Re:Twitter's not completely useless
on
One-Tweet Wonders
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· Score: 1
Twitter is trendy but has no functional advantage.
And yet, the people flocking to it think you're wrong. Apparently they see value in the way Twitter works compared to the other available tools and have chosen it.
I run my own website and my own mailserver (complete with listserv), so it's pretty much equally convenient for me to post data to Twitter or my local services. However, everyone I know seems more willing to subscribe to one service (Twitter or Facebook; your pick) and follow all their friends from there than to subscribe to a separate RSS feed or listserv for each of their friends.
Oh, that's brilliant! That's obviously sufficient for everyone, so let's just drop ODF altogether.
Re:Twitter's not completely useless
on
One-Tweet Wonders
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What's the difference between waiting for a web page to update and waiting for an email to hit your inbox?
In this case, it's the difference between the OP sending the results to everyone listening, and one of those listeners taking the data and uploading it to a website. In other words, between primary and secondary sources.
People know how to use email. Subscribing to a mail list is trivial. Last time I did it it involved sending the word subscribe to an email address. Everyone knows how to do this.
Your mouse-incapable uncle surely doesn't.
You also set up your example is invalid due to the artificial limitations you put on it. Why would you create a one off list? Why not leave the list around for the team?
That's possible, sure, but not in the context of the OP's situation. He was able to send text messages but quite likely not able to set up a mailing list while sitting on the bleachers watching the wrestling.
You're saying rather than doing that trivial step it's some how easier to have people create yet another account, this time with a system they are not familiar with.
You mean, like creating an account on the hypothetical listserv? Why are you under the impression that subscribing to a listserv is inherently easier than subscribing to Twitter?
Email is not one to one. You know you can put a semi colon followed by another address on the To: line right?
I'm pretty new to email, but even I know that it's one-to-one. Adding multiple To: or Cc: or Bcc: entries is functionally identical to sending multiple copies of the message, unless you want to get into gray areas like single instance store on the recipient's end.
Texting, at least for me and I have a bare bare bones phone, is one to many. I can send the same text to multiple people just by selecting multiple recipients.
No. Texting is one-to-one, albeit repeatable. BTW, you might ask your carrier whether sending a single text to 50 recipients is billable as one message or 50. I bet the answer might surprise you.
I ask again. What advantages does it offer over existing technology other than being new?
Well, in the OP's case, it offered the rather huge advantage of letting him send one single SMS to Twitter instead of making him keep track of everyone who was interested so that he could notify each person individually, all without having to set up a listserv in advance and convincing everyone to subscribe to it. You might take note that despite your reasons why it shouldn't work, it did.
Conspicuously absent: Apple's "Pages" word processor. I'd happily pay Apple for a word processor that plays nicely on my PPC Mac, but I'll be damned if I'm going to lock my data into Yet Another Weird Apple Format. Seriously, what genius at Apple said "we have a 0% share of the word processing market - let's invent our own incompatible format so that no one can exchange data with us!"
Re:Twitter's not completely useless
on
One-Tweet Wonders
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This is also an example of no compelling reason to use twitter for this. Email or text would both work in this situation.
How so? Say 100 people wanted to get the live scores without waiting for the web page to update. The OP could've created a special-purpose mailing list, walked everyone through signing up, and then deleted it afterward. With texting, I suppose he could've stored all their numbers and texted each one every time someone won a match.
Honestly the only difference I see between twitter and email/text is a lack of security. The information originator cannot control who has access to the feed.
Well, openness and the fact that email and text are one-to-one channels while Twitter (and Facebook) are one-to-many. But other than the access model and the difference between direct communication and broadcasting, yes, they're very much alike.
Re:Whiners of all countries, unite!
on
One-Tweet Wonders
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· Score: 1
Absent one-off scenarios (the Obama campaign), I've yet to see any value in any of it. What I do see is a large number of people engaged in what could generously be described as trivia, and dragging down the quality of discourse for the rest of us to levels too embarassing to ponder.
The value is that I have a lot of friends and far too little time to hang out with all of them (kids, baseball leagues, house projects, etc.). It's kind of nice to see that Rob just finished a chapter of his newest novel, and Jon shaved 5 seconds off his circuit time over last year, and Jayson had some luck getting his RAID card working. There's no way I want to get an email about each of those things, but I like having a terse chronological display of what my far-flung friends are up to. It makes them seem not so distant.
Honestly, the alternative to Twitter and Facebook for most people I know would be to permanently lose contact with them. In some cases that wouldn't be a bad thing, but I enjoy knowing that my high school buddy is having fun being a dad and that my old neighbor in California is still making those weird sculptures.
That is the point, for me at least, and yes, that's the kind of society I want to live in.
And if you still don't get it, consider that Twitter is a less verbose and topical version of Slashdot. You could make the same arguments against this site ("Twitter for geeks. Less concise."), but here we are.
I don't use Windows and don't care one way or another. Strawman conspiracy theories aside, though, it's an undeniable fact that MS holds onto patches. That's the very definition of Patch Tuesday!
We run ZFS on every FreeBSD server and a few desktops. Mostly 64bit. It requires tuning.
Required, past tense, for the most part. Recent releases do the job just fine to the point that I've un-tuned every ZFS system I manage and let the OS handle it. Note: not applicable on 32-bit, but that's a crapshoot anyway.
That's 7 different text-based (aka "simple") languages/syntaxes a developer has to learn just to be able just to get the same basic functionality as a simple desktop application. The current system as it is isn't simple.
Your desktop application is, of course, written in Magic Language that abstracts away all details of MVC and a relational database so that you only have to learn one specific language/syntax.
I've visited the talk.origins group before and concluded that the pro-evolution group is just as zealotic as the creation/ID group. Just because you are (generally) right does not necessarily mean you're not a zealot. I suspect the mellow people of both sides have been driven out.
When someone insists that 2+2=5, you are not a zealot for steadfastly refusing to play along.
Monthly Rant: Slashdot, please toss CSS. It scrolls funny and overlaps wrong.
Correction: please fix the CSS. Right now the mobile version on my iTouch looks great, and there's no way you could make the same site look nice on a desktop and a portable device without CSS (that doesn't involve man-decades of pointless work).
In Nebraska here, you can get a spectacular view just 30 miles out of Omaha or Lincoln.
My wife and I moved to Norfolk during the Leonids a few years ago, and ended up pulling over to park on highway 51 out in the middle of nowhere. I agree: the skies here are spectacular.
That's one of the silliest terms I've ever heard. Comparing light at night to smog or dirty water is disingenuous. There are no health hazards to nighttime light.
I love well-lit civilization as much as the next young Libertarian, but loss of the night sky is a damn shame. If you've never stared into the cosmos and wondered, then your life is incomplete.
I drove out west a few years ago. Took 140 out through southern Oregon. It was just BLACK. No moon, no lights, nothing but starlight.
I have never seen anything quite as beautiful as being on a Navy ship about 2 degrees off the equator and under a new moon, with no light from horizon to horizon but the sky and the phosphorescent bacteria we were churning up. It was one of those things that was so lovely that it almost hurt, as if you couldn't look at it and breath at the same time.
It was a peculiar form of narcissism that ever led people to think anyone gave a crap about their day-to-day lives in the first place.
My blog ended up being one thing: a place for me to vent about things that annoyed me. I don't care if anyone reads my stuff; I just had to get it out of my system.
As it turns out, though, apparently a lot of people are annoyed by the same things: from Ecco shoes (6,800 hits) that fall apart (3,200 hits) to credit card interest rate scams (26,600 hits), I've been surprised to find out I'm not alone. Before blogging, I'd never have been heard by that many people, and even if I had, it would've been mostly a one-way communication. Think of it as the op-ed page in the newspaper writ large and cheap and Open Sourced.
But the new Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will be the first that will not run on PowerPC Macs.
I'm in the same boat, although my Mac was nearly a gift so I don't have the same sunk investment as you. Having said that, the biggest feature of Snow Leopard is that it's optimized for 64-bit, and your Mac and mine are both 32-bit. I doubt that a 32-bit build (even if it were logistically feasible) would run well on our machines. While I wish I could play with Snow Leopard, 10.5 isn't going to stop running on release day. You've already gotten more than 3 years of use from your laptop with no signs of stopping. That's nothing to sneeze at!
BTW, iLife '06 is the last version to fully support our Macs. iLife '08 requires a G5 or newer for iMovie. Also, OpenOffice.org 3.1 is only available for Intel. It's not just Apple that's deprecating PowerPC builds.
Except that your wrong. My iTouch's battery lasts just as long in full sunlight as when it's turned down in the dark. As others have pointed out, transflective screens are nice things to have in bright environments.
implies either a monochrome e-ink display or something with enough backlighting to overcome skylight
Millions of iPhone and iTouch owners are laughing at you. I used my iTouch to score a softball game from the bleachers with the sun behind me, and it was easily readable even while wearing sunglasses.
I don't understand who are going to sell these when Microsoft call them up and say "Oh, I see you're selling computers with [non-windows OS], that's interesting... Yeaaahh so... you know those rebates you get on Windows? Yeah, you can forget about those. Have a nice day"
Reply: "Fair enough. Guess we'll give up our 1% share of the desktop market in exchange for 90% of the netbook market. Take care!"
Slashdot Mirror
Twitter is trendy but has no functional advantage.
And yet, the people flocking to it think you're wrong. Apparently they see value in the way Twitter works compared to the other available tools and have chosen it.
I run my own website and my own mailserver (complete with listserv), so it's pretty much equally convenient for me to post data to Twitter or my local services. However, everyone I know seems more willing to subscribe to one service (Twitter or Facebook; your pick) and follow all their friends from there than to subscribe to a separate RSS feed or listserv for each of their friends.
Oh, that's brilliant! That's obviously sufficient for everyone, so let's just drop ODF altogether.
What's the difference between waiting for a web page to update and waiting for an email to hit your inbox?
In this case, it's the difference between the OP sending the results to everyone listening, and one of those listeners taking the data and uploading it to a website. In other words, between primary and secondary sources.
People know how to use email. Subscribing to a mail list is trivial. Last time I did it it involved sending the word subscribe to an email address. Everyone knows how to do this.
Your mouse-incapable uncle surely doesn't.
You also set up your example is invalid due to the artificial limitations you put on it. Why would you create a one off list? Why not leave the list around for the team?
That's possible, sure, but not in the context of the OP's situation. He was able to send text messages but quite likely not able to set up a mailing list while sitting on the bleachers watching the wrestling.
You're saying rather than doing that trivial step it's some how easier to have people create yet another account, this time with a system they are not familiar with.
You mean, like creating an account on the hypothetical listserv? Why are you under the impression that subscribing to a listserv is inherently easier than subscribing to Twitter?
Email is not one to one. You know you can put a semi colon followed by another address on the To: line right?
I'm pretty new to email, but even I know that it's one-to-one. Adding multiple To: or Cc: or Bcc: entries is functionally identical to sending multiple copies of the message, unless you want to get into gray areas like single instance store on the recipient's end.
Texting, at least for me and I have a bare bare bones phone, is one to many. I can send the same text to multiple people just by selecting multiple recipients.
No. Texting is one-to-one, albeit repeatable. BTW, you might ask your carrier whether sending a single text to 50 recipients is billable as one message or 50. I bet the answer might surprise you.
I ask again. What advantages does it offer over existing technology other than being new?
Well, in the OP's case, it offered the rather huge advantage of letting him send one single SMS to Twitter instead of making him keep track of everyone who was interested so that he could notify each person individually, all without having to set up a listserv in advance and convincing everyone to subscribe to it. You might take note that despite your reasons why it shouldn't work, it did.
Conspicuously absent: Apple's "Pages" word processor. I'd happily pay Apple for a word processor that plays nicely on my PPC Mac, but I'll be damned if I'm going to lock my data into Yet Another Weird Apple Format. Seriously, what genius at Apple said "we have a 0% share of the word processing market - let's invent our own incompatible format so that no one can exchange data with us!"
This is also an example of no compelling reason to use twitter for this. Email or text would both work in this situation.
How so? Say 100 people wanted to get the live scores without waiting for the web page to update. The OP could've created a special-purpose mailing list, walked everyone through signing up, and then deleted it afterward. With texting, I suppose he could've stored all their numbers and texted each one every time someone won a match.
Honestly the only difference I see between twitter and email/text is a lack of security. The information originator cannot control who has access to the feed.
Well, openness and the fact that email and text are one-to-one channels while Twitter (and Facebook) are one-to-many. But other than the access model and the difference between direct communication and broadcasting, yes, they're very much alike.
Absent one-off scenarios (the Obama campaign), I've yet to see any value in any of it. What I do see is a large number of people engaged in what could generously be described as trivia, and dragging down the quality of discourse for the rest of us to levels too embarassing to ponder.
The value is that I have a lot of friends and far too little time to hang out with all of them (kids, baseball leagues, house projects, etc.). It's kind of nice to see that Rob just finished a chapter of his newest novel, and Jon shaved 5 seconds off his circuit time over last year, and Jayson had some luck getting his RAID card working. There's no way I want to get an email about each of those things, but I like having a terse chronological display of what my far-flung friends are up to. It makes them seem not so distant.
Honestly, the alternative to Twitter and Facebook for most people I know would be to permanently lose contact with them. In some cases that wouldn't be a bad thing, but I enjoy knowing that my high school buddy is having fun being a dad and that my old neighbor in California is still making those weird sculptures.
That is the point, for me at least, and yes, that's the kind of society I want to live in.
And if you still don't get it, consider that Twitter is a less verbose and topical version of Slashdot. You could make the same arguments against this site ("Twitter for geeks. Less concise."), but here we are.
That's... frightening. On the other hand, I'm not amazed that a given language could yield a 500:1 productivity increase over COBOL.
I don't use Windows and don't care one way or another. Strawman conspiracy theories aside, though, it's an undeniable fact that MS holds onto patches. That's the very definition of Patch Tuesday!
We run ZFS on every FreeBSD server and a few desktops. Mostly 64bit. It requires tuning.
Required, past tense, for the most part. Recent releases do the job just fine to the point that I've un-tuned every ZFS system I manage and let the OS handle it. Note: not applicable on 32-bit, but that's a crapshoot anyway.
That's 7 different text-based (aka "simple") languages/syntaxes a developer has to learn just to be able just to get the same basic functionality as a simple desktop application. The current system as it is isn't simple.
Your desktop application is, of course, written in Magic Language that abstracts away all details of MVC and a relational database so that you only have to learn one specific language/syntax.
Squashing 31 vulnerabilities in a single patch, is, in a word, efficient.
Well, that's one way to positively spin "sat on patches until there were enough to bother with".
I've visited the talk.origins group before and concluded that the pro-evolution group is just as zealotic as the creation/ID group. Just because you are (generally) right does not necessarily mean you're not a zealot. I suspect the mellow people of both sides have been driven out.
When someone insists that 2+2=5, you are not a zealot for steadfastly refusing to play along.
Monthly Rant: Slashdot, please toss CSS. It scrolls funny and overlaps wrong.
Correction: please fix the CSS. Right now the mobile version on my iTouch looks great, and there's no way you could make the same site look nice on a desktop and a portable device without CSS (that doesn't involve man-decades of pointless work).
In Nebraska here, you can get a spectacular view just 30 miles out of Omaha or Lincoln.
My wife and I moved to Norfolk during the Leonids a few years ago, and ended up pulling over to park on highway 51 out in the middle of nowhere. I agree: the skies here are spectacular.
IHBT, but what the hell:
If you're too "manly" to appreciate beauty, then your life sucks more than your narrow brain can appreciate.
That's one of the silliest terms I've ever heard. Comparing light at night to smog or dirty water is disingenuous. There are no health hazards to nighttime light.
I love well-lit civilization as much as the next young Libertarian, but loss of the night sky is a damn shame. If you've never stared into the cosmos and wondered, then your life is incomplete.
So you managed to spot Laxitiva Major?
It's hard to see, as are most brown holes.
I drove out west a few years ago. Took 140 out through southern Oregon. It was just BLACK. No moon, no lights, nothing but starlight.
I have never seen anything quite as beautiful as being on a Navy ship about 2 degrees off the equator and under a new moon, with no light from horizon to horizon but the sky and the phosphorescent bacteria we were churning up. It was one of those things that was so lovely that it almost hurt, as if you couldn't look at it and breath at the same time.
It was a peculiar form of narcissism that ever led people to think anyone gave a crap about their day-to-day lives in the first place.
My blog ended up being one thing: a place for me to vent about things that annoyed me. I don't care if anyone reads my stuff; I just had to get it out of my system.
As it turns out, though, apparently a lot of people are annoyed by the same things: from Ecco shoes (6,800 hits) that fall apart (3,200 hits) to credit card interest rate scams (26,600 hits), I've been surprised to find out I'm not alone. Before blogging, I'd never have been heard by that many people, and even if I had, it would've been mostly a one-way communication. Think of it as the op-ed page in the newspaper writ large and cheap and Open Sourced.
"Gay" is not a substitute for the word "stupid."
I'm campaigning for the integrity of "hacker" and "pirate". Let's keep each other updated on how well that works out.
But the new Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will be the first that will not run on PowerPC Macs.
I'm in the same boat, although my Mac was nearly a gift so I don't have the same sunk investment as you. Having said that, the biggest feature of Snow Leopard is that it's optimized for 64-bit, and your Mac and mine are both 32-bit. I doubt that a 32-bit build (even if it were logistically feasible) would run well on our machines. While I wish I could play with Snow Leopard, 10.5 isn't going to stop running on release day. You've already gotten more than 3 years of use from your laptop with no signs of stopping. That's nothing to sneeze at!
BTW, iLife '06 is the last version to fully support our Macs. iLife '08 requires a G5 or newer for iMovie. Also, OpenOffice.org 3.1 is only available for Intel. It's not just Apple that's deprecating PowerPC builds.
Or you could boycott the particularly onerous terms of your contract by paying your ETF and not giving AT&T your money any longer.
Giving them extra money so that they no longer have to provide service to you? Yeah, that'll learn 'em.
that union had some STANDARDS for who they would let fly.
Of course, they were all along the lines of "Capt. Bob was hired before Capt. Joe, so he gets to pick."
Except that your wrong. My iTouch's battery lasts just as long in full sunlight as when it's turned down in the dark. As others have pointed out, transflective screens are nice things to have in bright environments.
implies either a monochrome e-ink display or something with enough backlighting to overcome skylight
Millions of iPhone and iTouch owners are laughing at you. I used my iTouch to score a softball game from the bleachers with the sun behind me, and it was easily readable even while wearing sunglasses.
I don't understand who are going to sell these when Microsoft call them up and say "Oh, I see you're selling computers with [non-windows OS], that's interesting... Yeaaahh so... you know those rebates you get on Windows? Yeah, you can forget about those. Have a nice day"
Reply: "Fair enough. Guess we'll give up our 1% share of the desktop market in exchange for 90% of the netbook market. Take care!"