Oh, and I agree. However, the "real" media make extensive use of freelancers, syndicates, and press bureaus. They're just as guilty as the bloggers.
However, if you're somebody like Kottke, you can get away with being an aggregator, as long as you're publishing new, interesting, and unusual content on a routine basis.
On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan is indeed a commentator, of which there are plenty in the real media (Fox News seem to have embraced this format exclusively). However, Sullivan's an interesting case because although he's not a fringe radical, he doesn't align particularly well at any point on the American political spectrum, making him worthless to a large media outlet. He's a gay conservative from England who happens to quite like Obama.
Very few media sources I've found actually provide a significantly better service than many other sources, so it simply doesn't make sense for me as a consumer to pay for product I can get for free.
Ironically, the GP used two such examples in his post. Although I'll grant you that the New York Times, BBC, and NPR provide a reasonably comparable level of coverage, and suppose that the Telegraph, Guardian, CNN, etc... could work in a pinch, Slashdot is not a journalistic outlet, and the Daily Mail is a trash rag that should not be taken seriously under any circumstances.*
*I welcome all sides of the political spectrum as long as you can make your point without lying. The endless stream of successful libel lawsuits filed against The Daily Mail should be enough of an indication not to trust the thing. Americans have a weird tendency to be unable to separate legitimate British media outlets from the tabloids.
FiveThirtyEight provides fantastic political coverage, largely based upon statistical analyses. Although the site became a bit more editorialized after the 2008 election, Nate Silver acknowledges his biases up front, and almost always provides rock-solid data to back them up. He's also been responsible for bringing down a few fraudulent pollsters.
Speaking of political commentary, Andrew Sullivan is certainly an interesting beast. His tangents about Sarah Palin are a bit silly, although his general political commentary tends to be spot-on.
Bad Astronomy is an all-around fantastic science blog.
Jason Kottke's blog has very little original content, although his content selections are impeccable, reminding me of what Slashdot used to be. He's good at his job in the same way that NPR is good at what it does.
There are more excellent music blogs than I can even possibly begin to enumerate. These have helped launch a mini revolution in the music industry. Although mainstream pop is still the same recycled garbage as it always was, the alternative music community is thriving, and occasionally some of the good stuff does trickle up into the mainstream.
BLDGBLOG is a great read for armchair architects. Infrastructurist is a great read for armchair civil engineers.
FlowingData is a fascinating read about data visualization.
I'll agree that European carriers ate 500x better -- when I lived in the UK, I had better reception, better customer service, and an arguably better phone using Tesco (whose main business is selling groceries) as my carrier, and only put in about £45 of prepay over an entire year, which also included a fair bit of international usage). I returned earlier this year after an 18 month absence, and discovered that my phone still worked, and had retained all £15 of balance I had kept on it before I left.
On the other hand, when I left the US for the UK, Verizon wouldn't let me cancel my phone without a massive surcharge, and deactivated my line anyway while I was gone, even though I kept paying the bill. When I went to reactivate it, the customer service agent tried to blame it all on me, bricked my phone, billed me for a new one, and lost my contacts in the process of trying to reactivate my line.
However, don't blame the companies. T-Mobile is a European carrier, while Verizon is 49% Vodafone.
I tend to believe that those maps aren't based upon actual call data.
AT&T's map shows coverage at my house, while there is definitely none (or it's just barely usable if you find that one magic spot where it works). Verizon's map shows 100% 3G coverage across my entire state (NJ), which is also blatantly untrue. I use them because I get coverage at my house, although there are many places where I can't get a EVDO signal, and a few more still where there is no coverage at all.
The FCC should have sued the pants off of Verizon for their "There's a map for that" series of ads. (They also should have sued the pants off of them and revoked their spectrum rights for their unbelievably abominable customer service, although that's a different matter entirely)
Actually, if you do enough usability testing, and collect statistics with a large and diverse enough sample size, you can objectively claim that it's good looking.
Similarly, eye tracking equipment and reading tests can be used to determine the legibility of a given typeface.
Apple's done extensive usability testing since the beginning, while Microsoft have seriously ramped up their efforts in this department over the past few years (and it shows). Microsoft's also no slouch when it comes to typography, even though their efforts might be a bit misguided (font rendering in Windows and Office is objectively terrible) -- rumor goes that several man-years went into optimizing the on-screen legibility (hinting) of Times New Roman. (Unfortunately, TNR is an ugly compromise between on-screen legibility and legibility on paper. It can look quite nice with proper kerning, spacing, and anti-aliasing, although the default Word templates don't take advantage of any of this. A block of text as formatted by Word's default template is very difficult to read -- you either need to increase the spacing, or put the text into columns for it to be readily legible.)
Typography predates computing by nearly a millennia. There is a science behind producing legible blocks of text, and years of conventional wisdom in the printing industry are finally beginning to trickle down into the world of mainstream computing.
and back to my original point: Monaco tests fairly well as far as monospaced fonts are concerned, although Apple's now using a newhttp://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/01/17/0715219/Programming-With-Proportional-Fonts# mono font as default on 10.6.x. Some of the other newer entrants to the field are fantastic -- Microsoft's Consolas could be mistaken for a proportional font, while the GPL-friendly Droid Sans Mono certainly isn't bad.
AFAIK, the open-source drivers are progressing at a breakneck pace, and hardware acceleration is very usable on some cards. One of the more recent kernel releases included a new driver, which is allegedly quite good.
Apologies for being unable to offer more specifics. The current state of affairs is rather confusing, although I'm fairly confident that we're very quickly progressing in the right direction.
ZFS can also run inside a FUSE module on linux. I use it for managing my NAS and backup pools.
The performance isn't great, although it's perfectly adequate for my needs -- having the awesome volume-management capabilities are more than a worthwhile tradeoff. Sun's continually making improvements to ZFS, while the ZFS-fuse team have been working on the performance angle.
Word has it that a private company is also working on a cleanroom implementation of ZFS for the Linux kernel, which should be free of licensing issues. (Of course, one could question the necessity of this effort, as Btrfs should have most of the features that make ZFS desirable by the time it's done)
I don't give a crap about patent-encumbered codecs.
However, it does mildly trouble me that my dual-core mac cannot play a 320x240 video without stuttering, as does the fact that VLC's crappy reverse-engineered codec can play the same FLV file 20-30x more efficiently.
Given that modern PCs have supported processor throttling for several years now, I have to imagine that the environmental impact of all the extra CPU cycles wasted due to Flash must be staggering.
I welcome Silverlight if only for the reason that it at least bloody works, and has a halfway-decent free implementation. It might be a trap, but it's a trap that works.
Re:HTML5 for the win? Sorry, that's not a codec.
on
YouTube Revamp Imminent?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, people who know a thing or two about video codecs tend to dislike Ogg because it isn't a particularly good codec. Its original owners, On2, open-sourced the product, because it was a 10-year-old technology that couldn't compete with any modern product.
Coincidentally, the internet's benevolent overlords, Google, are in talks to purchase On2, who own the IP to a few codecs that are considerably more modern than Theora (supposedly competitive with H.264 and VC-1). The idea of Google open-sourcing its newly-acquired property is certainly within the realm of possibility, especially if they can squeeze it into the HTML5 spec.
If YouTube only offers HD content using the new codec, there will be significant impetus for users to switch to HTML5-compliant browsers, or install plugins that enable similar functionality.
What's wrong with the security and sharing model of Facebook? It seems to offer comprehensive and granular control to me -- by far the best privacy controls of any site I've used.
Even if we ignore the causation argument, depression and mental illness are particularly difficult subjects to even correlate, as the criteria for diagnosis has changed considerably over the past several decades, as well as the rate of diagnosis given social stigmas and the availability of effective treatments (consider that, before Viagra, erectile dysfunction was considered to be extremely rare, as very few men would admit to having the condition, considering there was no effective treatment available)
Intel's style of innovation seems to be quite similar to that of Microsoft. Although both companies have extremely capable R&D departments that regularly do churn out exciting and innovative research, the stuff that makes it into actual products is largely a rehash of whatever AMD/Apple did 2 years ago.
As long as you keep track of your significant digits, you'll know the exact precision of your result, as well as the margin of error. If the margin of error isn't satisfactory for your purposes, you can take more precise measurements, and/or use more precise constants.
However, precision isn't worth a damn if your underlying measurements are flat-out wrong. If we use 4.27483 as our value of pi, it's more precise than 3.141, but a whole lot less accurate.
Newtonian mechanics is an approximation of relativistic mechanics that works extremely well at low speeds. (In fact, if you're talking about an object at rest relative to your own frame of reference, it works perfectly). You sacrifice a bit of accuracy, but no precision.
I've always wondered about this. While I'm certainly not going to complain about America's desire to recruit the best and the brightest, I do question why we don't do more to retain the best and the brightest, particularly when they regularly have visa problems in spite of receiving a massively subsidized education.*
I briefly considered continuing my education outside the US, and very quickly concluded that we are by far more generous toward foreign students than most other developed nations. The EU in particular wants nothing to do with you unless you're a citizen of one of their member states, or have more money than sense.**
*There's historic evidence to support this strategy -- it's often said that America made it to the moon because our German rocket scientists were better than Russia's German rocket scientists.
**This isn't necessarily true for undergraduate education. I completed part of my undergrad in Europe, and received a top-notch education for less money than most state schools charge in the US. I greatly regret my decision to return to the US to finish my degree so that I would receive a domestic qualification. However, if you're pursuing a postgraduate degree in the sciences, you'd be nuts to pay a dime for it.
From what I understand, Google is aiming to be a reseller, and will eventually be selling all Android-based devices from their website. The Nexus one is simply the first to be offered through the program.
I quite like Google's concerted attempts to divorce hardware devices from mobile carriers. It should spur considerable innovation in the industry. Of course, some things such as the burden of technical support still need to be sorted out -- turning to the European model should work just fine (subsidized contract phones are supported by the carrier, while 'unlocked' phones are supported by the manufacturer, with the carrier stepping in to provide help with SIM issues).
Using a natural gas plant to power a server farm would also be moronic, considering that the power demand is constant, and highly predictable. The air conditioners are the only devices that do not have a constant rate of consumption.
The eNV3 seems to be mostly the same phone as the eNV2 with a few cosmetic changes.
I sure as heck wouldn't buy one again, though it was a pretty nice phone when I got it 2 years ago, particularly in comparison to the competition.
My next phone will probably be an android headset -- possibly the new whiz-bang Google widget, depending on the price (and competency of T-Mobile, which I have some reasons to doubt). At the moment, T-Mobile appears to be the only mobile carrier that doesn't take its customers completely for granted (AT&T's cavalier attitude toward its network is only matched by Verizon's cavalier attitude toward its customers in general).
Slashdot Mirror
I think the parent was trying to be funny. RDRAM was notoriously prone to errors, and had to use ECC all the time in order to be usable.
I'm pretty sure this was an actual plot point in Snow Crash.
Oh, and I agree. However, the "real" media make extensive use of freelancers, syndicates, and press bureaus. They're just as guilty as the bloggers.
However, if you're somebody like Kottke, you can get away with being an aggregator, as long as you're publishing new, interesting, and unusual content on a routine basis.
On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan is indeed a commentator, of which there are plenty in the real media (Fox News seem to have embraced this format exclusively). However, Sullivan's an interesting case because although he's not a fringe radical, he doesn't align particularly well at any point on the American political spectrum, making him worthless to a large media outlet. He's a gay conservative from England who happens to quite like Obama.
Very few media sources I've found actually provide a significantly better service than many other sources, so it simply doesn't make sense for me as a consumer to pay for product I can get for free.
Ironically, the GP used two such examples in his post. Although I'll grant you that the New York Times, BBC, and NPR provide a reasonably comparable level of coverage, and suppose that the Telegraph, Guardian, CNN, etc... could work in a pinch, Slashdot is not a journalistic outlet, and the Daily Mail is a trash rag that should not be taken seriously under any circumstances.*
*I welcome all sides of the political spectrum as long as you can make your point without lying. The endless stream of successful libel lawsuits filed against The Daily Mail should be enough of an indication not to trust the thing. Americans have a weird tendency to be unable to separate legitimate British media outlets from the tabloids.
FiveThirtyEight provides fantastic political coverage, largely based upon statistical analyses. Although the site became a bit more editorialized after the 2008 election, Nate Silver acknowledges his biases up front, and almost always provides rock-solid data to back them up. He's also been responsible for bringing down a few fraudulent pollsters.
Speaking of political commentary, Andrew Sullivan is certainly an interesting beast. His tangents about Sarah Palin are a bit silly, although his general political commentary tends to be spot-on.
Bad Astronomy is an all-around fantastic science blog.
Jason Kottke's blog has very little original content, although his content selections are impeccable, reminding me of what Slashdot used to be. He's good at his job in the same way that NPR is good at what it does.
There are more excellent music blogs than I can even possibly begin to enumerate. These have helped launch a mini revolution in the music industry. Although mainstream pop is still the same recycled garbage as it always was, the alternative music community is thriving, and occasionally some of the good stuff does trickle up into the mainstream.
BLDGBLOG is a great read for armchair architects. Infrastructurist is a great read for armchair civil engineers.
FlowingData is a fascinating read about data visualization.
Want to look good at work? Read this.
I'm sure I'm forgetting a few good ones. Google solicited the reading lists of a few experts. Their recommendations are generally quite good.
I'll agree that European carriers ate 500x better -- when I lived in the UK, I had better reception, better customer service, and an arguably better phone using Tesco (whose main business is selling groceries) as my carrier, and only put in about £45 of prepay over an entire year, which also included a fair bit of international usage). I returned earlier this year after an 18 month absence, and discovered that my phone still worked, and had retained all £15 of balance I had kept on it before I left.
On the other hand, when I left the US for the UK, Verizon wouldn't let me cancel my phone without a massive surcharge, and deactivated my line anyway while I was gone, even though I kept paying the bill. When I went to reactivate it, the customer service agent tried to blame it all on me, bricked my phone, billed me for a new one, and lost my contacts in the process of trying to reactivate my line.
However, don't blame the companies. T-Mobile is a European carrier, while Verizon is 49% Vodafone.
I tend to believe that those maps aren't based upon actual call data.
AT&T's map shows coverage at my house, while there is definitely none (or it's just barely usable if you find that one magic spot where it works). Verizon's map shows 100% 3G coverage across my entire state (NJ), which is also blatantly untrue. I use them because I get coverage at my house, although there are many places where I can't get a EVDO signal, and a few more still where there is no coverage at all.
The FCC should have sued the pants off of Verizon for their "There's a map for that" series of ads. (They also should have sued the pants off of them and revoked their spectrum rights for their unbelievably abominable customer service, although that's a different matter entirely)
You were writing adware for Buick in the 90s using a Mac?
So many things about this just don't add up. Do explain more...
Actually, if you do enough usability testing, and collect statistics with a large and diverse enough sample size, you can objectively claim that it's good looking.
Similarly, eye tracking equipment and reading tests can be used to determine the legibility of a given typeface.
Apple's done extensive usability testing since the beginning, while Microsoft have seriously ramped up their efforts in this department over the past few years (and it shows). Microsoft's also no slouch when it comes to typography, even though their efforts might be a bit misguided (font rendering in Windows and Office is objectively terrible) -- rumor goes that several man-years went into optimizing the on-screen legibility (hinting) of Times New Roman. (Unfortunately, TNR is an ugly compromise between on-screen legibility and legibility on paper. It can look quite nice with proper kerning, spacing, and anti-aliasing, although the default Word templates don't take advantage of any of this. A block of text as formatted by Word's default template is very difficult to read -- you either need to increase the spacing, or put the text into columns for it to be readily legible.)
Typography predates computing by nearly a millennia. There is a science behind producing legible blocks of text, and years of conventional wisdom in the printing industry are finally beginning to trickle down into the world of mainstream computing.
and back to my original point: Monaco tests fairly well as far as monospaced fonts are concerned, although Apple's now using a newhttp://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/01/17/0715219/Programming-With-Proportional-Fonts# mono font as default on 10.6.x. Some of the other newer entrants to the field are fantastic -- Microsoft's Consolas could be mistaken for a proportional font, while the GPL-friendly Droid Sans Mono certainly isn't bad.
AFAIK, the open-source drivers are progressing at a breakneck pace, and hardware acceleration is very usable on some cards. One of the more recent kernel releases included a new driver, which is allegedly quite good.
Apologies for being unable to offer more specifics. The current state of affairs is rather confusing, although I'm fairly confident that we're very quickly progressing in the right direction.
# Our government attacked.... Afghanistan, which had nothing to do with the attack on us. Billions spent.
That's blatantly untrue.
ZFS can also run inside a FUSE module on linux. I use it for managing my NAS and backup pools.
The performance isn't great, although it's perfectly adequate for my needs -- having the awesome volume-management capabilities are more than a worthwhile tradeoff. Sun's continually making improvements to ZFS, while the ZFS-fuse team have been working on the performance angle.
Word has it that a private company is also working on a cleanroom implementation of ZFS for the Linux kernel, which should be free of licensing issues. (Of course, one could question the necessity of this effort, as Btrfs should have most of the features that make ZFS desirable by the time it's done)
I don't give a crap about patent-encumbered codecs.
However, it does mildly trouble me that my dual-core mac cannot play a 320x240 video without stuttering, as does the fact that VLC's crappy reverse-engineered codec can play the same FLV file 20-30x more efficiently.
Given that modern PCs have supported processor throttling for several years now, I have to imagine that the environmental impact of all the extra CPU cycles wasted due to Flash must be staggering.
I welcome Silverlight if only for the reason that it at least bloody works, and has a halfway-decent free implementation. It might be a trap, but it's a trap that works.
Actually, people who know a thing or two about video codecs tend to dislike Ogg because it isn't a particularly good codec. Its original owners, On2, open-sourced the product, because it was a 10-year-old technology that couldn't compete with any modern product.
Coincidentally, the internet's benevolent overlords, Google, are in talks to purchase On2, who own the IP to a few codecs that are considerably more modern than Theora (supposedly competitive with H.264 and VC-1). The idea of Google open-sourcing its newly-acquired property is certainly within the realm of possibility, especially if they can squeeze it into the HTML5 spec.
If YouTube only offers HD content using the new codec, there will be significant impetus for users to switch to HTML5-compliant browsers, or install plugins that enable similar functionality.
What's wrong with the security and sharing model of Facebook? It seems to offer comprehensive and granular control to me -- by far the best privacy controls of any site I've used.
Please do not confuse correlation with causation.
Even if we ignore the causation argument, depression and mental illness are particularly difficult subjects to even correlate, as the criteria for diagnosis has changed considerably over the past several decades, as well as the rate of diagnosis given social stigmas and the availability of effective treatments (consider that, before Viagra, erectile dysfunction was considered to be extremely rare, as very few men would admit to having the condition, considering there was no effective treatment available)
Intel's style of innovation seems to be quite similar to that of Microsoft. Although both companies have extremely capable R&D departments that regularly do churn out exciting and innovative research, the stuff that makes it into actual products is largely a rehash of whatever AMD/Apple did 2 years ago.
Please don't confuse accuracy with precision.
As long as you keep track of your significant digits, you'll know the exact precision of your result, as well as the margin of error. If the margin of error isn't satisfactory for your purposes, you can take more precise measurements, and/or use more precise constants.
However, precision isn't worth a damn if your underlying measurements are flat-out wrong. If we use 4.27483 as our value of pi, it's more precise than 3.141, but a whole lot less accurate.
Newtonian mechanics is an approximation of relativistic mechanics that works extremely well at low speeds. (In fact, if you're talking about an object at rest relative to your own frame of reference, it works perfectly). You sacrifice a bit of accuracy, but no precision.
I've always wondered about this. While I'm certainly not going to complain about America's desire to recruit the best and the brightest, I do question why we don't do more to retain the best and the brightest, particularly when they regularly have visa problems in spite of receiving a massively subsidized education.*
I briefly considered continuing my education outside the US, and very quickly concluded that we are by far more generous toward foreign students than most other developed nations. The EU in particular wants nothing to do with you unless you're a citizen of one of their member states, or have more money than sense.**
*There's historic evidence to support this strategy -- it's often said that America made it to the moon because our German rocket scientists were better than Russia's German rocket scientists.
**This isn't necessarily true for undergraduate education. I completed part of my undergrad in Europe, and received a top-notch education for less money than most state schools charge in the US. I greatly regret my decision to return to the US to finish my degree so that I would receive a domestic qualification. However, if you're pursuing a postgraduate degree in the sciences, you'd be nuts to pay a dime for it.
A better argument for BSD'd software. You answer to no one.
Shouldn't HTC be providing support?
From what I understand, Google is aiming to be a reseller, and will eventually be selling all Android-based devices from their website. The Nexus one is simply the first to be offered through the program.
I quite like Google's concerted attempts to divorce hardware devices from mobile carriers. It should spur considerable innovation in the industry. Of course, some things such as the burden of technical support still need to be sorted out -- turning to the European model should work just fine (subsidized contract phones are supported by the carrier, while 'unlocked' phones are supported by the manufacturer, with the carrier stepping in to provide help with SIM issues).
Using a natural gas plant to power a server farm would also be moronic, considering that the power demand is constant, and highly predictable. The air conditioners are the only devices that do not have a constant rate of consumption.
But it's okay for Con Edison to have this information?
Given the choice between Google and my sleazeball utility company, I know which one I'd trust more with my data.
This actually exists as a product, albeit for use in the entertainment industry, which also uses 19" racks for a variety of applications.
The eNV3 seems to be mostly the same phone as the eNV2 with a few cosmetic changes.
I sure as heck wouldn't buy one again, though it was a pretty nice phone when I got it 2 years ago, particularly in comparison to the competition.
My next phone will probably be an android headset -- possibly the new whiz-bang Google widget, depending on the price (and competency of T-Mobile, which I have some reasons to doubt). At the moment, T-Mobile appears to be the only mobile carrier that doesn't take its customers completely for granted (AT&T's cavalier attitude toward its network is only matched by Verizon's cavalier attitude toward its customers in general).