What happened to the wave of business books a few years back about the importance of putting the customer first, and showing that the companies that just concentrated on satisfying the customer--actually, I think "delighting, not just satisfying" was one of the phrases--consistently outperformed the companies that engaged in all the clever-clever manipulation and chiseling and trickery?
If people want to record the stream, let 'em.
They've been doing it for decades, folks. I remember a guy in college whose nickname was "tapes" because he had a huge collection of tapes of popular music recorded off the air. At 1-7/8 ips on open-reel tapes on an analog tape recorder, which dates me and the period.
People always have been able to do stuff like that.
And it never amounts to a hill of beans, in terms of hurting artists or recording companies or whatever, because it's just too much work organizing the recordings and editing the stream to find the starting and stopping points and labelling the tape boxes. And, these days, either accepting handwritten scribbled labels or futzing some more looking for cover art or pictures of the artist or editing CD labels or formatting LightScribe text.
And it tends to be a lifecycle thing. You do that when you're in college and short on cash. People who are willing to put that much work into it are also people who are deeply committed to listening to music and sooner or later most of them get a job and a salary and suddenly they no longer have six hours to edit and organize recording but they do have a credit card and money to buy CDs or iTunes downloads or whatever.
It's like worrying about the possibility that someone could pay for one newspaper but take two out of the vending box. Does it ever happen? Sure. Does it make it worth building a complicated, more expensive vending box? Obviously not, and the newspaper folks obviously understand the tradeoff.
If the music companies just focussed on pleasing the customer, they'd do a lot better than they're doing now. It almost seems as if they're more concerned about the sheer abstract principle of the thing ("but they're robbing me!") than about dollars and cents. They're certainly not showing any concern for their customers.
At least they should be required to say WHY
on
False Copyright Claims
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I frequently use the ProQuest databases of newspaper story images, available courtesy of my public library. These are digitized page images. Those for The New York Times go cover 1851 to 2003; those for the Boston Globe, 1872 - 1923.
All of these, without exception, bear the notice "Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission."
In the case of articles published before 1923 (and don't you think it's interesting that the Globe cuts off at exactly 1923?) I completely fail to see how these can be anything other than a faithful reproduction of a work published in the United States before 1923.
Darn it, at the very least, if someone is going to claim copyright in something, they should be required to give an explicit statement of the legal basis for their claim. Maybe there's some way this material is copyrighted, but in the case of material that every university library guideline says is in the public domain, the burden of proof... or at least, the burden of saying why this is an exception to the general rule... should fall on the person making the assertion.
I think agree with your posting, beginning to end.
Two points: information about me is a valuable possession and I am entitled to give it to whom and when I wish... and have a legitimate beef when it is taken from me without my consent.
Your point about "secrets are not evenly distibuted" is well taken. The situation is, of course, very analogous to money or power or anything else of value. P
orgy may say "I got plenty of nothing, and nothing's plenty for me... Folks with plenty of plenty/Got a lock on their door/They're 'fraid somebody's a goin' to rob 'em while they're out a makin' more/What for?" But the people who say "I don't care about privacy, I have nothing to hide" probably have more secrets of more value than they realize. People who are willing to practice voluntary simplicity with respect to money or possessions are good people, but I would put stress on the word "voluntary." Don't take my money and tell me you're doing it for my own good. The same is true of personal information.
Second, I am more than willing to discard concealment to build trust. However, discarding concealment does not automatically build trust. There are people who are more than willing to use their strength to exploit weakness, and to take information (or power, or money) without giving back anything in exchange. I believe people like this are borderline-sociopathic and very rare. However... they do exist; 1%-of-the-population-rare, not 0.0001%-of-the-population-rare, and they frequently manage to get themselves into positions of authority.
Do power players show their cards to each other? Why not? Because a poker game is a (somewhat) adversarial situation, in which disclosing information give an advantage to your opponents, which they are likely to exploit.
A large number of human situations involve some degree of negotiation and are to some degree adversarial. Knowledge can be power, and knowledge can be money. You don't need to be a control freak to want to retain some degree of control.
Not that I expect to get the better of a car deal, but I still don't necessarily want the salesman to know how much money I can write a check for today, and he doesn't necessarily want me to know the financial state of the dealership or his sales goal for the month and how many cars he's sold.
You know things are getting bad when even supposedly technical types start to use this kind of language. In a few years we can expect to see serious techie-to-techie channels postings saying things like "The CPU went kerblooie" and "The disk became discombobulated" and "Don't apply this patch if you're not a real computer genius..."
The story really resonated with hackers, hobbyists, and computer enthusiasts--particularly those who were enthusiastic about the style of direct interactive computing... as pioneered by Project Whirlwind -> Tracy Licklider -> timesharing -> DEC OS -> hobbyist microcomputers... but were also familiar with IBM-style mainframe operating systems.
By 1982, there were beginning to be a lot of people who could relate to that kind of story, but still not enough to make a movie a box-office hit.
Dell's prices fluctuate more rapidly and more widely than the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Identical systems may vary by significant amounts depending on whether you talk to a "home office" or "small business" rep... or whether you talk to them on Tuesday or Wednesday... or whether you get the price on the Web or over the phone or in a mailing.
I'm not sure anyone knows what a Dell costs unless they are a business negotating a deal for a few thousand of them.
"Another analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray said he expects Apple to bring out iPods that resemble iPhone, which features such as a touch-sensitive screen, later this year. Such products would help stop iPhone eating into iPod sales. 'We believe the iPhone reveals much of what the iPod will soon be,' Munster said in a note to clients, 'iPods with some of the touchscreen features of the iPhone should lessen the impact of cannibalization.'"
Hold on a minute. In the first place, why would Apple we worried about a $500 or $600 iPhone "eating into iPod sales?"
That sounds like the sort of poisonous big-corporation bozo thinking. People that care more about their division than about either a) the customer, or b) the company as a whole. Like old-time GM, where Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac worried more about each other than about, say, high-quality foreign cars. It's the sort of thinking that leads to artificially holding back new products in order to "milk the cash cow" and extract the last dollar from the older product. To rationalized product lines with exactly seven price points.
That's not the way every company works (remember Digital introducing the MicroVAX II, knowing perfectly well that it wasn't going to "cannibalize" higher-end VAX sales, it was going to vaporize them?) And there's good evidence that it's not the way Apple works. A case in point would be the replacement of the iPod Mini, which was a popular, successful, and well-liked product, with the Nano. There's no evidence at all that Apple was worried about the Nano "cannibalizing" sales of the Mini!
The distance between the human ear and the human mouth is pretty well fixed... how can they make a one-piece phone much smaller than the iPhone? I just don't see it. Maybe a miniature version of a candlestick phone, with two pieces connected by a cord. Or perhaps a tiny Shuffle-like mouthpiece and a separate, tiny bluetooth earpiece?
And I'm not sure I see how they can make the thing more than incrementally cheaper.
They can't make the screen smaller without turning the iPhone into something like an ordinary cell phone. And then you don't get any of the breakthrough advantages of the iPhone user interface. It would just be a Motorola ROKR with an Apple logo and, possibly, better iPod functionality.
So far, Apple has been consistently good in avoiding the temptation to put the Apple brand on something that Apple fans like me would perceive to be a cheap piece of crap.
The iPod Shuffle is a good case in point. Before it came out, everyone was speculating that it would have a tiny, i.e. unusable screen (like some of the competitive.mp3 players). Instead, in both the older and newer Shuffles, Apple came out with a slick piece of industrial design that looks and feels like a quality product in a new category, not a cheap-and-cheesy version of an existing product, or a slightly-tarted-up version of a score of competitors' products.
I'm darned if I see how they can make a much smaller, cheaper iPhone without falling into that trap.
Which is more valuable, a Brahms symphony which took twenty years to write and lasts an hour......a carefully crafted pop tune (Cole Porter... Paul McCartney... Lieber and Stoller), which nevertheless takes at most months to write, lasts a few minutes......or a jazz improvisation created in the heat of the moment?
It's a silly question. They're all valuable.
Blog postings should not be compared to "in-depth articles." They're not the same thing. They are more comparable to transcripts of bull sessions. A good online exchange is something like sitting in on a lunchtime conversations between a prof and his grad students.
Quite likely if you could listen on a tape recording of Socrates gabbing with his students in the groves of Academe, before Plato selected and polished and smoothed and delete expletives, it would read like blog postings.
As far as I know, all the important gear in the IT room is on battery-backup units. Not my department, but I'm pretty sure it is. It's the same department that takes care of all the desktops in the cubicles, and all of those are on battery backup. When the power goes out the entire building is filled with the eerie wail of dozens of battery-backup units whining in misery, slowly tapering down as people shut down their PCs and turn off the backup units.
So I don't know exactly what it was that failed, but it probably wasn't the gear in the building.
I don't really know. I'm just reporting what actually happened.
I didn't think cell phone towers were supposed to die that quickly, either.
But I'm very sad to hear this about Verizon. This is the final nail in the coffin of the ultra-reliable count-on-it-in-emergencies service that Theodore Vail, AT&T, and the Western Electric engineers brought into being. Through pure self-interest, and I know that the days of Ma Bell had their downside, but it was one of the wonders of the world. The phones always worked and in the extremely rare occasions when they didn't, the phone company acted as if they had a responsibility to make them work.
Now we're slowly getting pushed back into cheap service that works except when you really need it. Because it's easy to evaluate what your phone costs, and it's easy to look at the list of spiffy features, but it's very hard for Joe Consumer to know how reliable the service is... so the free market can't put a proper value on reliability.
Six months ago, the company I work for installed spiffy VOIP telephones. Because of some issue or another, they kept the old I-know-it's-not-Centrex-but-whaddaya-call-it system connected for a while. And there were also about three individual plain old lines for some fax machines.
A few months ago there was a power outage that started around 9 a.m. and lasted into the early afternoon.
The spiffy VOIP phones went dead immediately.
The old company phones kept working for about an hour.
Apparently the local cell towers don't have much in the way of battery backup because a few hours later nobody's cell phone could get a signal.
But the three plain old phones were still working six hours later, and based on past experience I believe they would have worked for a couple of days.
This is silly. The Seven Wonders of the Modern World can't be decided by an internet poll. The objective, authoritative, truthy way is to let the American Society of Civil Engineers decide it. And they have spoken. TheSeven Wonders of the Modern World are the Channel Tunnel, the CN Tower, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Itaipu Dam, the Netherlands North Sea Protection Works, and the Panama Canal
In 1899, Technology Review noted that "readers of Popular Mechanics some time ago selected by vote" wireless, the telephone, aeroplane, radium, antiseptics, antitoxins, spectrum analysis, and X-rays as the "seven wonders of the modern world."
The "seven wonders of the New World" were Niagara Falls, Yellowstone Park, Garden of the Gods, Mammoth Cave, Yosemite Valley, Giant Trees, and Natural Bridge.
I'm pissed at AT&T for turning over my bill to a collection agency in the first place, when a) it wasn't paid late, b) even AT&T thought it was only a couple of days late, c) I'd been their customer with a virtually immaculate payment record for twenty-five years. They should have given me about ninety days with slightly less polite warning letters every thirty days.
I'm pissed at AT&T for turning over my bill to a sleazy collection agency which they evidently weren't able or didn't want to control, and which most likely was breaking a few laws in continuing to call me.
I'm not pissed at the pitbull, I'm pissed with the guy that sicced the pitbull on me.
...I did tell the collection agency verbally on the phone that AT&T acknowledged that the bill had been paid, and I asked them not to call again. And I also told them in writing in a letter I sent to the address they provided, enclosing documentation, and they did not stop immediately. Maybe they are not "allowed" to call again, but the fact is that they did, over and over again, for about a month.
I "know my rights." It's like Dr. Strangelove, where the President says "But I thought only I had the authority to authorize a nuclear strike," and Buck Turgidson hems and haws and acknowledges that General Ripper "may have exceeded his authority."
Hurricanes? They provide opportunities for entrepreneurs to start up businesses rescuing flood victims for profit.
Local roads? Contract 'em out to private businesses. Let the incentive of tolls release entrepreneurial creativity. Hey, you could put an RFID chip in every car and charge a nickel every time drive down Main Street and a penny when you cruise down Mockingbird Lane.
Wars? Contract 'em out to Halliburton and Blackwater. (Oh, wait... we do, and look how well it works).
Because big, bureaucratic, oligopolistic, greedy megacorporations are always better at everything than big, bureaucratic, patronage-ridden government agencies. And the profit motive always automatically aligns itself perfectly with American moral values. As Engline Charlie Wilson said, "I always thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa."
...that there are so many replies along the lines of
"Dude you shouldn't have published this, why do you even work for microsoft."
and "You should quit right away"
and "this is horrible, man you ARE the reason microsoft is suffering!"
and "What is wrong with you? Why would you publish this? This is internal only"
and "I cannot believe you posted this. What is wrong with you? Makes me shudder to think what else your pathetic and bereft character would allow yourself to post"
and "Idiot, idiot, you should quit. You should be ashamed. Hopefully HR will figure out who the hell you are and can your ***."
When I read the posting, my thought was that both Microsoft and Google sounded like interesting places to work, with different profiles of plusses and minuses.
When I read the responses, my thought was that Microsoft must be as full of paranoid conformists as the second circle of Hell. If these responses are typical of the environment, goodness knows what Microsoft does to people who post Dilbert cartoons on their office walls.
System Requirements...iPhone activation requires an Internet connection; an iTunes Store account or a major credit card; a valid Social Security number (as required by AT&T); the latest version of iTunes available at www.itunes.com and a PC or Mac with a USB 2.0 port and one of the following operating systems [blah, blah, blah...]
Social Security number? WTF? This is 2007, companies that want my business should need my social security number.
As the Social Security Administrationtells us, "Your number is confidential... You should be careful about sharing your number with anyone who asks for it (even when you are provided with a benefit or service)." I reluctantly give it to banks and brokerages who need it for tax purposes. I very, very reluctantly give it to medical organizations.
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." --Charles Kingsley
And as for the case when enthusiasms become self-destructive: Don Marquis' "The Lesson of the Moth" opens:
"I was talking to a moth the other evening he was trying to break into an electric light bulb and fry himself on the wires"
He asks for an explanation, and the moth replies:
"it is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than to exist forever and never be a part of beauty"
Archy, the speaker, does not agree, but concludes
"but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself"
Anyone want to say that innovation in medicine is overrated? I don't think there's very much technologically in common between medicine as it was practiced fifty years ago and as it is today.
I personally know someone who had a heart valve replaced (with a pig valve); several people with hip, knee, and shoulder replacements. Prostate cancer is much less terrifying than it was as little as thirty years ago, thanks to nerve-sparing operative techniques. And think of what endoscopes and laparoscopic surgery have done.
The difference in quality and safety of anesthesia is nothing short of a revolution, made possible not only by new anesthetic agents (propofol instead of ether, anyone) but by pulse-oximetry.
I can't even imagine that a fluoroscope exists any more. And I recently had a "stress-echo" in which the doc was watching the inside of my heart continuously, in real time, in live video, and getting quantitative measurements of blood flow and so forth.
Even "stitches" use completely different materials and technology, and I have a huge, gross, lumpy scar from a childhood operation and a tiny, smooth one from a recent operation to prove it.
There's not much of a palimpsest in the doctor's office. Apart from the stethoscope and the exam table I can't think of much that hasn't changed.
Yes, I wish that all the old antibiotics still worked. Not everything has changed for the better.
Media companies have always worried about how many eyeballs will be watching that screen. That's why the videos you buy are "licensed for home use only."
Sometime before home video turned off (and turned out not to be the "strangler" of movies that Jack Valenti testified it was), RCA developed a system intended for video rental that they thought would overcome studios' objection to putting their content on home video. It was a cartridge with a mechanical design that would not rewind; the tape locked in place when viewing was complete, and required a special tool to release it. You could only watch it once, then you'd have to take it back to the video rental store where they would unlock it, rewind it, and charge another rental fee for another viewing.
RCA brought studio executives in for a demo, sure they had a winner. The executives said "We have no interest in this whatsover. You've given us absolutely no way to know how many people were watching it."
Now, in recent years there has been quite a lot of activity in biometrics and eyetracking. It is not at all inconceivable that someone could design a relatively low-cost device that could be built into a DVD player, PVR, whatever, that could tell how many eyes were watching. (And might even be able to discount cats' eyes, although dogs' eyes would be harder). And charge you accordingly. And maybe even charge extra if it detected that nobody had been watching the ads and coming attractions at the beginning.
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What happened to the wave of business books a few years back about the importance of putting the customer first, and showing that the companies that just concentrated on satisfying the customer--actually, I think "delighting, not just satisfying" was one of the phrases--consistently outperformed the companies that engaged in all the clever-clever manipulation and chiseling and trickery?
If people want to record the stream, let 'em.
They've been doing it for decades, folks. I remember a guy in college whose nickname was "tapes" because he had a huge collection of tapes of popular music recorded off the air. At 1-7/8 ips on open-reel tapes on an analog tape recorder, which dates me and the period.
People always have been able to do stuff like that.
And it never amounts to a hill of beans, in terms of hurting artists or recording companies or whatever, because it's just too much work organizing the recordings and editing the stream to find the starting and stopping points and labelling the tape boxes. And, these days, either accepting handwritten scribbled labels or futzing some more looking for cover art or pictures of the artist or editing CD labels or formatting LightScribe text.
And it tends to be a lifecycle thing. You do that when you're in college and short on cash. People who are willing to put that much work into it are also people who are deeply committed to listening to music and sooner or later most of them get a job and a salary and suddenly they no longer have six hours to edit and organize recording but they do have a credit card and money to buy CDs or iTunes downloads or whatever.
It's like worrying about the possibility that someone could pay for one newspaper but take two out of the vending box. Does it ever happen? Sure. Does it make it worth building a complicated, more expensive vending box? Obviously not, and the newspaper folks obviously understand the tradeoff.
If the music companies just focussed on pleasing the customer, they'd do a lot better than they're doing now. It almost seems as if they're more concerned about the sheer abstract principle of the thing ("but they're robbing me!") than about dollars and cents. They're certainly not showing any concern for their customers.
I frequently use the ProQuest databases of newspaper story images, available courtesy of my public library. These are digitized page images. Those for The New York Times go cover 1851 to 2003; those for the Boston Globe, 1872 - 1923.
All of these, without exception, bear the notice "Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission."
In the case of articles published before 1923 (and don't you think it's interesting that the Globe cuts off at exactly 1923?) I completely fail to see how these can be anything other than a faithful reproduction of a work published in the United States before 1923.
Darn it, at the very least, if someone is going to claim copyright in something, they should be required to give an explicit statement of the legal basis for their claim. Maybe there's some way this material is copyrighted, but in the case of material that every university library guideline says is in the public domain, the burden of proof... or at least, the burden of saying why this is an exception to the general rule... should fall on the person making the assertion.
I think agree with your posting, beginning to end.
Two points: information about me is a valuable possession and I am entitled to give it to whom and when I wish... and have a legitimate beef when it is taken from me without my consent.
Your point about "secrets are not evenly distibuted" is well taken. The situation is, of course, very analogous to money or power or anything else of value. P
orgy may say "I got plenty of nothing, and nothing's plenty for me... Folks with plenty of plenty/Got a lock on their door/They're 'fraid somebody's a goin' to rob 'em while they're out a makin' more/What for?" But the people who say "I don't care about privacy, I have nothing to hide" probably have more secrets of more value than they realize. People who are willing to practice voluntary simplicity with respect to money or possessions are good people, but I would put stress on the word "voluntary." Don't take my money and tell me you're doing it for my own good. The same is true of personal information.
Second, I am more than willing to discard concealment to build trust. However, discarding concealment does not automatically build trust. There are people who are more than willing to use their strength to exploit weakness, and to take information (or power, or money) without giving back anything in exchange. I believe people like this are borderline-sociopathic and very rare. However... they do exist; 1%-of-the-population-rare, not 0.0001%-of-the-population-rare, and they frequently manage to get themselves into positions of authority.
Do power players show their cards to each other? Why not? Because a poker game is a (somewhat) adversarial situation, in which disclosing information give an advantage to your opponents, which they are likely to exploit.
A large number of human situations involve some degree of negotiation and are to some degree adversarial. Knowledge can be power, and knowledge can be money. You don't need to be a control freak to want to retain some degree of control.
Not that I expect to get the better of a car deal, but I still don't necessarily want the salesman to know how much money I can write a check for today, and he doesn't necessarily want me to know the financial state of the dealership or his sales goal for the month and how many cars he's sold.
You know things are getting bad when even supposedly technical types start to use this kind of language. In a few years we can expect to see serious techie-to-techie channels postings saying things like "The CPU went kerblooie" and "The disk became discombobulated" and "Don't apply this patch if you're not a real computer genius..."
...they could call this bold new idea ".NET"
The story really resonated with hackers, hobbyists, and computer enthusiasts--particularly those who were enthusiastic about the style of direct interactive computing... as pioneered by Project Whirlwind -> Tracy Licklider -> timesharing -> DEC OS -> hobbyist microcomputers... but were also familiar with IBM-style mainframe operating systems.
By 1982, there were beginning to be a lot of people who could relate to that kind of story, but still not enough to make a movie a box-office hit.
Dell's prices fluctuate more rapidly and more widely than the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Identical systems may vary by significant amounts depending on whether you talk to a "home office" or "small business" rep... or whether you talk to them on Tuesday or Wednesday... or whether you get the price on the Web or over the phone or in a mailing.
I'm not sure anyone knows what a Dell costs unless they are a business negotating a deal for a few thousand of them.
"Another analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray said he expects Apple to bring out iPods that resemble iPhone, which features such as a touch-sensitive screen, later this year. Such products would help stop iPhone eating into iPod sales. 'We believe the iPhone reveals much of what the iPod will soon be,' Munster said in a note to clients, 'iPods with some of the touchscreen features of the iPhone should lessen the impact of cannibalization.'"
Hold on a minute. In the first place, why would Apple we worried about a $500 or $600 iPhone "eating into iPod sales?"
That sounds like the sort of poisonous big-corporation bozo thinking. People that care more about their division than about either a) the customer, or b) the company as a whole. Like old-time GM, where Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac worried more about each other than about, say, high-quality foreign cars. It's the sort of thinking that leads to artificially holding back new products in order to "milk the cash cow" and extract the last dollar from the older product. To rationalized product lines with exactly seven price points.
That's not the way every company works (remember Digital introducing the MicroVAX II, knowing perfectly well that it wasn't going to "cannibalize" higher-end VAX sales, it was going to vaporize them?) And there's good evidence that it's not the way Apple works. A case in point would be the replacement of the iPod Mini, which was a popular, successful, and well-liked product, with the Nano. There's no evidence at all that Apple was worried about the Nano "cannibalizing" sales of the Mini!
The distance between the human ear and the human mouth is pretty well fixed... how can they make a one-piece phone much smaller than the iPhone? I just don't see it. Maybe a miniature version of a candlestick phone, with two pieces connected by a cord. Or perhaps a tiny Shuffle-like mouthpiece and a separate, tiny bluetooth earpiece?
.mp3 players). Instead, in both the older and newer Shuffles, Apple came out with a slick piece of industrial design that looks and feels like a quality product in a new category, not a cheap-and-cheesy version of an existing product, or a slightly-tarted-up version of a score of competitors' products.
And I'm not sure I see how they can make the thing more than incrementally cheaper.
They can't make the screen smaller without turning the iPhone into something like an ordinary cell phone. And then you don't get any of the breakthrough advantages of the iPhone user interface. It would just be a Motorola ROKR with an Apple logo and, possibly, better iPod functionality.
So far, Apple has been consistently good in avoiding the temptation to put the Apple brand on something that Apple fans like me would perceive to be a cheap piece of crap.
The iPod Shuffle is a good case in point. Before it came out, everyone was speculating that it would have a tiny, i.e. unusable screen (like some of the competitive
I'm darned if I see how they can make a much smaller, cheaper iPhone without falling into that trap.
Which is more valuable, a Brahms symphony which took twenty years to write and lasts an hour... ...a carefully crafted pop tune (Cole Porter... Paul McCartney... Lieber and Stoller), which nevertheless takes at most months to write, lasts a few minutes... ...or a jazz improvisation created in the heat of the moment?
It's a silly question. They're all valuable.
Blog postings should not be compared to "in-depth articles." They're not the same thing. They are more comparable to transcripts of bull sessions. A good online exchange is something like sitting in on a lunchtime conversations between a prof and his grad students.
Quite likely if you could listen on a tape recording of Socrates gabbing with his students in the groves of Academe, before Plato selected and polished and smoothed and delete expletives, it would read like blog postings.
As far as I know, all the important gear in the IT room is on battery-backup units. Not my department, but I'm pretty sure it is. It's the same department that takes care of all the desktops in the cubicles, and all of those are on battery backup. When the power goes out the entire building is filled with the eerie wail of dozens of battery-backup units whining in misery, slowly tapering down as people shut down their PCs and turn off the backup units.
So I don't know exactly what it was that failed, but it probably wasn't the gear in the building.
I don't really know. I'm just reporting what actually happened.
I didn't think cell phone towers were supposed to die that quickly, either.
But I'm very sad to hear this about Verizon. This is the final nail in the coffin of the ultra-reliable count-on-it-in-emergencies service that Theodore Vail, AT&T, and the Western Electric engineers brought into being. Through pure self-interest, and I know that the days of Ma Bell had their downside, but it was one of the wonders of the world. The phones always worked and in the extremely rare occasions when they didn't, the phone company acted as if they had a responsibility to make them work.
Now we're slowly getting pushed back into cheap service that works except when you really need it. Because it's easy to evaluate what your phone costs, and it's easy to look at the list of spiffy features, but it's very hard for Joe Consumer to know how reliable the service is... so the free market can't put a proper value on reliability.
Six months ago, the company I work for installed spiffy VOIP telephones. Because of some issue or another, they kept the old I-know-it's-not-Centrex-but-whaddaya-call-it system connected for a while. And there were also about three individual plain old lines for some fax machines.
A few months ago there was a power outage that started around 9 a.m. and lasted into the early afternoon.
The spiffy VOIP phones went dead immediately.
The old company phones kept working for about an hour.
Apparently the local cell towers don't have much in the way of battery backup because a few hours later nobody's cell phone could get a signal.
But the three plain old phones were still working six hours later, and based on past experience I believe they would have worked for a couple of days.
This is silly. The Seven Wonders of the Modern World can't be decided by an internet poll. The objective, authoritative, truthy way is to let the American Society of Civil Engineers decide it. And they have spoken. The Seven Wonders of the Modern World are the Channel Tunnel, the CN Tower, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Itaipu Dam, the Netherlands North Sea Protection Works, and the Panama Canal
In 1899, Technology Review noted that "readers of Popular Mechanics some time ago selected by vote" wireless, the telephone, aeroplane, radium, antiseptics, antitoxins, spectrum analysis, and X-rays as the "seven wonders of the modern world."
The "seven wonders of the New World" were Niagara Falls, Yellowstone Park, Garden of the Gods, Mammoth Cave, Yosemite Valley, Giant Trees, and Natural Bridge.
I'm pissed at AT&T for turning over my bill to a collection agency in the first place, when a) it wasn't paid late, b) even AT&T thought it was only a couple of days late, c) I'd been their customer with a virtually immaculate payment record for twenty-five years. They should have given me about ninety days with slightly less polite warning letters every thirty days.
I'm pissed at AT&T for turning over my bill to a sleazy collection agency which they evidently weren't able or didn't want to control, and which most likely was breaking a few laws in continuing to call me.
I'm not pissed at the pitbull, I'm pissed with the guy that sicced the pitbull on me.
...I did tell the collection agency verbally on the phone that AT&T acknowledged that the bill had been paid, and I asked them not to call again. And I also told them in writing in a letter I sent to the address they provided, enclosing documentation, and they did not stop immediately. Maybe they are not "allowed" to call again, but the fact is that they did, over and over again, for about a month.
I "know my rights." It's like Dr. Strangelove, where the President says "But I thought only I had the authority to authorize a nuclear strike," and Buck Turgidson hems and haws and acknowledges that General Ripper "may have exceeded his authority."
"Microsoft doesn't view the popularity of user requests to downgrade from Vista to XP as a ding against Vista," Ball emphasized.
When his guests vomit, he probably doesn't view it a ding against the meal he's served them.
Hurricanes? They provide opportunities for entrepreneurs to start up businesses rescuing flood victims for profit.
Local roads? Contract 'em out to private businesses. Let the incentive of tolls release entrepreneurial creativity. Hey, you could put an RFID chip in every car and charge a nickel every time drive down Main Street and a penny when you cruise down Mockingbird Lane.
Wars? Contract 'em out to Halliburton and Blackwater. (Oh, wait... we do, and look how well it works).
Because big, bureaucratic, oligopolistic, greedy megacorporations are always better at everything than big, bureaucratic, patronage-ridden government agencies. And the profit motive always automatically aligns itself perfectly with American moral values. As Engline Charlie Wilson said, "I always thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa."
...call them "privateers."
...that there are so many replies along the lines of
"Dude you shouldn't have published this, why do you even work for microsoft."
and
"You should quit right away"
and
"this is horrible, man you ARE the reason microsoft is suffering!"
and
"What is wrong with you? Why would you publish this? This is internal only"
and
"I cannot believe you posted this. What is wrong with you? Makes me shudder to think what else your pathetic and bereft character would allow yourself to post"
and
"Idiot, idiot, you should quit. You should be ashamed. Hopefully HR will figure out who the hell you are and can your ***."
When I read the posting, my thought was that both Microsoft and Google sounded like interesting places to work, with different profiles of plusses and minuses.
When I read the responses, my thought was that Microsoft must be as full of paranoid conformists as the second circle of Hell. If these responses are typical of the environment, goodness knows what Microsoft does to people who post Dilbert cartoons on their office walls.
...so that when the jackbooted RIAA thugs break down my door at 3 a.m. in the morning I can point to the embedded ID as proof of ownership.
From this announcement:
...iPhone activation requires an Internet connection; an iTunes Store account or a major credit card; a valid Social Security number (as required by AT&T); the latest version of iTunes available at www.itunes.com and a PC or Mac with a USB 2.0 port and one of the following operating systems [blah, blah, blah...]
System Requirements
Social Security number? WTF? This is 2007, companies that want my business should need my social security number.
As the Social Security Administrationtells us, "Your number is confidential... You should be careful about sharing your number with anyone who asks for it (even when you are provided with a benefit or service)." I reluctantly give it to banks and brokerages who need it for tax purposes. I very, very reluctantly give it to medical organizations.
A phone company? No, thank you.
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." --Charles Kingsley
And as for the case when enthusiasms become self-destructive: Don Marquis' "The Lesson of the Moth" opens:
"I was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires"
He asks for an explanation, and the moth replies:
"it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty"
Archy, the speaker, does not agree, but concludes
"but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself"
Anyone want to say that innovation in medicine is overrated? I don't think there's very much technologically in common between medicine as it was practiced fifty years ago and as it is today.
I personally know someone who had a heart valve replaced (with a pig valve); several people with hip, knee, and shoulder replacements. Prostate cancer is much less terrifying than it was as little as thirty years ago, thanks to nerve-sparing operative techniques. And think of what endoscopes and laparoscopic surgery have done.
The difference in quality and safety of anesthesia is nothing short of a revolution, made possible not only by new anesthetic agents (propofol instead of ether, anyone) but by pulse-oximetry.
I can't even imagine that a fluoroscope exists any more. And I recently had a "stress-echo" in which the doc was watching the inside of my heart continuously, in real time, in live video, and getting quantitative measurements of blood flow and so forth.
Even "stitches" use completely different materials and technology, and I have a huge, gross, lumpy scar from a childhood operation and a tiny, smooth one from a recent operation to prove it.
There's not much of a palimpsest in the doctor's office. Apart from the stethoscope and the exam table I can't think of much that hasn't changed.
Yes, I wish that all the old antibiotics still worked. Not everything has changed for the better.
Media companies have always worried about how many eyeballs will be watching that screen. That's why the videos you buy are "licensed for home use only."
Sometime before home video turned off (and turned out not to be the "strangler" of movies that Jack Valenti testified it was), RCA developed a system intended for video rental that they thought would overcome studios' objection to putting their content on home video. It was a cartridge with a mechanical design that would not rewind; the tape locked in place when viewing was complete, and required a special tool to release it. You could only watch it once, then you'd have to take it back to the video rental store where they would unlock it, rewind it, and charge another rental fee for another viewing.
RCA brought studio executives in for a demo, sure they had a winner. The executives said "We have no interest in this whatsover. You've given us absolutely no way to know how many people were watching it."
Now, in recent years there has been quite a lot of activity in biometrics and eyetracking. It is not at all inconceivable that someone could design a relatively low-cost device that could be built into a DVD player, PVR, whatever, that could tell how many eyes were watching. (And might even be able to discount cats' eyes, although dogs' eyes would be harder). And charge you accordingly. And maybe even charge extra if it detected that nobody had been watching the ads and coming attractions at the beginning.