In a related story, Siemens announced that it would be changing its name to Xiemens. Also, Smith-Kline-Beecham will become Xmith-Kline-Beecham, Sony will become Xony, and this reporter, formerly known by the name Sammy Baby, will become Xammy Baby. All of the aforementioned organizations also announced plans to introduce new logos with lowercase letters, sans-serif fonts, and neat swooshes, kinda like the Nike logo.
Motion blur effects in video games, whether done through hardware or software (see old versions of Motorhead for the PC platform) are always exaggerated, mostly for the same reason that every game that came out in 1997 looked like it took place in a disco - because colored lighting had just become a common effect in games and no one had learned to use it with restraint. Maybe they will eventually. Keep your fingers crossed.
I'm a little surprised by the tone of your post, though. It seems like you're saying that the technology here sucks (or at least, the applicaiton thereof), but you predict that nVidia will sit on it. Maybe they will, but I suspect that since they own the patent now, they'll include it on future boards.
Interestingly, I think that this is one refinement that is going to see very little acceptance among people who are serious about winning. If you're really trying to up your frag count, you don't mind higher frame rates, or higher resolutions, or better texture management, but a feature that blurs details of the scene - that sounds like a really bad idea. That's why I stopped using motion blur in Motorhead, actually: what good is a feature that prevents you from being able to clearly identify an object you're about to crash into?
Re:I still like the pdQ Smartphone better...
on
Visor Phone Released
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· Score: 2
there didn't seem to be much in stating if it would work with other Palm style units or not
It won't. The Visorphone connects using the proprietary "Springboard Module" interface on the back of the unit - this feature is essentially what distinguishes Visors from Palms.
I'm not familiar with the pdQ device, but the Visor does have some pretty cool stuff going for it. In addition to running the vast majority of PalmOS software out there, it's... well, it's a phone, so even though you might not like the shape of the thing, you'd be able to play Dopewars while you talked to your mom.
The thing that bothers me about the Visorphone is the coverage, but plenty of people have mentioned that on/. already, so I'll leave it to them to discuss.
I don't really disagree with most of your post, but I think we're talking about two different things. You're saying that banner ads are never going to work because the expectations are wrong (ie, not like magazine ads) and because they're poorly targeted. I'm talking about what will have to take place in order to get banner ads merely to the level of print ads, which can't be clicked at all (barring some demonic CueCat like device), and can only be targeted to general readership.
However, I do disagree with your claim that ads don't work because the web is like a big phone book. Parts of the web are like a phone book - much of the rest is like a magazine, and ads in magazines seem to work just fine. My point wasn't that people will never respond to ads on the web, no matter how well targeted, polite, and well crafted they are. I suspect that people will respond to ads once they improve that far, although never to the "click-through" level advertisers seem to be looking for. And for even that gain, it'll be likely to take a new generation of display technology - and restraint on the part of advertisers - to get us there.
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Way back before Wired's online presence got bought out by Lycos, they experimented with this format. The interstitial ads were everywhere on the site, but were perhaps most annoying when trying to get to their "Threads" discussions (long since gone). There was an overwhelmingly negative response. One friend of mine went as far as to inject ads for his own nascent web design company into his posts on their discussion groups, then crow, "Let's see how you like it!"
The problem is that regardless of what streaming multimedia enthusiasts would have you believe, the web is most often used like a big phone book. Or a magazine. Sure, more often than not, the magazine is Hustler, but people are flipping through indexes (Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, AskJeeves, MySimon) to find the content they really want (porn, home electronics, news, music). It's not like a TV where we expect a certain show to be on a certain channel at a certain time, which is exactly what makes television ads work. Banner ads are, in some sense, more appropriate than interstitial ones because they look more like magazine ads.
The only reason magazine-style ads don't work in the online world is because display technology has such a long way to go. Think about the number, density, and (comperable) quality of the quarter or half page ads in the average color glossy monthly publication. Think about putting something like on a single web page, so that you could get ad and content on the screen simultaneously, without compromising the readability or navigability of either. It's enough to give a web designer fits.
Ironically, it looks like Wired has gone back to interstitial ads on their Hotwired site. Pity. It's a long time since that site has been useful for anything (other than as a portal to Webmonkey, Wired, or what appears to be their biggest advertiser, but I remember when there was some pretty good political and social commentary on that site. Sigh.
Fine, but were those temps offered a choice between full-time and temp work, or were the positions themselves only available to temps? If many more computer companies started offering only positions labelled as "temp" positions just to get away with providing fewer benefits, and it became increasingly harder and harder to find *any* computer jobs that weren't simply labelled as "temp" jobs, I'm sure you'd probably also agree that this doesn't sound like fair practice.
I agree with the general point - that companies hire temp workers to cut costs. But that's about as far as it goes. Microsoft can't simply turn all of their programming jobs into temp positions, because they'd have no continuity of staff - essentially, they'd have an army of short timers and would need to spend a signifigant portion of their time brininging the new hires up to speed.
Before the new policy decision, Microsoft could keep "temp" workers on the payroll for as long as they wanted, with no need to retrain them, and no need to hire them as full employees with benefits. That sucks.
I agree with you that MS will probably still continue to staff a bunch of temps, but at some level, that's their prerogative. The point is that this policy now makes it less adventageous for MS to hire as many temps, because they can't keep them indefinitely.
For those who are wondering, Microsoft's new temp rules (effective as of this past July) are that each temp is not allowed to return to work for 100 days following a one-year stretch of employment. Yes, that's insane.
Exactly what is your problem with this policy?
The lawsuit alleged (reasonably, IMO) that Microsoft kept "temporary" employees, including developers, in their stable for years at a time. This, the plaintiffs argued, is unfair, because after you've been working at a job for a year, it doesn't feel very damn temporary. They said they wanted Microsoft to treat temps like temps - by keeping them in temporary positions - and hiring the rest of their employees full time.
Microsoft could have (and still might yet) tried to dodge this bullet by shuffling temp employees around to different positions, claiming that the employee hadn't been in the same department long enough to qualify as a full-timer. Or, Microsoft could have terminated a temp's employment for a day and re-hired him the next day, then turn around and say "Oh, sure, he's been here since '97 - but he's been fired and re-hired three times since then.
So, considering that this policy is pretty much exactly what the lawsuit was trying to achieve - keeping temps temporary, and hiring them full time if they prove too valuable to let go - I'm a little at a loss trying to figure out what your problem with it is. Or do you think that temp positions should come with job security? I mean, for god's sake, they're temps. They're supposed to be short timers.
That's not likely to work either. Another site ("TotalNews.com"? I can't remember the name) once tried to make a quick buck by linking a whole bunch of other news sites in a frame and running ads - essentially, they were making a links page and using ad revenue off it. They were cease-and-desisted out of existence, if memory serves.
This is a government web site, not a sales site. The goal is complete and accurate information, not loading speed.
You had me until right about here. Load speed is a useability issue, not an asthetic issue, so government web site should be very much concerned with load speed. Besides which, most experts agree that large amounts of continuous text are difficult to read continuously, especially when scanning for specific pieces of information, and especially when viewed on a computer screen.
In situations like this, I think (personal opinion) that it's best to offer a "downloadable, monolithic" version of a document for printing, as well as a sectioned version for online viewing. I'm not going to get involved in an argument as to what the file type should be for a downloadable version, though.
You're wrong about serifs and readability. Sans-serif is easier to read when the words are unfamiliar (proper nouns, technical jargon, etc.). Serifed fonts are easier to read for normal text, so long as the reader understands the words that are being used.
Eh, whatever. Almighty Nielsen would disagree with you where screen fonts are concerned, but frankly I think that the enemy of the good for onscreen body font selection is the unconventional. The difference between serif fonts and sans serif fonts is minor enough for most that it's not really worth worrying about. Unless you pick some fsck'ed up font that the viewer doesn't have, or can't render properly. Or unless it's just plain ugly.
For what it's worth, I don't think this guy was trolling. Many *NIX admins don't even bother checking their vendors for security bulletins, preferring instead to rely on Bugtraq to get their news. To be perfectly honest, it's not a horrible strategy, considering activity on that list. And I don't think macpeep meant to suggest that the problems weren't fixed, but rather he was trying to say (incorrectly) that the fixes weren't accompanied by formal bulletins.
The problem is that Security Focus was copy-and-pasting those bulletins, according to the article. By any reasonable interpretation of copyright law, they'll have to stop that practice, even though I think it's in MS's clients' best interest to allow it to continue.
The pronunciations - done to differentiate miniseries from movie, but it detracts from the viewing experience. Its feydakin, boys, and I don't think "fih-die-kin" is a fair pronunciation of the term.
I had similar problems. That pronounciation reminded me of Yiddish, which is kinda neat, but not really appropriate to the series. I always assumed it was pronounced "fay-dah-KEEN". Also: pronouncing Chani as "CHAY-nee" made me think of Dick, which is not really what I was going for. I preferred "CHAH-nee," as per the Lynch produciton.
Series failed to stress just how dangerous Jessica was.
The Jessica of Herbert's books was, to put it mildly, a stone cold killah. After Paul's fight with Jamis, she calculates exactly what she needs to say to make sure Paul doesn't grow to develop a taste for blood, and says it, even though it hurts him. That line got cut from the SciFi production, which is a shame, because combined with everything else it made Jessica out to be just a protective mother figure, rather than a force to be reckoned with in her own right.
By the way - while the new Feyd played the part admirably, I have to say that I missed Sting. Not because he's a good actor, but because he was immediately believeable as a psychotic, spoiled, royal man-child.
This just proves that we need to have people on the boards of directors of every corporation in America to represent the interests of the people.
I couldn't disagree more. I believe it shows that each and every board of directors for every corporation in the world should be replace by efficient, highly advanced computers. Preferably, by just one computer, which will lead us all into the age of the machine. Long live our digital masters!
What the hell is this? Why should I get worked up about "IBM refusing to deal with the fact that FreeBSD will not boot on thier laptops?" IBM sells Linux, Solaris, and Windows computers, but nowhere did they ever say that they were going to provide BSD support for anything, let alone for their laptop line.
The support for open source operating systems you'll see from IBM is far and away better than any other large OEM, with the possible exception of SGI. If you want Linux laptop support, buy from The Linux Store, or Linux Laptops. Vote with your feet. Don't whine because IBM won't deliver support they never promised.
I seem to recall an article involving the relative difficulty of getting to a web site as compared to dialing a telephone. At the time, "web tone" was a hot buzzword. Many companies were using it to describe what they saw as the ideal user experience for the web - it should work as easily as a telephone.
Except that when you think about it, telephones are pretty damn hard to work. Buy a cheap US$20 phone in a department store. Plug it in. To dial, you have to lift the receiver, wait for the dial tone, then punch in this obscure sequence of ten (in the US, anyway) digits. If you don't know what they are, you have to look them up in a book, or call another number to ask someone. If you misdial, you run the risk of bothering some shmuck in his living room. Etc. The point of the article being, phones aren't as easy to use as everyone seems to give them credit for. We've just been using them since we were kids. Come to think of it - no kid I know who's been using the web for any period of time thinks it needs to be that much easier to use.
And of course, this neglects an obvious question: what happens if you have to change your phone number?
However, I clearly think that if Gore continues to go ahead with his lawyers in front of Democrat judges (who already have rewritten the law, in effect changing the rules of the game after the ball has been put in play), he's going to destroy his party.
Speaking as a Democrat who voted for Gore, I have to say that at this point I just wish he'd concede the election. Not because I don't think he has a case, but because if he wins, he will hold the most bitterly resented presidency in the history of the United States.
Gore going any further proves that Gore thinks more of himself than the country to continue to be the cause of damaging faith in the Constitution, law, and fairness. And he is the SOLE cause of all this. Some day, when less biased historians write of this era will paint this election and Gore's actions as the final chapter of the corrupt Clinton machine.
I suspect that history will not be so unkind to Gore. Remember that this is a man whose entire life has revolved around politics, whose parents were planning his eventual run for the Presidency while he was in his early teens, and who has been a "party player" for as long as he's been in politics. Plus, I think he genuinely sees himself as trying to protect the country from Bad Stuff in the form of a President Bush sequel.
Finally - the name of Gore's lead attorney is David Boies (you're correct in that he also argued against Microsoft). But try to be objective about the case: is it just that it's specious, or is it just that you're arguing for the other side?
Take your MPAA example, which you misstate. R and X ratings are quite effective, and the MPAA very much does pay attention, but not for the purpose of deterring people (even minors) from seeing violence or sex in theaters. R and X ratings encourage viewership, since they assure hormonally empowered youths to see a movie which they might otherwise pass by.
You're correct in stating that production houses pay very strict attention to the rating they're hoping to find for their audience, but then you vastly oversimplify the matter by saying that X ratings encourage viewership. X ratings encourage viewership for an extremely limited audience, and in extremely limited venues, but no big-budget film will shoot for this rating because there's not enough of a return on the investment.
For example, when the MPAA saw the original cut of Eddie Murphy Raw, they stamped an X rating on it, which caused Murphy and Townshend to scramble back to the editing room trying to cut out some of the more "offensive" bits. Townshend claimed to be shocked at the original rating, considering that there's no violence or nudity in the piece (just a lot of cursing).
And, because I sense a value judgement in your tone that sets my teeth on edge: the majority of the people I know who use pornography (and tell me about it) are married and above the age of thirty, and some people go into the sex industry because they actually enjoy it.
Finally, I suspect that your general point about the censored web site becoming more attractive to the surfer is just wrong, for two reasons. First reason: it's so damn easy to find porn on the Internet. Very rarely will someone care whether one site or another is censored, just so long as he can get to any of them, since the average web surfer has the attention span of a junebug and similar site loyalty. It might make the surfer more likely to seek out pornography in general - if he's, say, twelve - but otherwise, it's just yet another site that NetNanny (or whatever) blocks. The second reason: censorware tends to block so many sites incorrectly (false positives) that few people will pay attention to yet another blocked page.
I won't do the gruntwork of going to Google and searching for "John Timoney bicycle attack" for you, since it's not really all that hard. Plenty of people were arrested, many of them for the flimsiest of reasons, but only one was accused of chucking a bicycle at a cop, and other than your distrust of police in general, you don't seem to cite any reason to think that this incident didn't happen exactly as described.
With that said, I agree almost completely with the last paragraph of your post.
I live in the greater Philadelphia area. While protesters and activists like Sellers have my sympathies (and the mistaken-as-protester bystanders even more so), the courts were really in a bind. Many of the protesters who were being held refused to even divluge their actual names. How can a defense attorney make an argument that a client isn't a flight risk when he won't even give his name? Others took their clothes off while incarcerated and refused to comply with officer's instructions to move (by going limp), and then railed loudly at seeing cops "dragging limp naked protesters from their cells."
Finally, I'd prefer not to hear arguments that all of the protesters were exercising their right to assemble, or even engaging in simple civil disobedience. Some of them were turning over parked cars and assaulting police officers. I hate that the police and judicial system here seemed so ready to throw people in lockup, but given the situation, I can't really blame them.
The way in which the overvaluation of tech stocks affected me most was that people I meet who aren't familiar with computers keep going, "So. You're in computers. Are you rich?" And I would say, "No. I work for a university." And they'd say, "Oh." And that was pretty much the extent of their interest.
You could argue that "everybody knows that www.w3c.org means http://www.w3c.org". That's true. Except that some programmer will assume that therefore "www.w3c.org" is a valid URL, and he will break interoperability between his program and another program which is expecting a real URL. If Amaya's job is to be strictly correct, then it must do this for URLs too.
Respectfully, this is bullshit. I expect end-users to react with some degree of confusion to the distinction between a hostname and a URL. I do not expect it of programmers, and if a programmer can't get over something that most people learn in "HTML for Complete Imbeciles," (s)he should power down and back away from the computer slowly.
Slashdot Mirror
Poop. You know, I forgot about that. That's exactly the sort of shoddy fact-checking that's gonna get me fired one of these days.
(Actually, SKB/GSK is a huge employer of tech folks in this area of PA. I really should know this.)
In a related story, Siemens announced that it would be changing its name to Xiemens. Also, Smith-Kline-Beecham will become Xmith-Kline-Beecham, Sony will become Xony, and this reporter, formerly known by the name Sammy Baby, will become Xammy Baby. All of the aforementioned organizations also announced plans to introduce new logos with lowercase letters, sans-serif fonts, and neat swooshes, kinda like the Nike logo.
Motion blur effects in video games, whether done through hardware or software (see old versions of Motorhead for the PC platform) are always exaggerated, mostly for the same reason that every game that came out in 1997 looked like it took place in a disco - because colored lighting had just become a common effect in games and no one had learned to use it with restraint. Maybe they will eventually. Keep your fingers crossed.
I'm a little surprised by the tone of your post, though. It seems like you're saying that the technology here sucks (or at least, the applicaiton thereof), but you predict that nVidia will sit on it. Maybe they will, but I suspect that since they own the patent now, they'll include it on future boards.
Interestingly, I think that this is one refinement that is going to see very little acceptance among people who are serious about winning. If you're really trying to up your frag count, you don't mind higher frame rates, or higher resolutions, or better texture management, but a feature that blurs details of the scene - that sounds like a really bad idea. That's why I stopped using motion blur in Motorhead, actually: what good is a feature that prevents you from being able to clearly identify an object you're about to crash into?
It won't. The Visorphone connects using the proprietary "Springboard Module" interface on the back of the unit - this feature is essentially what distinguishes Visors from Palms.
I'm not familiar with the pdQ device, but the Visor does have some pretty cool stuff going for it. In addition to running the vast majority of PalmOS software out there, it's... well, it's a phone, so even though you might not like the shape of the thing, you'd be able to play Dopewars while you talked to your mom.
The thing that bothers me about the Visorphone is the coverage, but plenty of people have mentioned that on /. already, so I'll leave it to them to discuss.
I don't really disagree with most of your post, but I think we're talking about two different things. You're saying that banner ads are never going to work because the expectations are wrong (ie, not like magazine ads) and because they're poorly targeted. I'm talking about what will have to take place in order to get banner ads merely to the level of print ads, which can't be clicked at all (barring some demonic CueCat like device), and can only be targeted to general readership.
However, I do disagree with your claim that ads don't work because the web is like a big phone book. Parts of the web are like a phone book - much of the rest is like a magazine, and ads in magazines seem to work just fine. My point wasn't that people will never respond to ads on the web, no matter how well targeted, polite, and well crafted they are. I suspect that people will respond to ads once they improve that far, although never to the "click-through" level advertisers seem to be looking for. And for even that gain, it'll be likely to take a new generation of display technology - and restraint on the part of advertisers - to get us there.
Item #5528252355
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Way back before Wired's online presence got bought out by Lycos, they experimented with this format. The interstitial ads were everywhere on the site, but were perhaps most annoying when trying to get to their "Threads" discussions (long since gone). There was an overwhelmingly negative response. One friend of mine went as far as to inject ads for his own nascent web design company into his posts on their discussion groups, then crow, "Let's see how you like it!"
The problem is that regardless of what streaming multimedia enthusiasts would have you believe, the web is most often used like a big phone book. Or a magazine. Sure, more often than not, the magazine is Hustler, but people are flipping through indexes (Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, AskJeeves, MySimon) to find the content they really want (porn, home electronics, news, music). It's not like a TV where we expect a certain show to be on a certain channel at a certain time, which is exactly what makes television ads work. Banner ads are, in some sense, more appropriate than interstitial ones because they look more like magazine ads.
The only reason magazine-style ads don't work in the online world is because display technology has such a long way to go. Think about the number, density, and (comperable) quality of the quarter or half page ads in the average color glossy monthly publication. Think about putting something like on a single web page, so that you could get ad and content on the screen simultaneously, without compromising the readability or navigability of either. It's enough to give a web designer fits.
Ironically, it looks like Wired has gone back to interstitial ads on their Hotwired site. Pity. It's a long time since that site has been useful for anything (other than as a portal to Webmonkey, Wired, or what appears to be their biggest advertiser, but I remember when there was some pretty good political and social commentary on that site. Sigh.
I agree with the general point - that companies hire temp workers to cut costs. But that's about as far as it goes. Microsoft can't simply turn all of their programming jobs into temp positions, because they'd have no continuity of staff - essentially, they'd have an army of short timers and would need to spend a signifigant portion of their time brininging the new hires up to speed.
Before the new policy decision, Microsoft could keep "temp" workers on the payroll for as long as they wanted, with no need to retrain them, and no need to hire them as full employees with benefits. That sucks.
I agree with you that MS will probably still continue to staff a bunch of temps, but at some level, that's their prerogative. The point is that this policy now makes it less adventageous for MS to hire as many temps, because they can't keep them indefinitely.
Exactly what is your problem with this policy?
The lawsuit alleged (reasonably, IMO) that Microsoft kept "temporary" employees, including developers, in their stable for years at a time. This, the plaintiffs argued, is unfair, because after you've been working at a job for a year, it doesn't feel very damn temporary. They said they wanted Microsoft to treat temps like temps - by keeping them in temporary positions - and hiring the rest of their employees full time.
Microsoft could have (and still might yet) tried to dodge this bullet by shuffling temp employees around to different positions, claiming that the employee hadn't been in the same department long enough to qualify as a full-timer. Or, Microsoft could have terminated a temp's employment for a day and re-hired him the next day, then turn around and say "Oh, sure, he's been here since '97 - but he's been fired and re-hired three times since then.
So, considering that this policy is pretty much exactly what the lawsuit was trying to achieve - keeping temps temporary, and hiring them full time if they prove too valuable to let go - I'm a little at a loss trying to figure out what your problem with it is. Or do you think that temp positions should come with job security? I mean, for god's sake, they're temps. They're supposed to be short timers.
That's not likely to work either. Another site ("TotalNews.com"? I can't remember the name) once tried to make a quick buck by linking a whole bunch of other news sites in a frame and running ads - essentially, they were making a links page and using ad revenue off it. They were cease-and-desisted out of existence, if memory serves.
In situations like this, I think (personal opinion) that it's best to offer a "downloadable, monolithic" version of a document for printing, as well as a sectioned version for online viewing. I'm not going to get involved in an argument as to what the file type should be for a downloadable version, though.
Eh, whatever. Almighty Nielsen would disagree with you where screen fonts are concerned, but frankly I think that the enemy of the good for onscreen body font selection is the unconventional. The difference between serif fonts and sans serif fonts is minor enough for most that it's not really worth worrying about. Unless you pick some fsck'ed up font that the viewer doesn't have, or can't render properly. Or unless it's just plain ugly.
For what it's worth, I don't think this guy was trolling. Many *NIX admins don't even bother checking their vendors for security bulletins, preferring instead to rely on Bugtraq to get their news. To be perfectly honest, it's not a horrible strategy, considering activity on that list. And I don't think macpeep meant to suggest that the problems weren't fixed, but rather he was trying to say (incorrectly) that the fixes weren't accompanied by formal bulletins.
The problem is that Security Focus was copy-and-pasting those bulletins, according to the article. By any reasonable interpretation of copyright law, they'll have to stop that practice, even though I think it's in MS's clients' best interest to allow it to continue.
I had similar problems. That pronounciation reminded me of Yiddish, which is kinda neat, but not really appropriate to the series. I always assumed it was pronounced "fay-dah-KEEN". Also: pronouncing Chani as "CHAY-nee" made me think of Dick, which is not really what I was going for. I preferred "CHAH-nee," as per the Lynch produciton.
The Jessica of Herbert's books was, to put it mildly, a stone cold killah. After Paul's fight with Jamis, she calculates exactly what she needs to say to make sure Paul doesn't grow to develop a taste for blood, and says it, even though it hurts him. That line got cut from the SciFi production, which is a shame, because combined with everything else it made Jessica out to be just a protective mother figure, rather than a force to be reckoned with in her own right.
By the way - while the new Feyd played the part admirably, I have to say that I missed Sting. Not because he's a good actor, but because he was immediately believeable as a psychotic, spoiled, royal man-child.
I couldn't disagree more. I believe it shows that each and every board of directors for every corporation in the world should be replace by efficient, highly advanced computers. Preferably, by just one computer, which will lead us all into the age of the machine. Long live our digital masters!
What the hell is this? Why should I get worked up about "IBM refusing to deal with the fact that FreeBSD will not boot on thier laptops?" IBM sells Linux, Solaris, and Windows computers, but nowhere did they ever say that they were going to provide BSD support for anything, let alone for their laptop line.
The support for open source operating systems you'll see from IBM is far and away better than any other large OEM, with the possible exception of SGI. If you want Linux laptop support, buy from The Linux Store, or Linux Laptops. Vote with your feet. Don't whine because IBM won't deliver support they never promised.
An informal meeting held over lunch (as in, "brown bag lunch").
Corrected link: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20001128/tc/will_p hone_numbers_replace_urls__1.html
I seem to recall an article involving the relative difficulty of getting to a web site as compared to dialing a telephone. At the time, "web tone" was a hot buzzword. Many companies were using it to describe what they saw as the ideal user experience for the web - it should work as easily as a telephone.
Except that when you think about it, telephones are pretty damn hard to work. Buy a cheap US$20 phone in a department store. Plug it in. To dial, you have to lift the receiver, wait for the dial tone, then punch in this obscure sequence of ten (in the US, anyway) digits. If you don't know what they are, you have to look them up in a book, or call another number to ask someone. If you misdial, you run the risk of bothering some shmuck in his living room. Etc. The point of the article being, phones aren't as easy to use as everyone seems to give them credit for. We've just been using them since we were kids. Come to think of it - no kid I know who's been using the web for any period of time thinks it needs to be that much easier to use.
And of course, this neglects an obvious question: what happens if you have to change your phone number?
Speaking as a Democrat who voted for Gore, I have to say that at this point I just wish he'd concede the election. Not because I don't think he has a case, but because if he wins, he will hold the most bitterly resented presidency in the history of the United States.
I suspect that history will not be so unkind to Gore. Remember that this is a man whose entire life has revolved around politics, whose parents were planning his eventual run for the Presidency while he was in his early teens, and who has been a "party player" for as long as he's been in politics. Plus, I think he genuinely sees himself as trying to protect the country from Bad Stuff in the form of a President Bush sequel.
Finally - the name of Gore's lead attorney is David Boies (you're correct in that he also argued against Microsoft). But try to be objective about the case: is it just that it's specious, or is it just that you're arguing for the other side?
You're correct in stating that production houses pay very strict attention to the rating they're hoping to find for their audience, but then you vastly oversimplify the matter by saying that X ratings encourage viewership. X ratings encourage viewership for an extremely limited audience, and in extremely limited venues, but no big-budget film will shoot for this rating because there's not enough of a return on the investment.
For example, when the MPAA saw the original cut of Eddie Murphy Raw, they stamped an X rating on it, which caused Murphy and Townshend to scramble back to the editing room trying to cut out some of the more "offensive" bits. Townshend claimed to be shocked at the original rating, considering that there's no violence or nudity in the piece (just a lot of cursing).
And, because I sense a value judgement in your tone that sets my teeth on edge: the majority of the people I know who use pornography (and tell me about it) are married and above the age of thirty, and some people go into the sex industry because they actually enjoy it.
Finally, I suspect that your general point about the censored web site becoming more attractive to the surfer is just wrong, for two reasons. First reason: it's so damn easy to find porn on the Internet. Very rarely will someone care whether one site or another is censored, just so long as he can get to any of them, since the average web surfer has the attention span of a junebug and similar site loyalty. It might make the surfer more likely to seek out pornography in general - if he's, say, twelve - but otherwise, it's just yet another site that NetNanny (or whatever) blocks. The second reason: censorware tends to block so many sites incorrectly (false positives) that few people will pay attention to yet another blocked page.
I won't do the gruntwork of going to Google and searching for "John Timoney bicycle attack" for you, since it's not really all that hard. Plenty of people were arrested, many of them for the flimsiest of reasons, but only one was accused of chucking a bicycle at a cop, and other than your distrust of police in general, you don't seem to cite any reason to think that this incident didn't happen exactly as described.
With that said, I agree almost completely with the last paragraph of your post.
Well written.
I live in the greater Philadelphia area. While protesters and activists like Sellers have my sympathies (and the mistaken-as-protester bystanders even more so), the courts were really in a bind. Many of the protesters who were being held refused to even divluge their actual names. How can a defense attorney make an argument that a client isn't a flight risk when he won't even give his name? Others took their clothes off while incarcerated and refused to comply with officer's instructions to move (by going limp), and then railed loudly at seeing cops "dragging limp naked protesters from their cells."
Finally, I'd prefer not to hear arguments that all of the protesters were exercising their right to assemble, or even engaging in simple civil disobedience. Some of them were turning over parked cars and assaulting police officers. I hate that the police and judicial system here seemed so ready to throw people in lockup, but given the situation, I can't really blame them.
The way in which the overvaluation of tech stocks affected me most was that people I meet who aren't familiar with computers keep going, "So. You're in computers. Are you rich?" And I would say, "No. I work for a university." And they'd say, "Oh." And that was pretty much the extent of their interest.
Q: Are you the Judean People's Front?
A: Fuck off! Judean People's Front... we're the People's Front of Judea!
Respectfully, this is bullshit. I expect end-users to react with some degree of confusion to the distinction between a hostname and a URL. I do not expect it of programmers, and if a programmer can't get over something that most people learn in "HTML for Complete Imbeciles," (s)he should power down and back away from the computer slowly.