Print tech reporters have had it too easy for too long...you had to be print first, which means that the tech reporter for the WSJ or the NYT has to have been in the business for quite a while, and is probably not exactly tech savvy, and certainly not hip. Now those fossils are competing with bloggers, and some of those bloggers are hip, articulate, AND extremely tech savvy, so, of course, they're getting beat down.
It's time folks started reading blogs or some other tool for their 'advice.' I swear, Dear Abbey and her ilk have had untouchable, ass-easy jobs for far too long. It's time to knock them off their high horses!! Who's with me?
If you're not a fan of fluff, you might like the Economist.
You're not the first to recommend that. Others have suggested US News & World Report. Personally I enjoy the scientific articles in Discover, and am probably going to renew when my subscription ends next month.
Newsweek moved from news to entertainment about a decade ago. Today the magazine is so full of ads and fluff pieces it's not worth reading, IMO.
What's particularly weak are these 'guest author' articles, which I imagine is this one from Google's brass. The article is near the beginning of the mag, if memory serves me correct, and is written by some different guest author each month and can be about anything, really. It's pretty lame, usually some post-menopausal woman bemoaning her children leaving home, or some high school person talking about preparing for college, or some disaffected 29 year old explaining the challenges his generation fails between sips of a double-tall.
(I'm not much into the printed magazines, but the only ones I'm subscribed to now is Discover and Make. I used to subscribe to Newsweek several years back, but was continually disappointed by the fluff and eventually canceled.)
What irks me is the across-the-board $1.99 price tag for episodes. Why does last night's Law and Order cost as some random one from Season 3, for example?
If you're OJ or Robert Blake you can kill people and only be punished monetarily. And if you're smart enough (or have good enough advisors) like OJ, you can buy a multi-million dollar house in Florida, declare bankruptcy, and then keep your house and stiff the family of the people you murdered.
This blog entry by Joel Spolsky details the success of the film, including the profit and loss... interesting to see the cost breakdown in making an independent film. As of December 1st they had sold nearly 2,600 copies of the DVD, but being listed on/. will surely net some additional sales.
Of course the real profit is in increased exposure to Joel's company and the highlighting of his internship program, which likely promises an even better crop of students next summer.
Saying "copyrights shouldn't be for sale" is a widespread belief which I will never understand. Some nations have "moral rights" for authors that are not transferable. It was inane in kindergarten when one kid would yell at another "you can't draw a pony; it was my idea to draw a pony".
So you're ok with the equally inane dialog:
KID 1: You can't draw a pony; it was my idea to draw a pony KID 2: But look, you drew a house. KID 1: Ah, yes, but I sold my idea to draw a pony to Billy over there.
???
Or did you mean to have a paragraph break between the first and second sentences?
I'm an old stogy so the vast majority of music I have is music I ripped back in the late 90s when at college. So I already have the folder and file structure. The point is, I don't want to have to do more work to organize my media library, I want my player to work with the way it's already organized.
Good point. So the problem, perhaps, is that copyrights shouldn't be for sale. Maybe they can be licensed, but not bought and sold. And, sure, that makes an 80 year old's stuff worth less than a young guy's, but so it goes. I still think that the price would be based more on popularity of the work rather than the age of the creator. That is, a publisher would be more willing to roll the dice licensing the rights to the latest Stephen King novel when he's 80 than they would be on paying some unknown 20 year old.
Content distributors would basically become very familiar with actuary tables.
Spot on. Usually I arrange my MP3s into genre folders, then band folders. I'd like to be able to browser like that. iTunes seems like it is pretty spiffy if you have the ID3 tags all spelled out, and I know there are software apps like MusicBrainz that help with that, but a lot of the classical music I like is done released for free by individual performers who don't tag their MP3 files and who aren't popular enough to have entries on the MusicBrainz servers.
Is it just me or do all media players really seem to suck ass these days? I use iTunes because I want a podcasting tool integrated with my media player, and I do buy the occassional track from iTunes, but I don't like how iTunes just basically has one big ol' library that I have to tag and create playlists to filter.
Not a big fan of WMP either. I liked WinAmp a lot, back before podcasts and before I bought "Apple" music through iTunes... I just wish someone would come out with a music/video media player that didn't blow. Of course, seeing as the going price for these pieces of software is $0.00, and all profit is made from selling content, and buying content essentially locks you into a particular player, I understand why we haven't seen this... (Yeah, yeah, I know you can burn a purchased iTunes song to CD then rip it back into MP3 for portability, but that's a PITA...)
re you dismayed that Microsoft hasn't lifted a finger to improve or enhance IE since it buried Netscape's Navigator browser at the dawn of the century?
I am not an IE zealot (I use FireFox), but this statement isn't 100% accurate. MS did add popup blocking support for IE in SP2. And there are a ton of new features for IE7.
Granted, too little, too late, and way behind FireFox's release/feature schedule (which is why I use FF and not IE), but at least Microsoft is doing something. Proof that competition is a Good Thing.
Books are driven by popularity, so doing so wouldn't hurt new sales.
But due to the long tail effect, the popularity might bubble up for years, or decades. Personally, I think copyright should survive for the lifetime of the creator(s), and once he/she/they die, the works enter the public domain. If I author a song, book, poem, etc., I believe I should own the rights to it. But why should those rights survive my death?
One could argue the same thing for physical property...
my understanding is that many authors make a lot of their money from book signings
I've authored a half-dozen computer trade books and have only been to one author signing (at a tech conference) and signed two books.
Authors make their money from royalties. I get a percentage of every sale the publisher makes to the distributor.
Example: A book of mine sells at Amazon.com/B&N/Borders for $39.95. That means that my publisher sold the book to Amazon.com et al for roughly $19.95. If I am on, say, 10% royalty, I get , then, $1.95 for that copy sold. Of course, the publisher holds onto a percentage (maybe 20-30%) of every dollar coming in because more likely than not the distributor won't sell all the copies and will want a refund (these are called 'returns').
So 99.999999% of all money I make writing books is from royalties on copies sold, as I imagine is the case for all but the most famous authors (Stephen King, Dan Brown, etc.), who have movies, name recognition, etc., etc.
Difficulty with transferring files (I haven't gotten it to work, but I could be doing something wrong)
I concur. I think the main IM clients have some code in there that can work around/with firewalls to get the transfers through. Trillian is not as easy, you have to manually open up ports on your firewall.
I use Trillian just b/c it seems a shame to have to have multiple IM clients running just to stay in touch with the ol' lady, clients, and friends. Trillian lets me do that with just one app, so that's what I use.
Honestly, though, it seems like virtually everybody on my contact list has switched over to MSN over the years, for whatever reason.
When I buy a PC, any PC, I have Windows preinstalled.
False. Yes, there are MANY PCs that come preinstalled with Windows, or are MS OEMs, but there have been PCs sold as complete systems without MS being installed. (Didn't WalMart try this a couple years back?)
But mass exterminations weren't possible until they systematized the process. Early on in the war the SS squads would round up and execute the undesireables, but it was slow and had a high mental cost on the soldiers doing the killing. The gas chambers made killings millions feasible both logistically and psychologically. Had those been taken out of commission, what would Hitler have done? Divert precious few materials from those factories yet to be bombed to build more gas chambers? Remember that the time we're talking about is pretty late in the war when the Allies were clearly on the path to victory...
Your comment sure did scuttle the dust off of some folds in the ol' cranium. I remember having a helluva time playing that four-player mode back at college. Yeah, that game rocked, the controls were pretty sweet. Damn, those were some fun times.
A lot of bad shit went down throughout the war and people just stood by. I'm not blaming them, it's hard to stand up when doing so will likely mean the end of your and your family's life. But the point remains, the Allies knew of the existence of concentration camps and the systemmatic murder that was going on, but decided not to bomb them. I'm not saying that this is anti-Semitism, as deciding to save ornaments strictly for military targets makes militaristic sense, but bombing those camps out of commission would have made moral sense, collateral damage be damned.
I'm not the military expert you obviously are, but I don't recall ever reading about precision smart bombs in the 1940s that could have achieved what you describe.
AFAIK the tech was limited to scattering lots and lots of high explosives over a wide area--i.e., kill them all, and let the gods sort them out.
Right, but concentration camps weren't located in cities. Carpet bombing sorties could easily decimate the entire camp. Yes, you'd kill the thousands of innocent prisoners there, but you'd destroy the infrastructure for mass murder, thereby saving tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives moving forward. The point would be to decimate the killing facilities - the gas showers, the kilns used to creamate the bodies.
It might make some people squeamish, killing 1,000 innocent civilians, but it's hard to justify not doing it if you know that killing 1,000 innocents will save 10,000 innocents.
Slashdot Mirror
It's time folks started reading blogs or some other tool for their 'advice.' I swear, Dear Abbey and her ilk have had untouchable, ass-easy jobs for far too long. It's time to knock them off their high horses!! Who's with me?
You're not the first to recommend that. Others have suggested US News & World Report. Personally I enjoy the scientific articles in Discover, and am probably going to renew when my subscription ends next month.
What's particularly weak are these 'guest author' articles, which I imagine is this one from Google's brass. The article is near the beginning of the mag, if memory serves me correct, and is written by some different guest author each month and can be about anything, really. It's pretty lame, usually some post-menopausal woman bemoaning her children leaving home, or some high school person talking about preparing for college, or some disaffected 29 year old explaining the challenges his generation fails between sips of a double-tall.
(I'm not much into the printed magazines, but the only ones I'm subscribed to now is Discover and Make. I used to subscribe to Newsweek several years back, but was continually disappointed by the fluff and eventually canceled.)
What irks me is the across-the-board $1.99 price tag for episodes. Why does last night's Law and Order cost as some random one from Season 3, for example?
Ah, sweet justice.
Of course the real profit is in increased exposure to Joel's company and the highlighting of his internship program, which likely promises an even better crop of students next summer.
So you're ok with the equally inane dialog:
KID 1: You can't draw a pony; it was my idea to draw a pony
KID 2: But look, you drew a house.
KID 1: Ah, yes, but I sold my idea to draw a pony to Billy over there.
???
Or did you mean to have a paragraph break between the first and second sentences?
I'm an old stogy so the vast majority of music I have is music I ripped back in the late 90s when at college. So I already have the folder and file structure. The point is, I don't want to have to do more work to organize my media library, I want my player to work with the way it's already organized.
Content distributors would basically become very familiar with actuary tables.
Spot on. Usually I arrange my MP3s into genre folders, then band folders. I'd like to be able to browser like that. iTunes seems like it is pretty spiffy if you have the ID3 tags all spelled out, and I know there are software apps like MusicBrainz that help with that, but a lot of the classical music I like is done released for free by individual performers who don't tag their MP3 files and who aren't popular enough to have entries on the MusicBrainz servers.
While IE7 hasn't yet hit RTM, you can download the Beta.
It's easy to say, "SUPPORT STANDARDS, DAMMIT!", but not so easy in practice. This blog entry by Microsoftie Raymond Chen is worth reading.
Not a big fan of WMP either. I liked WinAmp a lot, back before podcasts and before I bought "Apple" music through iTunes... I just wish someone would come out with a music/video media player that didn't blow. Of course, seeing as the going price for these pieces of software is $0.00, and all profit is made from selling content, and buying content essentially locks you into a particular player, I understand why we haven't seen this... (Yeah, yeah, I know you can burn a purchased iTunes song to CD then rip it back into MP3 for portability, but that's a PITA...)
Ok, enough rambling...
I am not an IE zealot (I use FireFox), but this statement isn't 100% accurate. MS did add popup blocking support for IE in SP2. And there are a ton of new features for IE7.
Granted, too little, too late, and way behind FireFox's release/feature schedule (which is why I use FF and not IE), but at least Microsoft is doing something. Proof that competition is a Good Thing.
I'm afraid I'm not following you here.
But due to the long tail effect, the popularity might bubble up for years, or decades. Personally, I think copyright should survive for the lifetime of the creator(s), and once he/she/they die, the works enter the public domain. If I author a song, book, poem, etc., I believe I should own the rights to it. But why should those rights survive my death?
One could argue the same thing for physical property...
I've authored a half-dozen computer trade books and have only been to one author signing (at a tech conference) and signed two books.
Authors make their money from royalties. I get a percentage of every sale the publisher makes to the distributor.
Example: A book of mine sells at Amazon.com/B&N/Borders for $39.95. That means that my publisher sold the book to Amazon.com et al for roughly $19.95. If I am on, say, 10% royalty, I get , then, $1.95 for that copy sold. Of course, the publisher holds onto a percentage (maybe 20-30%) of every dollar coming in because more likely than not the distributor won't sell all the copies and will want a refund (these are called 'returns').
So 99.999999% of all money I make writing books is from royalties on copies sold, as I imagine is the case for all but the most famous authors (Stephen King, Dan Brown, etc.), who have movies, name recognition, etc., etc.
If you are interested in learning more about the economics of writing a computer trade book, check out a blog entry of mine, aptly titled, The economics of writing a computer trade book...
I concur. I think the main IM clients have some code in there that can work around/with firewalls to get the transfers through. Trillian is not as easy, you have to manually open up ports on your firewall.
I use Trillian just b/c it seems a shame to have to have multiple IM clients running just to stay in touch with the ol' lady, clients, and friends. Trillian lets me do that with just one app, so that's what I use.
Honestly, though, it seems like virtually everybody on my contact list has switched over to MSN over the years, for whatever reason.
This guy's wife (well, now widow) would agree.
Excuse me for not going to Google. Search on:
walmart linux pc
Here's the first hit: WalMart Offers a New Linux PC. And another one: Wal-Mart Expands Linux Offerring.
False. Yes, there are MANY PCs that come preinstalled with Windows, or are MS OEMs, but there have been PCs sold as complete systems without MS being installed. (Didn't WalMart try this a couple years back?)
But mass exterminations weren't possible until they systematized the process. Early on in the war the SS squads would round up and execute the undesireables, but it was slow and had a high mental cost on the soldiers doing the killing. The gas chambers made killings millions feasible both logistically and psychologically. Had those been taken out of commission, what would Hitler have done? Divert precious few materials from those factories yet to be bombed to build more gas chambers? Remember that the time we're talking about is pretty late in the war when the Allies were clearly on the path to victory...
Your comment sure did scuttle the dust off of some folds in the ol' cranium. I remember having a helluva time playing that four-player mode back at college. Yeah, that game rocked, the controls were pretty sweet. Damn, those were some fun times.
A lot of bad shit went down throughout the war and people just stood by. I'm not blaming them, it's hard to stand up when doing so will likely mean the end of your and your family's life. But the point remains, the Allies knew of the existence of concentration camps and the systemmatic murder that was going on, but decided not to bomb them. I'm not saying that this is anti-Semitism, as deciding to save ornaments strictly for military targets makes militaristic sense, but bombing those camps out of commission would have made moral sense, collateral damage be damned.
Right, but concentration camps weren't located in cities. Carpet bombing sorties could easily decimate the entire camp. Yes, you'd kill the thousands of innocent prisoners there, but you'd destroy the infrastructure for mass murder, thereby saving tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives moving forward. The point would be to decimate the killing facilities - the gas showers, the kilns used to creamate the bodies.
It might make some people squeamish, killing 1,000 innocent civilians, but it's hard to justify not doing it if you know that killing 1,000 innocents will save 10,000 innocents.