The scary thing is, I suspect that most Slashdot readers now have wives or girlfriends, and some of them might come to the parties and even bring friends.
I know my wife will come to the Tampa (FL) party, and if the Orlando one is on a different date we might hit both of them...
My primary video camera is a Sony A1U, usually mounted on a Manfrotto tripod with fluid head. This is obviously "professional" gear. If I whip that sucker out, with or without tripod, nearby cops in big cities tend to freak.
If I haul out my little Panasonic "grandpa and the grandkids" handheld camcorder, nobody ever says a word to me.
My next cam purchase will probably be a Canon HV20 -- it does HD and gives pretty good quality in any rational amount of light, but is small enough not to alarm The Nosies. The only problem is going to be audio.... even a shortie shotgun mic suddenly makes a cam look "professional" enough to cause suspicion.
I recently taped some short takes at JFK airport in NYC -- not of security or anything -- and some Delta employees totally freaked out and called airport security, who told me not to take shots of security personnel but otherwise left me alone.
Luckily, I don't live in NYC, but in Bradenton, Florida. Here and in nearby Sarasota I *routinely* tape commercial video on the streets and beaches, often with a tripod and boom mic, and nearly as often with 3 - 5 people in cast/crew, and nobody bothers me at all. Cops just ask, "Oh what are you filming?" out of ordinary curiosity, then maybe stand around to watch if they're not busy.
Yeah, you're supposed to have a permit for most "professional film activity" here, but I've never gotten one, and I've never been hassled about permitting. Around here, even small-time professional video production is rare enough that people want to watch you do it, not keep you *from* doing it.
I, too, vote for mesquite (or other high-quality "real wood") charcoal and no-fluid, chimney charcoal lighting.
I have an easy-to-clean Son of Hibachi for everyday grilling and a big, oval Patio Classic BBQ with adjustable airflow for slow cooking -- that also functions as a party-scale grill when we host cookouts for large groups.
Some people seem to think lighting charcoal is a big deal. Not so. Crumple 3 sheets of newspaper, put them in the chimney (the Son of Hibachi functions as a chimney in its "closed" position), pour the desired amount of charcoal (15 briquets or so for our small grill, full to the brim for the big one) into the chimney on top of the paper, light paper through the air holes at the bottom of the chimney, then do something else for 15 minutes.
Now pour the charcoal into your grill or BBQ and.... cook. Or, in the case of my Son of Hibachi, open it out flat, spread the briquets, and... cook.
For slow-cooked BBQ (super-tasty ribs and briskets), be prepared to add more charcoal after two - three hours. Lift the grill, pour in about as many unlit briquets as lit ones already cooking, and use your charcoal tool (in my case a giant cast iron spoon) to make sure the unlit briquets are nestled well among the lit ones, put the grill and food back, and close the lid. Come back in a couple of hours and... eat.
Both of these units are super-easy to clean. I have BBQ heretic (propane-using) friends who are amazed when they see that cleaning my charcoal cookers is *easier* than cleaning their flavor-destroying, gaseous monstrosities.
Infrared heat is great for drying paint on cars and metal surfaces in general. But for cooking? (shudder) Not on *my* Florida patio. When it comes to BBQ, we like the real thing around here.
MSNBC's debate video use restrictions are bad business -- for MSNBC.
In their shoes I'd be encouraging everyone and anyone to use that video all over the damn place, either full-length or as a series of excerpts.
Of course, I'd also put an "MSNBC" logo as a watermark on every frame -- in either the lower-left or upper-right corner so it wouldn't get covered up by the "YouTube" (or whatever video hosting service) logo that would cover it if it was placed in the lower-right corner.
This would be major FREE ADVERTISING FOR MSNBC!!!
Imagine millions of people who have been ignoring MSNBC suddenly finding out -- through those watermarks -- that MSNBC carries substantive, public service programming.
"Can you say, 'more viewers,' boys and girls?"
Sadly, this is only an exercise in imagination. In real life, NBC management and lawyers are too stupid to take advantage of this major FREE marketing opportunity.
And people wonder why old-line media companies are losing their audience and their influence...
If you write to Rep. Homan, it should be to thank him for supporting open standards. He's the good guy here.
And rather than sending negative letters to other state legislators, how about teaching them what open standards are and about the positive attributes of open source?
The biggest problem with the legislators on this issue isn't corruption, but ignorance. Most of them have never really heard of a "Linux." They get their information about IT from the same media sources as their constituents.
Education is the key here. I will start *educating* my legislators about open standards and open source once the current legislative session is over.
I'll also be talking about how directly talking to the IT people in state government may be more effective than talking to legislators, but that'll be a separate article about lobbying for open source based on suggestions and input from one of the lobbyists I quoted anonymously in this article.:)
Mark Martin, the Wagg-Ed guy who wrote most of that briefing document, is a detail-oriented pro. I've had plenty of contact with him, both during the work day when we're on opposite sides of the fence, and after-hours, when we stop thinking about work and have friendly conversations (often over a drink or three) about sports, family, politics, and other non-controversial topics.
The only thing surprising to me about this "story" is that anyone is surprised to learn that Mark is just as good and thorough a researcher as the reporters he deals with all day long.
I would not be surprised to read one day that Mark has left Wagg-Ed and started his own PR agency -- and I would be even *less* surprised to learn that most of his clients were open source-based companies. He is often Microsoft's point man in their "Why proprietary software is better than FOSS" PR efforts, so he has an exceptional grasp of FOSS benefits. This knowledge will serve him well if and when he decides to leave the Dark Kingdom and join the Forces of Goodness.:)
On the Internet, all a reader sees of a story on a site's main page are the hed and lede (journo shorthand for "headline" and "lead paragraph"), which makes them more important than they are in a paper publication where a reader can glance down a bit and see more of the story.
Some online publications are now using an "eyebrow" sentence below the hed -- essentially a long subhed, in effect a brief story summary.
I like this style because it gives readers -- and search engines -- a good idea of what's in the story without forcing the writer to load its first paragraph with too many facts. Instead, the writer has the option of opening a story with a quote, a description, an anecdote or something else instead of the traditional, terse lede.
News has always been tailored to its delivery medium. The "inverted pyramid" style, where a story is written so that the most important facts come first, and others are delivered in decreasing order of importance until the story trails off into irrelevance, was developed to make "cutting" a story to fit a given amount of space simple. The typesetter simply took sentences off the end of the story until it was the right length.
Back in the days of hand-set type, and even later, during the pre-offset Linotype (hot metal typesetting machine) period, the type was set backwards, as a mirror image, so editing a story with any kind of judgement during the typesetting process was a time-consuming task. It was easier to whack the end, sentence by sentence -- and many newspapers used one-sentence paragraphs to make this even easier -- and if a story ended up a bit short the typesetter could stick in a small-type "filler" story chosen for size, not relevance.
(Fillers were once a whole separate wire service genre. AP's fillers almost always contained the phrase, "It was reported yesterday." You would read a story about local political malfeasance, and at the end, usually in italics, you'd see a little piece that said someting like, "Hummingbirds often migrate 2000 miles or more every Spring and Fall, it was reported yesterday." Fillers not only filled the type case -- which had to be "locked down" to keep all the type from falling out when it was put on the press, but brought zest to newspapers. I think I last saw a newspaper filler in 1974 or so, but I still miss fillers. Slashdot quotes of the day just aren't the same...)
In TV news, the basic story style tends to be a spoken hed, possibly with a brief shot of the scene, followed by a "more after this" statement, then a commercial break. The linear format of television broadcasting, combined with its dependence on inline ads for revenue, makes this format the standard one, as ingrained in TV people as the inverted pyramid syle is in newspaper journalists.
And so on. I assume direct neural "full sense" info delivery will create another whole set of story styles.
The medium may not be the message, but it plays a large part in determining how that message is delivered.
Headlines written to please search engines rate no more than a small sidebar in the endless tale of media evolution. And sidebars.... they rate a whole rant of their own. Deciding what information should be in a story's main body and what should be relegated to sidebar status is as much of an art as headline writing....
That reason is the motion artifacts and image noise that seem to go along with the AVCHD format. And that's just *one* of the reasons why, instead of buying an HDR-SR1, I paid an extra ~$1200 for a Sony HVR-A1U that does not only standard DV and HDV but also DVCAM format.
I lust after the time savings of being able to bang a camera hard drive's contents into a computer at faster-than-playback speeds, but I also like the fact that DV tapes give me an original archive of what I've shot, and for at least the next few years it's likely that DV and HDV (and DVCAM and DVPRO) are going to be the dominant formats for prosumer, event, and a growing amount of ENG video.
OTOH, if you don't know what DVCAM, DVPRO and ENG mean, you'll probably be happy with the SR1. I would strongly recommend it over the similarly-priced DV-tape HC3, which has neither mic nor headset jacks. (Hint: *always* use an external mic to keep from picking up the camcorder's own mechanism noise -- and noise from your finger/hand movements if you're hand-holding the thing. Or your breating if you're 1' away from the back of the cam and trying to get clean sound from a person 10' away in front of it.)
Four hours of recording time is a LOT if you're going to be doing around-the-home and local shooting where you can unload the cam into a computer every day (and you have major HD space on the computer). The biggest on-camera battery you can buy for that cam will go about five hours, which is barely enough to get 4 hours of actual shooting.
I have never shot more than four hours in a single day, myself. In general, I think you will find that for most home, semi-pro, training video, and indie film use, you will rarely (if ever) shoot much more than two hours per day, so a 4 hour HD on the cam ought to be plenty for most people.
The line about people backing away at a college reunion came from a Microsoft employee in response to my (bland and open-ended) question, "What's it like to work for Microsoft?"
I really only asked two questions: The one above, and "What changes would make Microsoft a better company?" My sample -- about a dozen people near the entrance to the company store wearing Microsoft employee badges -- was surely not representative of the company as a whole, but even so the amount of negativity I heard was a little shocking.
Are you telling me the Microsoft person who said all of virtual earth's feature set only worked in Explorer was lying? Could have been. But I just tried to access some of the advanced features myself with Firefox and failed, so maybe not.
I don't agree with everything Bruce Perens says or does, but I like and respect his Sincere Choice ideas, including a level playing field, interoperability, and letting software developers and software publishers choose their own copyright policies without yelling at other software developers and software publishers for choosing different ones.
As I said, a lot of software companies *do* follow these ideas. I believe that if Microsoft did, too, it would be good for all of us -- and probably even better for Microsoft shareholders and employees.
Well... if I'd pushed Nick and his crowd hard I would have been guilty of the meanness to mid-rank employees I'm being accused of anyway. I saw no point in badgering marketing people who are guilty of nothing but doing their jobs as well as they can. They don't run the company, and their job is to put a positive spin on everything.
What some Slashdot readers seem to have missed (possibly because they read only part of the article, if any of it) is that the negative comments about Microsoft's corporate culture came from Microsoft employees. I said clearly that I asked questions of many "unauthorized" people. I didn't quote any of them by name because I was there to write a story, not to get some poor guy fired for being more open with me than he was supposed to be.
I have never believed that all Microsoft employees are evil. Most of the ones I know personally are decent people. I have seen the company do a lot of bizarre things, and it's still threatening Linux users in an unseemly way, but I don't think Nick White or many of the other 70,000 Microsoft employees are behind any of that or even like it. That kind of behavior comes from top management, which *from what Microsoft employees have told me* may change before long. And almost of the Microsoft people I have talked to "informally" considered Ray Ozzie the most likely successor to Steve Ballmer, and told me they thought he'd be a better boss. I have no idea if any of this is true.
We'll see.
Or, to use the traditional cliche, "only time will tell."
Whatever I say, you will pick it apart. I am trying to give you honest answers, not score debating points.
I am (obviously) capable of writing correct English myself, and I'm a perfectly competent copy editor, but I also must deal with the Slashdot "your words are yours, not mine to change" philosophy. Either you or I could run a grammatically-perfect Slashdot with virtually no dupe posts or other errors, I'm sure, but would it still be the Slashdot we have all come to know and love (and sometimes hate)?
I don't have a good answer for this. I'm sure you do, and I'd love to hear it -- but by private email, please, not by continuing this off-topic thread. (robin at roblimo dot com = best email, although roblimo at slashdot org also works.)
Now I'm going to go help a neighbor install a DSL modem, then edit some videos. Slashdot is less than 1/3 of my job, and less than 1/6 of my life. It's the weekend, and I think I deserve some time for personal projects.:)
You can see the size of the question pool for yourself by looking at the "Call for Questions" post and reading the comments at +5. You may not see exactly the same questions or the same number of questions moderated +5 today as I did on Tuesday afternoon when I was making my selections, but you'll get a rough idea of what was there.
I'm sure my selections could have been more to your taste, but if I'd chosen questions with you in mind, some of the questions you liked would have been irrevelant to others and I would have been knocked for choosing them instead of someone else's favorites. There is simply no way to please every Slashdot user. Their/your tastes and opinions vary too much for that. I often (quietly) ask some of the many long-time Slashdot users I know personally for help, just to make sure I'm not letting my own opinions rule instead of trying to select questions that will also be meaningful to a large percentage of the Slashdot audience.
Note that one unique feature of Slashdot interviews is that the published Q&A session is not a final set-in-stone thing. It is the beginning of a discussion. If an interviewee ducks questions, answers with generalities instead of specifics or uses marketspeak in place of honest language, he or she will get called down on those mistakes by dozens or hundreds of Slashdot readers.
I like to give interviewees questions that can be answered in many ways largely because how they answer those questions tells us a lot about the interviewees' thought processes. Some communicate more honestly than others. Some answer curtly, and some answer at length. You don't get the same kind of insight from open-ended answers as you do from a give-and-take interview. You get a different kind -- and since many Slashdot interview guests have been interviewed elsewhere many times, a moment on Google will usually find at least some "straight" interviews with them. There is no need to repeat the same questions or even the same questioning style here.
As far as your general disgust with Slashdot editing: When I was put "in charge" of this bunch back in 1999 by OSTG's predecessor company, Andover.net, I was supposed to "professionalize" Slashdot. I didn't do that on purpose. One of Slashdot's big differences from traditional media is that many of our most valuable posters and contributors are experts in arcane programming or engineering areas but may not be very good at spelling or grammar. We want these people to be comfortable posting here. We want techies whose first language is Swedish and whose second language is German, who might write a bit clumsily in English, to feel comfortable posting on Slashdot if they have something important to say, even if their poor (English) writing skills would get them laughed off the New York Times forums.
Slashdot exists to provide a forum for people who like to find and discuss "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters" -- and "What Matters" in this case is what matters to the nerds who participate in Slashdot, not to grammarians (who should be on the ACES BB, not here) or people with political interests who think Slashdot ought to push their particular beliefs.
Slashdot be what it be. You've seen changes recently, and you'll see more changes in the future, but those changes are intended to make Slashdot more useful and more fun for its core user group, not to make Slashdot into a straight-line publication.
- Robin 'Roblimo' Miller (member of several fancy-sounding journalists' orgs that are full of people who think they could do Slashdot better but don't understand that bad spelling is an integral part of Slashdot's success)
You forget: In Slashdot interviews, *you* come up with the questions. I just try to pick the most cogent ones, usually from a stack of them that ask more or less the same thing in different words -- and I pick from questions not only *asked* by readers, but from the ones moderated highest, again *by readers*.
So if you want better question, ask better questions. If you want better questions moderated higher, do more and better moderation on interview questions.
I don't "fix" the questions because they're not my words. Now and then I may correct a typo, but beyond that, the whole point of a Slashdot interview is that the questions are written by readers and moderated by readers.
If you want me to come up with my own questions and do interviews by phone or in person, and publish both audio files of the conversation and written transcripts, fine. I'd ask "who, what, where, why, and how" questions, and I'd have lots of follow-ups. I have over 20 years of reporting experience, so I know how to draw people out during interviews (and how to keep them from ducking hard questions, too).
But that wouldn't be a *Slashdot* reader-generated interview.:)
I have watched a clean, neatly-attired Richard Stallman totally charm a group of mostly female Commerce Department lawyers while speaking against an intellectual property treaty.
I mean "charm" to the point where the lawyer-ladies surrounded him while we all ate lunch on the lawn of the Library of Congress building in Washington, DC.
While I do not always (or even necessarily often) agree with Mr. Stallman, I have usually found him to be intelligent, interesting, and good company.
As far as anyone who talks about Eben Moglen being a "dirty hippie" or some such: Prof. Moglen is one of the best-dressed people you'll ever meet at a FOSS gathering, and one of the best speakers, too.
You can truthfully criticize RMS for being an unyielding prick who often gets irritated by little things (I, for one, think his GNU/Linux insistence is both childish and a waste of time -- and I've told him so a number of times), but he has more charisma and sheer brainpower than most other people I've met in my life.
Besides, he helped Marty Connor get accepted by the MIT crowd, so we might say that without RMS Marty might today be managing a multiplex movie theater in Pittsburgh, and that would have been a huge waste of IT talent.
I'll add another prediction: That lots of people won't read and follow this note in the Slashdot Interview FAQ:
You can ask as many questions as you'd like!
But please, only ask one question per submitted comment.
You can ask a compound (multi-part) question, but if you make your question so complicated that no one's sure what you're asking, it's less likely to be moderated up. If you have several burning questions, take a minute to organize your thoughts and separate them into multiple comments.
I currently watch one - two NFL football games per week in season, and between two and three hours (minus PVR ad-skip time of 20% or so) per week year-round, mostly shows my wife wants to watch and I watch with her to be sociable.
Put it this way: I have a small TV in my office that I haven't had on in the last two years except during a few major news events.
Years ago, when I had my limo *and* wrote freelance, people asked me how I managed to keep such a hectic schedule. The answer was simple: I didn't watch TV at all during that period, so I had four more hours of work time per day then the average American without sacrificing any other activities.
FYI, bookstores "buy" books from publishers with the right to return them for full credit if they don't sell. So in real life, in the end, publishers supply them on consignment.
Not only that, authors share the risk. They only get royalties on books that customers actually buy, not on copies *shipped to* bookstores.
Even more fun, the bookstore gets as much of the total retail price of the book -- about 50% -- as the publisher and author combined.
It's a sick system, especially for the authors, which is why so many of us (I've written three books) are starting to look into alternative publishing and distribution channels.
Slashdot Mirror
The scary thing is, I suspect that most Slashdot readers now have wives or girlfriends, and some of them might come to the parties and even bring friends.
I know my wife will come to the Tampa (FL) party, and if the Orlando one is on a different date we might hit both of them...
- Robin
What??! You didn't know Symantec had a company song?
Well, here it is in its full awfulness. And no, this is NOT a parody...
- Robin
My primary video camera is a Sony A1U, usually mounted on a Manfrotto tripod with fluid head. This is obviously "professional" gear. If I whip that sucker out, with or without tripod, nearby cops in big cities tend to freak.
If I haul out my little Panasonic "grandpa and the grandkids" handheld camcorder, nobody ever says a word to me.
My next cam purchase will probably be a Canon HV20 -- it does HD and gives pretty good quality in any rational amount of light, but is small enough not to alarm The Nosies. The only problem is going to be audio.... even a shortie shotgun mic suddenly makes a cam look "professional" enough to cause suspicion.
I recently taped some short takes at JFK airport in NYC -- not of security or anything -- and some Delta employees totally freaked out and called airport security, who told me not to take shots of security personnel but otherwise left me alone.
Luckily, I don't live in NYC, but in Bradenton, Florida. Here and in nearby Sarasota I *routinely* tape commercial video on the streets and beaches, often with a tripod and boom mic, and nearly as often with 3 - 5 people in cast/crew, and nobody bothers me at all. Cops just ask, "Oh what are you filming?" out of ordinary curiosity, then maybe stand around to watch if they're not busy.
Yeah, you're supposed to have a permit for most "professional film activity" here, but I've never gotten one, and I've never been hassled about permitting. Around here, even small-time professional video production is rare enough that people want to watch you do it, not keep you *from* doing it.
- Robin
iPhone? Who cares about the iPhone, already? I want a jPhone, if only for the Schnapps!
The real reason for publishing these five videos separately is so that they are searchable separately by topic.
This makes them more useful, long-run, for people who are just learning about free software -- or about Eben Moglen, for that matter.
- Robin
I, too, vote for mesquite (or other high-quality "real wood") charcoal and no-fluid, chimney charcoal lighting.
I have an easy-to-clean Son of Hibachi for everyday grilling and a big, oval Patio Classic BBQ with adjustable airflow for slow cooking -- that also functions as a party-scale grill when we host cookouts for large groups.
Some people seem to think lighting charcoal is a big deal. Not so. Crumple 3 sheets of newspaper, put them in the chimney (the Son of Hibachi functions as a chimney in its "closed" position), pour the desired amount of charcoal (15 briquets or so for our small grill, full to the brim for the big one) into the chimney on top of the paper, light paper through the air holes at the bottom of the chimney, then do something else for 15 minutes.
Now pour the charcoal into your grill or BBQ and.... cook. Or, in the case of my Son of Hibachi, open it out flat, spread the briquets, and... cook.
For slow-cooked BBQ (super-tasty ribs and briskets), be prepared to add more charcoal after two - three hours. Lift the grill, pour in about as many unlit briquets as lit ones already cooking, and use your charcoal tool (in my case a giant cast iron spoon) to make sure the unlit briquets are nestled well among the lit ones, put the grill and food back, and close the lid. Come back in a couple of hours and... eat.
Both of these units are super-easy to clean. I have BBQ heretic (propane-using) friends who are amazed when they see that cleaning my charcoal cookers is *easier* than cleaning their flavor-destroying, gaseous monstrosities.
Infrared heat is great for drying paint on cars and metal surfaces in general. But for cooking? (shudder) Not on *my* Florida patio. When it comes to BBQ, we like the real thing around here.
- Robin
MSNBC's debate video use restrictions are bad business -- for MSNBC.
In their shoes I'd be encouraging everyone and anyone to use that video all over the damn place, either full-length or as a series of excerpts.
Of course, I'd also put an "MSNBC" logo as a watermark on every frame -- in either the lower-left or upper-right corner so it wouldn't get covered up by the "YouTube" (or whatever video hosting service) logo that would cover it if it was placed in the lower-right corner.
This would be major FREE ADVERTISING FOR MSNBC!!!
Imagine millions of people who have been ignoring MSNBC suddenly finding out -- through those watermarks -- that MSNBC carries substantive, public service programming.
"Can you say, 'more viewers,' boys and girls?"
Sadly, this is only an exercise in imagination. In real life, NBC management and lawyers are too stupid to take advantage of this major FREE marketing opportunity.
And people wonder why old-line media companies are losing their audience and their influence...
- Robin
If you write to Rep. Homan, it should be to thank him for supporting open standards. He's the good guy here.
:)
And rather than sending negative letters to other state legislators, how about teaching them what open standards are and about the positive attributes of open source?
The biggest problem with the legislators on this issue isn't corruption, but ignorance. Most of them have never really heard of a "Linux." They get their information about IT from the same media sources as their constituents.
Education is the key here. I will start *educating* my legislators about open standards and open source once the current legislative session is over.
I'll also be talking about how directly talking to the IT people in state government may be more effective than talking to legislators, but that'll be a separate article about lobbying for open source based on suggestions and input from one of the lobbyists I quoted anonymously in this article.
- Robin
Mark Martin, the Wagg-Ed guy who wrote most of that briefing document, is a detail-oriented pro. I've had plenty of contact with him, both during the work day when we're on opposite sides of the fence, and after-hours, when we stop thinking about work and have friendly conversations (often over a drink or three) about sports, family, politics, and other non-controversial topics.
:)
The only thing surprising to me about this "story" is that anyone is surprised to learn that Mark is just as good and thorough a researcher as the reporters he deals with all day long.
I would not be surprised to read one day that Mark has left Wagg-Ed and started his own PR agency -- and I would be even *less* surprised to learn that most of his clients were open source-based companies. He is often Microsoft's point man in their "Why proprietary software is better than FOSS" PR efforts, so he has an exceptional grasp of FOSS benefits. This knowledge will serve him well if and when he decides to leave the Dark Kingdom and join the Forces of Goodness.
- Robin
Corrected. Thanks for noticing.
On the Internet, all a reader sees of a story on a site's main page are the hed and lede (journo shorthand for "headline" and "lead paragraph"), which makes them more important than they are in a paper publication where a reader can glance down a bit and see more of the story.
Some online publications are now using an "eyebrow" sentence below the hed -- essentially a long subhed, in effect a brief story summary.
I like this style because it gives readers -- and search engines -- a good idea of what's in the story without forcing the writer to load its first paragraph with too many facts. Instead, the writer has the option of opening a story with a quote, a description, an anecdote or something else instead of the traditional, terse lede.
News has always been tailored to its delivery medium. The "inverted pyramid" style, where a story is written so that the most important facts come first, and others are delivered in decreasing order of importance until the story trails off into irrelevance, was developed to make "cutting" a story to fit a given amount of space simple. The typesetter simply took sentences off the end of the story until it was the right length.
Back in the days of hand-set type, and even later, during the pre-offset Linotype (hot metal typesetting machine) period, the type was set backwards, as a mirror image, so editing a story with any kind of judgement during the typesetting process was a time-consuming task. It was easier to whack the end, sentence by sentence -- and many newspapers used one-sentence paragraphs to make this even easier -- and if a story ended up a bit short the typesetter could stick in a small-type "filler" story chosen for size, not relevance.
(Fillers were once a whole separate wire service genre. AP's fillers almost always contained the phrase, "It was reported yesterday." You would read a story about local political malfeasance, and at the end, usually in italics, you'd see a little piece that said someting like, "Hummingbirds often migrate 2000 miles or more every Spring and Fall, it was reported yesterday." Fillers not only filled the type case -- which had to be "locked down" to keep all the type from falling out when it was put on the press, but brought zest to newspapers. I think I last saw a newspaper filler in 1974 or so, but I still miss fillers. Slashdot quotes of the day just aren't the same...)
In TV news, the basic story style tends to be a spoken hed, possibly with a brief shot of the scene, followed by a "more after this" statement, then a commercial break. The linear format of television broadcasting, combined with its dependence on inline ads for revenue, makes this format the standard one, as ingrained in TV people as the inverted pyramid syle is in newspaper journalists.
And so on. I assume direct neural "full sense" info delivery will create another whole set of story styles.
The medium may not be the message, but it plays a large part in determining how that message is delivered.
Headlines written to please search engines rate no more than a small sidebar in the endless tale of media evolution. And sidebars.... they rate a whole rant of their own. Deciding what information should be in a story's main body and what should be relegated to sidebar status is as much of an art as headline writing....
That reason is the motion artifacts and image noise that seem to go along with the AVCHD format. And that's just *one* of the reasons why, instead of buying an HDR-SR1, I paid an extra ~$1200 for a Sony HVR-A1U that does not only standard DV and HDV but also DVCAM format.
I lust after the time savings of being able to bang a camera hard drive's contents into a computer at faster-than-playback speeds, but I also like the fact that DV tapes give me an original archive of what I've shot, and for at least the next few years it's likely that DV and HDV (and DVCAM and DVPRO) are going to be the dominant formats for prosumer, event, and a growing amount of ENG video.
OTOH, if you don't know what DVCAM, DVPRO and ENG mean, you'll probably be happy with the SR1. I would strongly recommend it over the similarly-priced DV-tape HC3, which has neither mic nor headset jacks. (Hint: *always* use an external mic to keep from picking up the camcorder's own mechanism noise -- and noise from your finger/hand movements if you're hand-holding the thing. Or your breating if you're 1' away from the back of the cam and trying to get clean sound from a person 10' away in front of it.)
Four hours of recording time is a LOT if you're going to be doing around-the-home and local shooting where you can unload the cam into a computer every day (and you have major HD space on the computer). The biggest on-camera battery you can buy for that cam will go about five hours, which is barely enough to get 4 hours of actual shooting.
I have never shot more than four hours in a single day, myself. In general, I think you will find that for most home, semi-pro, training video, and indie film use, you will rarely (if ever) shoot much more than two hours per day, so a 4 hour HD on the cam ought to be plenty for most people.
- Robin
The line about people backing away at a college reunion came from a Microsoft employee in response to my (bland and open-ended) question, "What's it like to work for Microsoft?"
I really only asked two questions: The one above, and "What changes would make Microsoft a better company?" My sample -- about a dozen people near the entrance to the company store wearing Microsoft employee badges -- was surely not representative of the company as a whole, but even so the amount of negativity I heard was a little shocking.
Thanks for writing,
- Robin
3D view was what their presentation focused on. It was represented as the big gee-golly-gee-whiz reason Virtual Earth is better than Google Earth.
Thanks for writing,
- Robin
Are you telling me the Microsoft person who said all of virtual earth's feature set only worked in Explorer was lying? Could have been. But I just tried to access some of the advanced features myself with Firefox and failed, so maybe not.
Thanks for commenting,
- Robin
I don't agree with everything Bruce Perens says or does, but I like and respect his Sincere Choice ideas, including a level playing field, interoperability, and letting software developers and software publishers choose their own copyright policies without yelling at other software developers and software publishers for choosing different ones.
As I said, a lot of software companies *do* follow these ideas. I believe that if Microsoft did, too, it would be good for all of us -- and probably even better for Microsoft shareholders and employees.
- Robin
Well... if I'd pushed Nick and his crowd hard I would have been guilty of the meanness to mid-rank employees I'm being accused of anyway. I saw no point in badgering marketing people who are guilty of nothing but doing their jobs as well as they can. They don't run the company, and their job is to put a positive spin on everything.
What some Slashdot readers seem to have missed (possibly because they read only part of the article, if any of it) is that the negative comments about Microsoft's corporate culture came from Microsoft employees. I said clearly that I asked questions of many "unauthorized" people. I didn't quote any of them by name because I was there to write a story, not to get some poor guy fired for being more open with me than he was supposed to be.
I have never believed that all Microsoft employees are evil. Most of the ones I know personally are decent people. I have seen the company do a lot of bizarre things, and it's still threatening Linux users in an unseemly way, but I don't think Nick White or many of the other 70,000 Microsoft employees are behind any of that or even like it. That kind of behavior comes from top management, which *from what Microsoft employees have told me* may change before long. And almost of the Microsoft people I have talked to "informally" considered Ray Ozzie the most likely successor to Steve Ballmer, and told me they thought he'd be a better boss. I have no idea if any of this is true.
We'll see.
Or, to use the traditional cliche, "only time will tell."
- Robin
Whatever I say, you will pick it apart. I am trying to give you honest answers, not score debating points.
:)
I am (obviously) capable of writing correct English myself, and I'm a perfectly competent copy editor, but I also must deal with the Slashdot "your words are yours, not mine to change" philosophy. Either you or I could run a grammatically-perfect Slashdot with virtually no dupe posts or other errors, I'm sure, but would it still be the Slashdot we have all come to know and love (and sometimes hate)?
I don't have a good answer for this. I'm sure you do, and I'd love to hear it -- but by private email, please, not by continuing this off-topic thread. (robin at roblimo dot com = best email, although roblimo at slashdot org also works.)
Now I'm going to go help a neighbor install a DSL modem, then edit some videos. Slashdot is less than 1/3 of my job, and less than 1/6 of my life. It's the weekend, and I think I deserve some time for personal projects.
- Robin
You can see the size of the question pool for yourself by looking at the "Call for Questions" post and reading the comments at +5. You may not see exactly the same questions or the same number of questions moderated +5 today as I did on Tuesday afternoon when I was making my selections, but you'll get a rough idea of what was there.
I'm sure my selections could have been more to your taste, but if I'd chosen questions with you in mind, some of the questions you liked would have been irrevelant to others and I would have been knocked for choosing them instead of someone else's favorites. There is simply no way to please every Slashdot user. Their/your tastes and opinions vary too much for that. I often (quietly) ask some of the many long-time Slashdot users I know personally for help, just to make sure I'm not letting my own opinions rule instead of trying to select questions that will also be meaningful to a large percentage of the Slashdot audience.
Note that one unique feature of Slashdot interviews is that the published Q&A session is not a final set-in-stone thing. It is the beginning of a discussion. If an interviewee ducks questions, answers with generalities instead of specifics or uses marketspeak in place of honest language, he or she will get called down on those mistakes by dozens or hundreds of Slashdot readers.
I like to give interviewees questions that can be answered in many ways largely because how they answer those questions tells us a lot about the interviewees' thought processes. Some communicate more honestly than others. Some answer curtly, and some answer at length. You don't get the same kind of insight from open-ended answers as you do from a give-and-take interview. You get a different kind -- and since many Slashdot interview guests have been interviewed elsewhere many times, a moment on Google will usually find at least some "straight" interviews with them. There is no need to repeat the same questions or even the same questioning style here.
As far as your general disgust with Slashdot editing: When I was put "in charge" of this bunch back in 1999 by OSTG's predecessor company, Andover.net, I was supposed to "professionalize" Slashdot. I didn't do that on purpose. One of Slashdot's big differences from traditional media is that many of our most valuable posters and contributors are experts in arcane programming or engineering areas but may not be very good at spelling or grammar. We want these people to be comfortable posting here. We want techies whose first language is Swedish and whose second language is German, who might write a bit clumsily in English, to feel comfortable posting on Slashdot if they have something important to say, even if their poor (English) writing skills would get them laughed off the New York Times forums.
Slashdot exists to provide a forum for people who like to find and discuss "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters" -- and "What Matters" in this case is what matters to the nerds who participate in Slashdot, not to grammarians (who should be on the ACES BB, not here) or people with political interests who think Slashdot ought to push their particular beliefs.
Slashdot be what it be. You've seen changes recently, and you'll see more changes in the future, but those changes are intended to make Slashdot more useful and more fun for its core user group, not to make Slashdot into a straight-line publication.
- Robin 'Roblimo' Miller
(member of several fancy-sounding
journalists' orgs that are full of
people who think they could do
Slashdot better but don't understand
that bad spelling is an integral part
of Slashdot's success)
You forget: In Slashdot interviews, *you* come up with the questions. I just try to pick the most cogent ones, usually from a stack of them that ask more or less the same thing in different words -- and I pick from questions not only *asked* by readers, but from the ones moderated highest, again *by readers*.
:)
So if you want better question, ask better questions. If you want better questions moderated higher, do more and better moderation on interview questions.
I don't "fix" the questions because they're not my words. Now and then I may correct a typo, but beyond that, the whole point of a Slashdot interview is that the questions are written by readers and moderated by readers.
If you want me to come up with my own questions and do interviews by phone or in person, and publish both audio files of the conversation and written transcripts, fine. I'd ask "who, what, where, why, and how" questions, and I'd have lots of follow-ups. I have over 20 years of reporting experience, so I know how to draw people out during interviews (and how to keep them from ducking hard questions, too).
But that wouldn't be a *Slashdot* reader-generated interview.
- Robin
I have watched a clean, neatly-attired Richard Stallman totally charm a group of mostly female Commerce Department lawyers while speaking against an intellectual property treaty.
I mean "charm" to the point where the lawyer-ladies surrounded him while we all ate lunch on the lawn of the Library of Congress building in Washington, DC.
While I do not always (or even necessarily often) agree with Mr. Stallman, I have usually found him to be intelligent, interesting, and good company.
As far as anyone who talks about Eben Moglen being a "dirty hippie" or some such: Prof. Moglen is one of the best-dressed people you'll ever meet at a FOSS gathering, and one of the best speakers, too.
You can truthfully criticize RMS for being an unyielding prick who often gets irritated by little things (I, for one, think his GNU/Linux insistence is both childish and a waste of time -- and I've told him so a number of times), but he has more charisma and sheer brainpower than most other people I've met in my life.
Besides, he helped Marty Connor get accepted by the MIT crowd, so we might say that without RMS Marty might today be managing a multiplex movie theater in Pittsburgh, and that would have been a huge waste of IT talent.
- Robin
- Robin
I currently watch one - two NFL football games per week in season, and between two and three hours (minus PVR ad-skip time of 20% or so) per week year-round, mostly shows my wife wants to watch and I watch with her to be sociable.
Put it this way: I have a small TV in my office that I haven't had on in the last two years except during a few major news events.
Years ago, when I had my limo *and* wrote freelance, people asked me how I managed to keep such a hectic schedule. The answer was simple: I didn't watch TV at all during that period, so I had four more hours of work time per day then the average American without sacrificing any other activities.
- Robin
FYI, bookstores "buy" books from publishers with the right to return them for full credit if they don't sell. So in real life, in the end, publishers supply them on consignment.
Not only that, authors share the risk. They only get royalties on books that customers actually buy, not on copies *shipped to* bookstores.
Even more fun, the bookstore gets as much of the total retail price of the book -- about 50% -- as the publisher and author combined.
It's a sick system, especially for the authors, which is why so many of us (I've written three books) are starting to look into alternative publishing and distribution channels.
- Robin
...and does well.
He replaced a messed-up keyboard on my company ThinkPad for little more than the cost of shipping it to and from OSTG HQ in Fremont, Cal.
Since then I've sent him several other customers, and I have a Toshiba with a dead CD/DVD drive I'm going to take to him soon.
The guy says he makes a good living -- and I believe him.
If you need laptop repairs in the Sarasota/Bradenton (FL) area I heartily recommend Johnny - www.suncoastlaptops.com/
BTW, I found him on Craigslist... http://sarasota.craigslist.org/cps/197019984.html
- Robin