient it is to have a search engine outside of the database from which the web sites were driven. I told my manager that and he told me that wasn't acceptable and I had to make it work or he would look bad and get in trouble for pushing for the software purchase. I wasted more time on it as people continued to scream at me for a functional search engine that didn't crash. I ended up building a search engine into the Informix database on my own that worked great and then got reprimanded by my manager for not keeping him in the loop. Needless to say, I don't work there anymore, the NT-based search engine is no longer being used and my database search engine is still online.
Moral: non-tech people should not be making tech purchasing decisions.
- tokengeekgrrl
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
I am, too. I received complaints from this one person about how the agency web site wasn't fully ADA compliant for MONTHS. I explained to this individual that alot of what we put up are whole documents and we are not going to convert them all into HTML just to satisfy a few people. I know that on the state level, there is a focused awareness that the value and usefulness of the internet is directly proportional to the amount of restrictions it has on it. I just hope the feds know that.
I'm up for the XML idea myself -- ...
That's the way to go. I have already attended some XML seminars. We are definitely making plans to move towards XMLifying everything.
But the gov't often times do have inappropriate interfance of private businesses...
I know - it's really unfortunate. I work for an agency that supports the state judiciary, focusing on developing case management systems, efiling, and increasing public access to public court information, (via web applications in order to relieve the duties on the overworked court clerks), and have nothing to do with the legislature that passes such intrusive laws.
Peace.
tokengeekgrrl
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
1) The ADA was inspired by a citizens group who lobbied for its passage so this is not the standard government interference scenario.
2) The National Federation of the Blind, not the government, has filed the lawsuit.
3) I work on a state government web site and we have ALT tags on everything and are almost fully ADA compliant; however, full compliance is not an absolute requirement. We have to achieve compliance to the best of our ability which means if we don't have the money, time or resources to maintain it, we are not obligated to do so although we have done the best we can.
Given that government state agencies are only required to be in compliance as is within their capability, I would think it could and should be aruged that many commerical web sites depend on technology that cannot be reduced into text elements that is required by the screen converters the blind uses and to force them to do so would be inappropriate interference of private business.
Just my 3 cents.
- tokengeekgrrl
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
We are also working towards incorporating XML to keep our data portable. Currently, we are running Solaris but I'd like to move to Linux in the future because open source software is cheaper and easier to maintain. We are continually understaffed in IT and can't afford to be supporting various flavors of 3rd party proprietary software. With open source software, I can go online and find answers to questions if needed as opposed to being forced into a (substandard) support contract with a software company. So, open source software really is the best way for government to go, from my perspective, and should be given preference just based upon cost, maintenance and resource issues.
Just my 2 cents.
tokengeekgrrl
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.