Sounds a lot like the "baby train" and "birthrate peak nine months after the 1965 Northeast US blackout" myths. Only less entertaining.
Someone said, "Gee, I betcha there's a lot of online shopping when people get back to work and their high-speed internet connections" and the plausible and amusing speculation became a legend.
I actually was skeptical about this, because most e-commerce sites are quite usable even at dialup speeds, and, conversely, DSL and cable are far from rare.
It's not like the days when people had 28Kbps modems at home and T1s at work.
It would be very interesting if someone actually managed to track the "Cyber Monday" meme to its source. It might be possible, since it originated recently and probably spread mostly via the Internet.
Supposedly George Smathers attacked Claude Pepper by calling him "a known extravert," with a sister who was a "thespian" and a brother who was a "practicing homo sapiens," saying that Pepper "matriculated" in college and "practiced celibacy" before marriage. Pepper lost.
I am sick unto death of cheerful articles that assert that [optical storage medium o' the month] has been proven in accelerated-life testing to last for umpteen aeons, and then discovering that my three-year-old disks can't be read......and saying "use a reliable brand," but no two people have the same opinions of what's reliable... ("Mitsui Gold or nothing..." "Just use the cheapest you can find..." "The Staples house brand is OK..." "No, no, it has to be a brand name like Sony or Verbatim, but which brand doesn't matter...)...and every one was saying that because the DVD data layer is sandwiched between two thick pieces of polycarbonate instead of underneath a fragile lacquer coat, DVDs will be far MORE long-lived than CD-R's.
...tempting offers to enlarge their gnorgls, pictures of young teens foithboindering, and sincere offers from Dr. Blfpsplk who wants to smuggle thirty million credits out of the country and will happily give 10% of it to any reliable person who will lend him the use of their bank account......I'll start worrying.
Because then they will get OUR viruses, and reverse-engineer them.
Whenever Microsoft advances a delivery date, they usually remove a couple of promised features.
I thought they'd already cancelled most of the features preannounced for Vista.
What features are left to remove?
"Oh, we've found that our customers are asking for the same look and feel of Windows XP so we've decided to keep the graphic design and UI the same..."
"I have not had one crash, and the only trace I've seen of it is on Kotaku."
What, exactly, is "a trace" of a crash? Sounds like "a little bit pregnant" to me...
No, there was EXACTLY such a project: Nupedia
on
Swahili Wiki-Dictionary?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Nupedia, Wikipedia's predecessor, was exactly such a project.
You didn't hear very much about it because after two years and $250,000 invested, it had a grand total of "24 articles that completed its review process" and 74 more that were well along.
Many of Wikipedia's organizational principles and policies originated in Nupedia, and Larry Sanger maintains that the success of Wikipedia stemmed from the fact that it had its start in a community of people who were thoroughly steeped in Nupedia ways of doing things.
Still, it is hard to see how Nupedia can be described as other than a "failure."
"he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes..."
How, exactly, does he do this? It sounds like quite a trick.
He mentions "Then there's the professional ecologist major in Benin - he's a birder. He's sent in hundreds of bird entries, every type of thrush or crow ever spotted in East Africa, with their English and Swahili names." How does he "vet" these entries if he's not an ecologist himself?
Wikipedia regularly receives all sorts of hoax and joke definitions, neologisms, fraternity-house in-jokes, and so forth. It takes more than "minutes" to sort some of them out.
Does he just go on his personal intuition, which entries sound right and "feel" right to him? Or what?
Stallman did something completely appropriate. It made a point. It made a valid point. It made the point effectively by attracting attention and publicity. It did not hurt anybody. It caused the barest minimum of disruption and inconvenience.
It has probably brought the matter to the attention of U.N. officials who honestly didn't know or understand the problems with RFID, and regardless of their visible behavior I am sure that it educated the security people as well. I don't know whether this in itself will change policy, but I'd bet a nickel that behind the scenes there have been some discussions and briefings.
Now, the U.N. security people did as close to the right thing as you can imagine them doing. You can't expect them to make an instant technical analysis of the situation. The facts they were presented with were: a) the badges are being used for security, to make sure that only authorized people attend; b) Stallman was conspiciously doing something or other with the badges; c) they had no way of knowing whether it was any kind of security threat, but at least the possibility existed. Screwing around with a security pass is suspicious, even if you don't know what exactly to suspect, and even if in this case it was innocent.
They didn't arrest him. They didn't beat him up. They created the barest minimum of disruption and inconvenience to Stallman and to the meeting.
I say Stallman was effective, on a matter that has some real society importance. And I say the security guards' response was measured and sensible.
Yes, I know who. But they are the same people who previously said the U. S. would switch over in 2006.
I think it will be very interesting to see what happens. Relatively few people with good, working TV sets are ditching them for HDTV sets. A lot of people find it hard to see why one should get rid of a perfectly good 26" TV that has a beautiful picture and cost $600 when you bought it twenty years ago, in order to buy a $2000 TV and a whole bunch of new gear to go with it.
And while you don't need to be fabulous wealthy to buy a $2,000 TV, quite a lot of middle-class families that have $2,000 to spend but have rather a lot of things to spend it on that take priority over replacing a TV that is still working.
I believe we will see at least one more cycle of pushing the deadline off as it gets close.
"No one in the military would make life or death decisions based on a machine translation." That's pure CYA for the first time this device gets someone killed. If a life or death decision needs to be made and the only thing you have at hand is a machine translation, what are you going to use?
I don't know how representative of the state of the art they are, but I've been massively underwhelmed at Babelfish's ability to understand foreign-language text and by ViaVoice's ability to understand speech. I can't imagine the effect of layering machine translation errors on top of machine voice interpretation errors.
According to href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/iraq-a rmy">James T. Fallows, "The U.S. military does everything in Iraq worse and slower than it could if it solved its language problems. It is unbelievable that American fighting ranks have so little help. Soon after Pearl Harbor the U.S. military launched major Japanese-language training institutes at universities and was screening draftees to find the most promising students. America has made no comparable effort to teach Arabic. Nearly three years after the invasion of Iraq the typical company of 150 or so U.S. soldiers gets by with one or two Arabic-speakers. T. X. Hammes says that U.S. forces and trainers in Iraq should have about 22,000 interpreters, but they have nowhere near that many. "
Instead of doing the obvious thing--give soldiers training in Arabic and offer big bonuses for Arabic-speaking recruits--the U.S. does nothing for a couple of years and then tries to throw a cheap technical fix at the problem.
If we must throw gadgets at the problem, why not a satellite phone linked to a big building full of human Arabic/English simultaneous translators?
Why are all the college stations down at the low end of the FM dial?
Because it was the universities that did all the heavy lifting in creating what we know as "radio broadcasting." And, originally, just like the Net, it was non-commercial. The legal framework at the time said that the airwaves belong to the public and must be used to serve the public interest.
Then the commercial interests came in and hijacked radio.
Congress handed over the lion's share of spectrum commercial interests and tossed the universities a wee slice of spectrum that would be reserved for educational broadcasting.
The FCC's job was originally _supposed_ to be preserving the airwaves for the public and policing frequencies to prevent interference, not worrying about exposed nipples in prime time.
And, yes, there was a giant stockmarket bubble in which investors frantic to get in on the land rush bid up the stock of any company that had "radio" in its name...
...isn't great, either. When will it occur to them to do something about that?
I think Microsoft is suffering from terminal Big Company Disease, the situation in which a company loses focus on serving the customer and starts to obey the Three Laws of Necrotics:
1) First Law: hurt the competition. This is more important than anything else.
2) Second Law: don't cannibalize any of your own products, so long as this does not conflict with the First Law.
3) Third Law: Serve the customer, so long as this does not conflict with the First or Second law, and can be done in any spare time left over after dealing with more important priorities
It's funny. I work very closely with two other programmers, although we work on almost disjoint bodies of code. Our coding styles vary widely. One of us uses Hungarian notation, one of us does not, one sometimes does and sometimes doesn't. We use different indentation styles, different nesting styles, different personal styles for naming variables.
And you know what? None of us have any trouble at all reading or maintaining each other's code.
Why? Because we're good programmers; because we _care_ about what we are doing, we take a long-term approach, and management judges us by our long-term track record and doesn't look over our shoulders micromanaging how many spaces we indent.
And we all write LOTS of comments, but we comment the things that need to be commented, not just pro-forma and CYA stuff.
Apple may have used intuition or good taste when they put a single menu bar at the top of the screen initially, but later on they did research which backed it up.
The edges of the screen are prime real estate and are easy targets to hit because the mouse pointer is constrained by the screen; effectively the menu bar is infinite in height. In order to hit a menu bar at the top of a window, you need to decelerate and hit a target that is fairly small. You need to do precision control in two dimensions instead of only one.
I think one of the reason Windows users are always complaining that using the mouse is slower than the keyboard is because putting the menu at the top of the window makes the mouse slower to use than if it were at the top of the screen.
Bruce Tognazinni devotes an entire chapter--27--of "Tog on Interface," (1992, Addison-Wesley) to this very topic. He cites four or five pieces of research.
But, never mind. It's only research. Tognazinni wrote--in 1990!--"People for years have been explaining to me that in this era of giant screen monitors, we just have to do something about those menu bars way up there at the top of the screen; that menu bars should be attached to windows, or pop up beneath the cursor or something. Anything, just so they aren't up at the top of the screen any more." And I am sure people will be doing it fifteen years from now, too.
This Boston Globe article is interesting... it's essentially a summary of a new book by Mike Davis.
It puts pandemics into their political and social context. The article says that if flu does develop into a planetwide scourge, it "will be a largely man-made disaster" caused by "overseas tourism, wetland destruction, a corporate 'Livestock Revolution,' and Third World urbanization.
I've been involved in way too many projects where people said, "Oh, yeah, we're doing all our development on Windows but it's no big deal. We aren't going to use anything non-portable."
Then, when the time came to port it... it was utterly intertwingled with Windows-specific cruft, half of which crept in because nobody even knew they were doing it. If they'd ever tried even once to port it, they could have caught this stuff as it happened.
I don't mind a conscious decision to use.ini files, or CStrings, or what have you. It was all the non-portable things they did without even knowing it--and the fact that the non-portable stuff was salted and peppered evenly throughout the whole project instead of concentrated in a few well-defined modules--that got to me.
And it didn't help that everything was compiled with permissive compiler options regarding C/C++ conformance, and a low warning level.
If you think this a bubble, you just don't get it. This is a fundamental paradigm shift. The secret to wealth without effort has finally been found. This is totally, absolutely different from the Internet bubble, Florida real estate during the 1920s, multilevel marketing, pyramid clubs, and arbitrage of international postal reply coupons. You see, it's completely legal, because you give the government your social security number so that you can pay income tax on the fabulous wealth this system generates--guaranteed!
This one works. You just have to dare to be great. Fire your boss and never work again! It can work for anyone. You can do it from your home in your spare time. And for $19.95 I'll send you absolutely free a valuable envelope packed full of information on how you can buy our videotype seminar series. Try it at absolutely no obligation. If you follow the simple step-by-step instructions and, after three months you are not making $2000, $3000, $5000 a month, just send a letter to our PO box or call our disconnected phone line and we will cheerfully refund your money.
If iTunes Music Store can successfully sell video with granularity lower than an entire movie... and, in general, content that is "worth" less than $20... it opens up a world of possibilities. And I'd say individual episodes of popular television sitcoms at two bucks a pop are a good start.
It doesn't matter what device you watch them on. That's just technology, which--not to be dismissive--is the least important part of the equation.
If companies can make money selling five-inch DVD players for $70, making a five-inch DVD player that doesn't need to have a DVD drive in it should be a slam dunk. If Apple can make an iPod nano, making a BIGGER iPod with a bigger screen shouldn't be too hard.
Besides, I don't want to watch TV on a 2" screen at home, where I have an easy chair and a TV receiver. But on an airplane flight... or a bus ride... or a dentist's waiting room... I might be willing to compromise.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, not sure why my URL showed up properly when I previewed but not when I posted. Let me try again. It was
http://www.snopes.com/pregnant/babtrain.htm
i.e. here
Sounds a lot like the "baby train" and "birthrate peak nine months after the 1965 Northeast US blackout" myths. Only less entertaining.
Someone said, "Gee, I betcha there's a lot of online shopping when people get back to work and their high-speed internet connections" and the plausible and amusing speculation became a legend.
I actually was skeptical about this, because most e-commerce sites are quite usable even at dialup speeds, and, conversely, DSL and cable are far from rare.
It's not like the days when people had 28Kbps modems at home and T1s at work.
It would be very interesting if someone actually managed to track the "Cyber Monday" meme to its source. It might be possible, since it originated recently and probably spread mostly via the Internet.
Supposedly George Smathers attacked Claude Pepper by calling him "a known extravert," with a sister who was a "thespian" and a brother who was a "practicing homo sapiens," saying that Pepper "matriculated" in college and "practiced celibacy" before marriage. Pepper lost.
Please tell me more about that.
...and saying "use a reliable brand," but no two people have the same opinions of what's reliable... ("Mitsui Gold or nothing..." "Just use the cheapest you can find..." "The Staples house brand is OK..." "No, no, it has to be a brand name like Sony or Verbatim, but which brand doesn't matter...) ...and every one was saying that because the DVD data layer is sandwiched between two thick pieces of polycarbonate instead of underneath a fragile lacquer coat, DVDs will be far MORE long-lived than CD-R's.
I am sick unto death of cheerful articles that assert that [optical storage medium o' the month] has been proven in accelerated-life testing to last for umpteen aeons, and then discovering that my three-year-old disks can't be read...
...to put on my spiffy new Apple Developer's Transition Kit?
Preferably one that will be hard to remove when Apple receives it back at the end of 2006?
...well, it was a squeeze. Digital had to use a nip here and a tuck there to cram it into the very first MicroVAX.
(Heh heh heh sonny... and I had to walk to school. In the winter. Two miles. Uphill both ways...)
...tempting offers to enlarge their gnorgls, pictures of young teens foithboindering, and sincere offers from Dr. Blfpsplk who wants to smuggle thirty million credits out of the country and will happily give 10% of it to any reliable person who will lend him the use of their bank account... ...I'll start worrying.
Because then they will get OUR viruses, and reverse-engineer them.
Whenever Microsoft advances a delivery date, they usually remove a couple of promised features.
I thought they'd already cancelled most of the features preannounced for Vista.
What features are left to remove?
"Oh, we've found that our customers are asking for the same look and feel of Windows XP so we've decided to keep the graphic design and UI the same..."
"I have not had one crash, and the only trace I've seen of it is on Kotaku."
What, exactly, is "a trace" of a crash? Sounds like "a little bit pregnant" to me...
Nupedia, Wikipedia's predecessor, was exactly such a project.
You didn't hear very much about it because after two years and $250,000 invested, it had a grand total of "24 articles that completed its review process" and 74 more that were well along.
Many of Wikipedia's organizational principles and policies originated in Nupedia, and Larry Sanger maintains that the success of Wikipedia stemmed from the fact that it had its start in a community of people who were thoroughly steeped in Nupedia ways of doing things.
Still, it is hard to see how Nupedia can be described as other than a "failure."
"he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes..."
How, exactly, does he do this? It sounds like quite a trick.
He mentions "Then there's the professional ecologist major in Benin - he's a birder. He's sent in hundreds of bird entries, every type of thrush or crow ever spotted in East Africa, with their English and Swahili names." How does he "vet" these entries if he's not an ecologist himself?
Wikipedia regularly receives all sorts of hoax and joke definitions, neologisms, fraternity-house in-jokes, and so forth. It takes more than "minutes" to sort some of them out.
Does he just go on his personal intuition, which entries sound right and "feel" right to him? Or what?
Or a Boeing 777?
And making sure all of those parts are in ample supply is trivial?
For that matter, how many "parts" does Windows XP have, and how is Microsoft managing to make sure they all work?
Stallman did something completely appropriate. It made a point. It made a valid point. It made the point effectively by attracting attention and publicity. It did not hurt anybody. It caused the barest minimum of disruption and inconvenience.
It has probably brought the matter to the attention of U.N. officials who honestly didn't know or understand the problems with RFID, and regardless of their visible behavior I am sure that it educated the security people as well. I don't know whether this in itself will change policy, but I'd bet a nickel that behind the scenes there have been some discussions and briefings.
Now, the U.N. security people did as close to the right thing as you can imagine them doing. You can't expect them to make an instant technical analysis of the situation. The facts they were presented with were: a) the badges are being used for security, to make sure that only authorized people attend; b) Stallman was conspiciously doing something or other with the badges; c) they had no way of knowing whether it was any kind of security threat, but at least the possibility existed. Screwing around with a security pass is suspicious, even if you don't know what exactly to suspect, and even if in this case it was innocent.
They didn't arrest him. They didn't beat him up. They created the barest minimum of disruption and inconvenience to Stallman and to the meeting.
I say Stallman was effective, on a matter that has some real society importance. And I say the security guards' response was measured and sensible.
Yes, I know who. But they are the same people who previously said the U. S. would switch over in 2006.
I think it will be very interesting to see what happens. Relatively few people with good, working TV sets are ditching them for HDTV sets. A lot of people find it hard to see why one should get rid of a perfectly good 26" TV that has a beautiful picture and cost $600 when you bought it twenty years ago, in order to buy a $2000 TV and a whole bunch of new gear to go with it.
And while you don't need to be fabulous wealthy to buy a $2,000 TV, quite a lot of middle-class families that have $2,000 to spend but have rather a lot of things to spend it on that take priority over replacing a TV that is still working.
I believe we will see at least one more cycle of pushing the deadline off as it gets close.
James T. Fallows
This time I DID press "preview..."
"No one in the military would make life or death decisions based on a machine translation." That's pure CYA for the first time this device gets someone killed. If a life or death decision needs to be made and the only thing you have at hand is a machine translation, what are you going to use?
a rmy">James T. Fallows, "The U.S. military does everything in Iraq worse and slower than it could if it solved its language problems. It is unbelievable that American fighting ranks have so little help. Soon after Pearl Harbor the U.S. military launched major Japanese-language training institutes at universities and was screening draftees to find the most promising students. America has made no comparable effort to teach Arabic. Nearly three years after the invasion of Iraq the typical company of 150 or so U.S. soldiers gets by with one or two Arabic-speakers. T. X. Hammes says that U.S. forces and trainers in Iraq should have about 22,000 interpreters, but they have nowhere near that many. "
I don't know how representative of the state of the art they are, but I've been massively underwhelmed at Babelfish's ability to understand foreign-language text and by ViaVoice's ability to understand speech. I can't imagine the effect of layering machine translation errors on top of machine voice interpretation errors.
According to href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/iraq-
Instead of doing the obvious thing--give soldiers training in Arabic and offer big bonuses for Arabic-speaking recruits--the U.S. does nothing for a couple of years and then tries to throw a cheap technical fix at the problem.
If we must throw gadgets at the problem, why not a satellite phone linked to a big building full of human Arabic/English simultaneous translators?
Why are all the college stations down at the low end of the FM dial?
Because it was the universities that did all the heavy lifting in creating what we know as "radio broadcasting." And, originally, just like the Net, it was non-commercial. The legal framework at the time said that the airwaves belong to the public and must be used to serve the public interest.
Then the commercial interests came in and hijacked radio.
Congress handed over the lion's share of spectrum commercial interests and tossed the universities a wee slice of spectrum that would be reserved for educational broadcasting.
The FCC's job was originally _supposed_ to be preserving the airwaves for the public and policing frequencies to prevent interference, not worrying about exposed nipples in prime time.
And, yes, there was a giant stockmarket bubble in which investors frantic to get in on the land rush bid up the stock of any company that had "radio" in its name...
...isn't great, either. When will it occur to them to do something about that?
I think Microsoft is suffering from terminal Big Company Disease, the situation in which a company loses focus on serving the customer and starts to obey the Three Laws of Necrotics:
1) First Law: hurt the competition. This is more important than anything else.
2) Second Law: don't cannibalize any of your own products, so long as this does not conflict with the First Law.
3) Third Law: Serve the customer, so long as this does not conflict with the First or Second law, and can be done in any spare time left over after dealing with more important priorities
It's funny. I work very closely with two other programmers, although we work on almost disjoint bodies of code. Our coding styles vary widely. One of us uses Hungarian notation, one of us does not, one sometimes does and sometimes doesn't. We use different indentation styles, different nesting styles, different personal styles for naming variables.
And you know what? None of us have any trouble at all reading or maintaining each other's code.
Why? Because we're good programmers; because we _care_ about what we are doing, we take a long-term approach, and management judges us by our long-term track record and doesn't look over our shoulders micromanaging how many spaces we indent.
And we all write LOTS of comments, but we comment the things that need to be commented, not just pro-forma and CYA stuff.
"The Book of Lists" by David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace.
"Eyeless in Gaza" by Aldous Huxley.
"Trout Fishing in America" by Richard Brautigan.
Apple may have used intuition or good taste when they put a single menu bar at the top of the screen initially, but later on they did research which backed it up.
The edges of the screen are prime real estate and are easy targets to hit because the mouse pointer is constrained by the screen; effectively the menu bar is infinite in height. In order to hit a menu bar at the top of a window, you need to decelerate and hit a target that is fairly small. You need to do precision control in two dimensions instead of only one.
I think one of the reason Windows users are always complaining that using the mouse is slower than the keyboard is because putting the menu at the top of the window makes the mouse slower to use than if it were at the top of the screen.
Bruce Tognazinni devotes an entire chapter--27--of "Tog on Interface," (1992, Addison-Wesley) to this very topic. He cites four or five pieces of research.
But, never mind. It's only research. Tognazinni wrote--in 1990!--"People for years have been explaining to me that in this era of giant screen monitors, we just have to do something about those menu bars way up there at the top of the screen; that menu bars should be attached to windows, or pop up beneath the cursor or something. Anything, just so they aren't up at the top of the screen any more." And I am sure people will be doing it fifteen years from now, too.
This Boston Globe article is interesting... it's essentially a summary of a new book by Mike Davis.
It puts pandemics into their political and social context. The article says that if flu does develop into a planetwide scourge, it "will be a largely man-made disaster" caused by "overseas tourism, wetland destruction, a corporate 'Livestock Revolution,' and Third World urbanization.
Amen, brother.
.ini files, or CStrings, or what have you. It was all the non-portable things they did without even knowing it--and the fact that the non-portable stuff was salted and peppered evenly throughout the whole project instead of concentrated in a few well-defined modules--that got to me.
I've been involved in way too many projects where people said, "Oh, yeah, we're doing all our development on Windows but it's no big deal. We aren't going to use anything non-portable."
Then, when the time came to port it... it was utterly intertwingled with Windows-specific cruft, half of which crept in because nobody even knew they were doing it. If they'd ever tried even once to port it, they could have caught this stuff as it happened.
I don't mind a conscious decision to use
And it didn't help that everything was compiled with permissive compiler options regarding C/C++ conformance, and a low warning level.
If you think this a bubble, you just don't get it. This is a fundamental paradigm shift. The secret to wealth without effort has finally been found. This is totally, absolutely different from the Internet bubble, Florida real estate during the 1920s, multilevel marketing, pyramid clubs, and arbitrage of international postal reply coupons. You see, it's completely legal, because you give the government your social security number so that you can pay income tax on the fabulous wealth this system generates--guaranteed!
This one works. You just have to dare to be great. Fire your boss and never work again! It can work for anyone. You can do it from your home in your spare time. And for $19.95 I'll send you absolutely free a valuable envelope packed full of information on how you can buy our videotype seminar series. Try it at absolutely no obligation. If you follow the simple step-by-step instructions and, after three months you are not making $2000, $3000, $5000 a month, just send a letter to our PO box or call our disconnected phone line and we will cheerfully refund your money.
If iTunes Music Store can successfully sell video with granularity lower than an entire movie... and, in general, content that is "worth" less than $20... it opens up a world of possibilities. And I'd say individual episodes of popular television sitcoms at two bucks a pop are a good start.
It doesn't matter what device you watch them on. That's just technology, which--not to be dismissive--is the least important part of the equation.
If companies can make money selling five-inch DVD players for $70, making a five-inch DVD player that doesn't need to have a DVD drive in it should be a slam dunk. If Apple can make an iPod nano, making a BIGGER iPod with a bigger screen shouldn't be too hard.
Besides, I don't want to watch TV on a 2" screen at home, where I have an easy chair and a TV receiver. But on an airplane flight... or a bus ride... or a dentist's waiting room... I might be willing to compromise.