The marketing certainly has been a problem. I attended this Itanium press event, and correcting the marketing is certainly high on the agenda for the Itanium Solutions Alliance.
What they want you to know now is that Itanium is not, repeat not a competitor for Xeon, Opteron, or the x86 architecture. Itanium's market is in high-end "mission critical computing" and as a replacement for RISC chips (meaning Power and Sparc).
Where once they pushed the 64-bitness of the chip, the x64 extensions have muddied the waters somewhat, so they're not really talking about that anymore. What they are selling are the high-availability features that make Itanium competitive with the aforementioned RISC chips.
The advantage they are touting vs. the competition is openness. If you want a Sparc system you have to go to Sun, and you have to choose from the Sparc systems that Sun offers and the support packages that Sun offers (or maybe Fujitsu, just to blur the point a little bit). With Itanium you have several suppliers -- including Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, SGI, Unisys, and the other companies in the Itanium Solutions Alliance. Each of those is free to provide its own support packages and terms of service. You also have a few choices of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and HP/UX, while the only OS that currently runs on Sparc is Solaris.
Believe it or not, it's actually not that bad of a product story. Sooner or later, everybody who's on RISC chips right now is going to want to upgrade their hardware. If they're dead set against the x86 platform then they have three options. One option is to buy the latest version of whatever they're already using. A second option is to jump ship -- Sparc to Power or vice versa. Itanium gives them a third option, with the backing of Intel and a bunch of other prominent hardware vendors.
And then there's always the other, more established Itanium market: running great big SQL Server databases. Believe it or not, there's a fair amount of people who want to do that.
I learned (not quickly mind you) that 14 hour days sometimes 7 days a week quickly suck the life out of you. Take time for yourself.
And you know what else? Smart managers know this. They also know that it takes much more time and expense to hire new employees to replace the ones that quit from burn-out than it is to take some steps to keep the ones they already have mentally healthy. The poster may find that his employer is more than willing to provide some slack time to let him decompress between projects. Maybe all he has to do is ask.
Seriously, it never ceases to amaze me the number of people that tell me they're nearing critical burn-out at work and they're ready to quit, and yet they've never taken the time to sit down with their supervisors (or their supervisors' supervisors, if need be) to discuss the problem.
And when I'm not working, its too late to pound the pavement cuz every company is closed. And yeah...I know it sounds like whining...but most of the time I honestly don't have the energy to pound the pavement 24/7.
What's all this about 24/7? Probably the last ten, if not fifty jobs, I've applied for I've sent my resume and cover letter by e-mail. Are you expecting them to get back to you by IM in the next 15 minutes? Then what's the problem? Take a couple of hours each evening to identify a few companies you're interested in and send them your resume. If you're really so inundated with callbacks the next day that you don't have time to keep on top of them all, it's a sign you have even fewer problems than it sounds like you have.
Are you a shill for the US Department of Justice?
Let me test:
Marijuana is a 100% safe drug. There are exactly -zero- reported cases of deaths from it... ever. According to the US DOJ, how long should a marijuana user be put in prison for, shill?
You're an idiot. I've got a news flash for you: The U.S. Department of Justice has never written or ratified any law making marijuana illegal. Got that? Not one. Your homework assignment for the weekend is to study real hard until you figure out who did.
How much will the design tools cost?
If its freeware, Sparkle WILL kill Flash. If its cheapware($99 or less) it will hurt Flash in the short term, and could kill Flash in 5 years(because of the cost).
Really? Because the unwillingness of professional designers to pay for the tools they need to create content is what's been holding back Flash from becoming a near-ubiquitous medium for content delivery, is that right?
You seem to be neglecting the fact that the Flash plugin is a remarkably low-footprint piece of software that comes bundled with virtually every platform out there, from Web browsers to operating systems to mobile phones, at no cost to the consumer. I think Microsoft needs to work a little bit more on that problem than the lack of cheap dev tools. In my experience, companies and professionals are pretty accustomed to paying for tools.
Anyway, DRM or not, the big problem I have with Sony (and the other, with the cooler-looking, fancier device) is that they seem to think I want to buy this thing so I can buy more things.
It sounds worse than that, actually. Sony thinks you want to buy that thing so you can buy more things from Sony. "What about me?" he says, to some extent playing the Devil's advocate. I work for a publisher (fact). We could potentially provide our content every month in electronic format. Would we be able to support this device without buying into Sony's own, proprietary e-book format?
To be fair, from TFA it sounds like this device is supposed to support PDFs when it arrives. I hope it does so in a fast, unencumbered way that really allows you to view other people's PDFs. I kind of doubt it, though, and what's more PDF doesn't sound like a particularly good format for a device like this. PDF is page-based. What if the page format of the PDF doesn't fit the form factor of this device? The device sounds like it's designed to display a page at a time. How will you scroll around an oversized PDF? What's more, how will color text and graphics be represented?
I'd much rather see this device support the same e-book format I've been using on my Nokia 770: plain HTML. It's pretty much ideal for most purposes, as it turns out. Page form factor is not a problem. You can pick the font you find the most readable, in the size you want. You've got plain text, italics, bold, subheads for emphasis. You can put space between paragraphs and break at the end of a chapter. As it turns out, most books don't really use many more typographical conventions than those. All the fancy-formatting stuff that PDF gives you is really just cruft. When we read, we really just want to read text.
Everybody loves talking about the iPod and the iTunes store interchangeably now, as if it was the iTunes store that made the iPod a success. That's rewriting history. Good design made the iPod a success, and let's not forget that the iPod was used for playing MP3s, which everybody either already had or could get from their friends, Web sites, or Napster. Unless an e-book reader has a way to get your own content onto it -- and let's pretend for argument's sake that none of it will be pirated -- then it won't find a market.
here we simply disagree is on style. I think Slashdot is informal, and therefore typos don't matter that much. Obviously a good number of readers disagree. They print out pages and mark them out with red pens and post in the forums that we are awful. But I don't think that a stylistic decision like that is really that important in the grand scheme of things.
Fine. Then I'll propose something that many others have proposed before: set up a moderation system for stories.
You have a well-established moderation system for the site that I, unlike some people, think works pretty well. It's certainly better than the tons of other sites that have no moderation whatsoever.
In a "news for nerds site," the purpose of the moderation system is to allow the most intelligent, insightful, funny, or otherwise underrated comments rise to the top. And it seems to work. But on the other hand, the stories posted are essentially whatever the hell the editors feel like posting -- and unfortunately many of these, especially the summaries, come off as not particularly insightful or intelligent.
In effect, Taco, you are intentionally, artificially inflating the noise-to-signal ratio on the home page. You seem intent on letting the dumbasses command the floor, allowing the meritocracy to rule only in the comments area. Why is this?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I browse at -1 because that's just the kind of guy I am. But I can certainly understand why this policy could make some readers pretty peeved.
IIRC, Gibson wasn't saying it was a back door that Microsoft hadn't bothered to fix. He was suggesting that it was a back door that somebody had put there on purpose.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say your statements about Microsoft installing spyware with Windows update are just patently false. If you're really seeing what you describe, you haven't done a good enough job of cleaning spyware from Internet Explorer before you run Windows Update. Try using Spybot S&D in addition to Adaware, and be sure to use all of the immunization features.
Apple was doing very poorly because they, like every other OS manufacturer at the time, were locked out of every distribution channel by M$'s aggressive (and later, ruled illegal) control of >95% of the retail market place.
Uh huh. That's a fairly simplistic assessment, don't you think?
If you're correct, however, then thank goodness that Apple got access to that retail channel before it came out with the iMac, the iPod, G4 and G5 Power Macs and Powerbooks, and Mac OS X. Otherwise it would have been doomed!
My/. profile currently shows, for the calendar year 2005, eleven stories submitted, three of those accepted, one still pending. Where's the problem?
Could it perhaps also be that, despite all the care and consideration you put into each and every one of your quality-over-quantity submissions, they just weren't very interesting or well-written?
Handwriting recognition is great? You're kidding, right? The saddest thing about the 770 is that, for a first-time user, entering text with the handwriting recognition takes about the same amount of time as pecking it in on the microscopic onscreen keyboard. Once you get used to a few of the keyboard's undocumented shortcuts (like hitting a key and then stroking up to do uppercase) you will be able to enter text much more quickly with it that with the awful handwriting recognition.
Seriously folks, the handwriting recognition on the 770 is far more difficult to master than Grafitti on a first-generation PalmPilot.
I have one. I paid for it with my own money, just so you know -- which means I didn't screw around with it for an afternoon and send it back to Nokia. I still have it, I still use it... but not for all that much. I'm not as impressed with the software as some others in this topic. For a first-generation product it's... interesting. But I wouldn't recommend it for most casual consumers, as I explain in my column, here.
Here's another thing, too. Nokia has gone out of its way to explain to everybody that this is a brand-new product category. But it isn't really. We've seen plenty of products like this one before. We call them PDAs. Nokia trounced every PDA to date by including a noticeably far superior screen, but it left out the PDA software. With that big omission, we're all left wondering what exactly we're supposed to use it for.
Me personally, I can't find much use for it so far other than some light Web browsing (because "serious" Web browsing will crash it) and FBReader, the open source ebook software that was ported to it by a third party. The included e-mail program is awful. The PDF reader is totally unusable unless you turn off images. The RSS reader is interesting, but not really my cup of tea. The Opera browser mostly works, but is crippled by lack of memory and lack of ad-blocking features.
After all that, I'm still fascinated by the device. It's just too bad that this first generation is still more concept than reality.
The movie asked questions and had a discussion of race in America that would have been unthinkable without the fig-leaf of science fiction.
So yes, it was appropriate. Those who are offended never looked deeper than the skin. Which is sort of the problem.
That may be true, about the original Planet of the Apes movie. But if you RTF summary, you'll see that this wasn't a DVD of the Planet of the Apes movie. It was a DVD of Planet of the Apes: The TV Series (aka "Starsky and Hutch on Mars"). The movie is widely lauded as both an enjoyable science fiction film and a work of social commentary. The TV show isn't lauded for much of anything.
This on the other hand seems like an absurd statement. Most of this stuff was shot on 35mm or better. It was shot to be viewed on huge screens with actors 15 feet tall. Sure, people are a little further away, but still. 35mm has far better "resolution" than does HD. Why would this not convert well?
Because of film grain, which can look strange when converted to pixels and requires digital filtering to clean up. Because of scratches on the negatives, or dirt that inevitably made its way into film prints in those days. They already have to clean this stuff up for the current generation of DVDs. Look how many DVDs have been re-released in "special editions" because the original pressings looked so awful ("Scarface" is the most obvious example). There's a lot of technology used to clean up original film prints for DVD already, but the process is only going to get harder when you start converting for high-resolution HD picture. Stuff that you might be able to "get away with" on a low-resolution NTSC screen won't cut it for a crowd that bought an HD-DVD specifically for its miraculous picture quality.
And so what you'll get is films that have been extensively digitally remastered, a la Star Wars. When the DVDs of the original trilogy came out there were lots of Web pages comparing frames from the new prints to the old ones. In my opinion, and that of a lot of people who grew up watching those films, not all the digital retouching was for the better -- and I'm not even talking about the scenes Lucas added or replaced.
Creating an HD-DVD of an older movie with picture quality up to the standards that have been hyped for the format is going to be extremely costly. Thus, I predict you won't see HD-DVD "Special Editions" of classic movies appearing in any particular hurry -- not any faster than they showed up for plain ol' DVD, at least. When they do appear, I'm willing to bet that a lot of the film-buff types, whom you might think are the ones most eagerly awaiting the new format, are going to be disappointed. But hey, Hollywood... prove me wrong.
I think the movies studios are seriously overestimating how much people care about quality. Sure, there will always be the high end types that always have to have the latest and greatest home theater equipment - the kind of people who bought laserdiscs back in the pre-DVD days. But the vast majority of people just want to watch the movie, and will do so via the path of least resistance - it's convenience that matters, not quality.
I'll go you one further. There are a lot of movie buffs who like to see a high-quality picture. But, by and large, those types of consumers are passionate about old movies -- movies from the 1970s or earlier. None of those movies were filmed with DVD in mind, or even with home viewing in mind. The negatives will surely have deteriorated over time (George Lucas has said that Star Wars would have been lost forever very soon if he didn't go through the process of remastering it when he did; too bad he had to tamper with it at the same time). What's more, ultra-high-resolution HD processes probably won't be particularly flattering to the film stocks used at that time. Whatever classic movies do make it onto HD-DVD will either look slapped together -- with spots, hairs on the film, crackle and all -- or else they'll be heavily digitally retouched. Some people think that music fans are crazy when they say classic 70s albums sound worse after they've been digitally remastered for CD, but even the average consumer is going to be able to tell the difference between an original print of "The Godfather" and one that's been painted over with seven layers of Photoshop.
he industry is being lulled into a false sense that the masses want HD DVDs because of the success of HDTVs, but I believe that has more to do with people wanting larger screens that take up less real estate (LCD, Plasma), than it really does with the higher resolution (for the masses, not for everyone).
Hear, hear. How many times have I walked into a Virgin Megastore, or anyplace where they're showing a DVD on their fancy-shmancy widescreen plasma TV, and they haven't even switched the DVD player to anamorphic mode, so the picture looks squashed vertically with black bars across the top and bottom? Most of the people who buy these TVs (which seem to be businesses -- bars, restaurants, hotels, stores, and so on) don't care what the resolution is, or even if the picture looks visibly distorted.
I mean, let's get serious. This guy crashed the Web server of a high school. Not a bank. Not a military research base. This is no threat to "homeland security." It's a kid goofing off. You want to slap him with a felony conviction for that?
Sure it was the wrong thing to do. Sure he should be punished. But it seems to me that there was a time in this country where somebody who did something like this would get suspended from school for two weeks and the real punishment would come from Dad's belt.
Have we as a people become so emasculated that we really need to have the government step in, call out the cops, and throw felony charges at a teenage kid for the digital equivalent of toilet papering a house?
I'm so tired of hearing about all these companies whose sole purpose is to hang onto patents and so-called intellectual property. In many ways you can compare these companies to the start-ups of the dot-com bubble. And just like that bubble, sooner or later this bubble......oh, skip it. To hell with it, I can't go through with it. Someone else will pick it up I'm sure.
I'm thinking SCO has nothing to do with Santa Cruz and more to do with SChizOphrenia because they've seem to have lost touch with reality.
The acronym SCO used by the current company to own it does not stand for the Santa Cruz Operation and never has. It's essentially a retooled Caldera that is using the SCO name (acquired along with Unix property rights) for branding purposes. The company formerly known as the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) until recently was known as Tarantella. Tarantella was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems.
Yeah, and there's another glaringly obvious flaw in the interview, too. Check it out: Question 4 and Question 1 are almost exactly the same! Why so many dupes?
I realize this doesn't sound like much of a change, but for many less sophisticated internet users, the concept of having the news come to you rather than having to go to the news is not familiar.
I think the mistake you're making is that the broad computer-using public doesn't think in terms of buzzwords like "push," "pull," or "RSS," any more than they fire up Internet Explorer and say to themselves, "Wow gee golly the HTML protocol sure makes it easy for me to retrieve information from an IP network."
People think of computers as devices. They use them for things. When they boot up Windows, they are largely ignorant of what's going on underneath, much the same way that most people don't really know how HBO gets into their TV set. Furthermore, there is no part of their brains that is fantasizing that they are soaring through a universe of "cyberspace," exploring the magical realms that the latest permutation of XML tags allows them to encounter. No -- they're just checking their e-mail.
So where's this "fundamental change" you're talking about? If I want to read news headlines on the Web the old fashioned way, I have to fire up a Web browser and pull up a few bookmarks. If I want to do the same thing using RSS, I have to fire up an RSS reader instead. Fundamentally -- your word -- it sounds like pretty much the same thing to me.
Instead, I suspect that only 4 percent of the public uses RSS because those 4 percent are exactly what they sound like -- a small and inconsequential minority. The difference between somebody who gets information via RSS and someone who gets it via the old-fashioned Web is about as significant as the difference between someone who likes to maximize all his application windows and someone who doesn't.
No matter how many people have blogged poetic about the supposed RSS Revolution, the technology (if it even deserves to be called such) really isn't that groundbreaking or important. Its most useful application is probably content syndication, allowing partner Web sites to share content in an automated fashion. Some people will probably always like to use it to check the headlines on their favorite news sites or to avoid having to surf to dozens of different blogs. On the other hand, people whose only real interest in the Internet is e-mail, Soulseek, and MySpace probably will never have much of a reason to care about it. And you may be shocked to learn just what percentage of PC users fall into the latter category.
Slashdot Mirror
The marketing certainly has been a problem. I attended this Itanium press event, and correcting the marketing is certainly high on the agenda for the Itanium Solutions Alliance.
What they want you to know now is that Itanium is not, repeat not a competitor for Xeon, Opteron, or the x86 architecture. Itanium's market is in high-end "mission critical computing" and as a replacement for RISC chips (meaning Power and Sparc).
Where once they pushed the 64-bitness of the chip, the x64 extensions have muddied the waters somewhat, so they're not really talking about that anymore. What they are selling are the high-availability features that make Itanium competitive with the aforementioned RISC chips.
The advantage they are touting vs. the competition is openness. If you want a Sparc system you have to go to Sun, and you have to choose from the Sparc systems that Sun offers and the support packages that Sun offers (or maybe Fujitsu, just to blur the point a little bit). With Itanium you have several suppliers -- including Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, SGI, Unisys, and the other companies in the Itanium Solutions Alliance. Each of those is free to provide its own support packages and terms of service. You also have a few choices of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and HP/UX, while the only OS that currently runs on Sparc is Solaris.
Believe it or not, it's actually not that bad of a product story. Sooner or later, everybody who's on RISC chips right now is going to want to upgrade their hardware. If they're dead set against the x86 platform then they have three options. One option is to buy the latest version of whatever they're already using. A second option is to jump ship -- Sparc to Power or vice versa. Itanium gives them a third option, with the backing of Intel and a bunch of other prominent hardware vendors.
And then there's always the other, more established Itanium market: running great big SQL Server databases. Believe it or not, there's a fair amount of people who want to do that.
Seriously, it never ceases to amaze me the number of people that tell me they're nearing critical burn-out at work and they're ready to quit, and yet they've never taken the time to sit down with their supervisors (or their supervisors' supervisors, if need be) to discuss the problem.
You seem to be neglecting the fact that the Flash plugin is a remarkably low-footprint piece of software that comes bundled with virtually every platform out there, from Web browsers to operating systems to mobile phones, at no cost to the consumer. I think Microsoft needs to work a little bit more on that problem than the lack of cheap dev tools. In my experience, companies and professionals are pretty accustomed to paying for tools.
To be fair, from TFA it sounds like this device is supposed to support PDFs when it arrives. I hope it does so in a fast, unencumbered way that really allows you to view other people's PDFs. I kind of doubt it, though, and what's more PDF doesn't sound like a particularly good format for a device like this. PDF is page-based. What if the page format of the PDF doesn't fit the form factor of this device? The device sounds like it's designed to display a page at a time. How will you scroll around an oversized PDF? What's more, how will color text and graphics be represented?
I'd much rather see this device support the same e-book format I've been using on my Nokia 770: plain HTML. It's pretty much ideal for most purposes, as it turns out. Page form factor is not a problem. You can pick the font you find the most readable, in the size you want. You've got plain text, italics, bold, subheads for emphasis. You can put space between paragraphs and break at the end of a chapter. As it turns out, most books don't really use many more typographical conventions than those. All the fancy-formatting stuff that PDF gives you is really just cruft. When we read, we really just want to read text.
Everybody loves talking about the iPod and the iTunes store interchangeably now, as if it was the iTunes store that made the iPod a success. That's rewriting history. Good design made the iPod a success, and let's not forget that the iPod was used for playing MP3s, which everybody either already had or could get from their friends, Web sites, or Napster. Unless an e-book reader has a way to get your own content onto it -- and let's pretend for argument's sake that none of it will be pirated -- then it won't find a market.
Jesus Taco, if you can't ignore one random comment from an AC then maybe you really just aren't suited to participating in this site?
You have a well-established moderation system for the site that I, unlike some people, think works pretty well. It's certainly better than the tons of other sites that have no moderation whatsoever.
In a "news for nerds site," the purpose of the moderation system is to allow the most intelligent, insightful, funny, or otherwise underrated comments rise to the top. And it seems to work. But on the other hand, the stories posted are essentially whatever the hell the editors feel like posting -- and unfortunately many of these, especially the summaries, come off as not particularly insightful or intelligent.
In effect, Taco, you are intentionally, artificially inflating the noise-to-signal ratio on the home page. You seem intent on letting the dumbasses command the floor, allowing the meritocracy to rule only in the comments area. Why is this?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I browse at -1 because that's just the kind of guy I am. But I can certainly understand why this policy could make some readers pretty peeved.
IIRC, Gibson wasn't saying it was a back door that Microsoft hadn't bothered to fix. He was suggesting that it was a back door that somebody had put there on purpose.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say your statements about Microsoft installing spyware with Windows update are just patently false. If you're really seeing what you describe, you haven't done a good enough job of cleaning spyware from Internet Explorer before you run Windows Update. Try using Spybot S&D in addition to Adaware, and be sure to use all of the immunization features.
If you're correct, however, then thank goodness that Apple got access to that retail channel before it came out with the iMac, the iPod, G4 and G5 Power Macs and Powerbooks, and Mac OS X. Otherwise it would have been doomed!
Wait, where have I heard that before?
My /. profile currently shows, for the calendar year 2005, eleven stories submitted, three of those accepted, one still pending. Where's the problem?
Could it perhaps also be that, despite all the care and consideration you put into each and every one of your quality-over-quantity submissions, they just weren't very interesting or well-written?
Handwriting recognition is great? You're kidding, right? The saddest thing about the 770 is that, for a first-time user, entering text with the handwriting recognition takes about the same amount of time as pecking it in on the microscopic onscreen keyboard. Once you get used to a few of the keyboard's undocumented shortcuts (like hitting a key and then stroking up to do uppercase) you will be able to enter text much more quickly with it that with the awful handwriting recognition.
Seriously folks, the handwriting recognition on the 770 is far more difficult to master than Grafitti on a first-generation PalmPilot.
Here's another thing, too. Nokia has gone out of its way to explain to everybody that this is a brand-new product category. But it isn't really. We've seen plenty of products like this one before. We call them PDAs. Nokia trounced every PDA to date by including a noticeably far superior screen, but it left out the PDA software. With that big omission, we're all left wondering what exactly we're supposed to use it for.
Me personally, I can't find much use for it so far other than some light Web browsing (because "serious" Web browsing will crash it) and FBReader, the open source ebook software that was ported to it by a third party. The included e-mail program is awful. The PDF reader is totally unusable unless you turn off images. The RSS reader is interesting, but not really my cup of tea. The Opera browser mostly works, but is crippled by lack of memory and lack of ad-blocking features.
After all that, I'm still fascinated by the device. It's just too bad that this first generation is still more concept than reality.
And so what you'll get is films that have been extensively digitally remastered, a la Star Wars. When the DVDs of the original trilogy came out there were lots of Web pages comparing frames from the new prints to the old ones. In my opinion, and that of a lot of people who grew up watching those films, not all the digital retouching was for the better -- and I'm not even talking about the scenes Lucas added or replaced.
Creating an HD-DVD of an older movie with picture quality up to the standards that have been hyped for the format is going to be extremely costly. Thus, I predict you won't see HD-DVD "Special Editions" of classic movies appearing in any particular hurry -- not any faster than they showed up for plain ol' DVD, at least. When they do appear, I'm willing to bet that a lot of the film-buff types, whom you might think are the ones most eagerly awaiting the new format, are going to be disappointed. But hey, Hollywood ... prove me wrong.
...we called it a prank.
I mean, let's get serious. This guy crashed the Web server of a high school. Not a bank. Not a military research base. This is no threat to "homeland security." It's a kid goofing off. You want to slap him with a felony conviction for that?
Sure it was the wrong thing to do. Sure he should be punished. But it seems to me that there was a time in this country where somebody who did something like this would get suspended from school for two weeks and the real punishment would come from Dad's belt.
Have we as a people become so emasculated that we really need to have the government step in, call out the cops, and throw felony charges at a teenage kid for the digital equivalent of toilet papering a house?
I'm so tired of hearing about all these companies whose sole purpose is to hang onto patents and so-called intellectual property. In many ways you can compare these companies to the start-ups of the dot-com bubble. And just like that bubble, sooner or later this bubble ... ...oh, skip it. To hell with it, I can't go through with it. Someone else will pick it up I'm sure.
Yeah, and there's another glaringly obvious flaw in the interview, too. Check it out: Question 4 and Question 1 are almost exactly the same! Why so many dupes?
People think of computers as devices. They use them for things. When they boot up Windows, they are largely ignorant of what's going on underneath, much the same way that most people don't really know how HBO gets into their TV set. Furthermore, there is no part of their brains that is fantasizing that they are soaring through a universe of "cyberspace," exploring the magical realms that the latest permutation of XML tags allows them to encounter. No -- they're just checking their e-mail.
So where's this "fundamental change" you're talking about? If I want to read news headlines on the Web the old fashioned way, I have to fire up a Web browser and pull up a few bookmarks. If I want to do the same thing using RSS, I have to fire up an RSS reader instead. Fundamentally -- your word -- it sounds like pretty much the same thing to me.
Instead, I suspect that only 4 percent of the public uses RSS because those 4 percent are exactly what they sound like -- a small and inconsequential minority. The difference between somebody who gets information via RSS and someone who gets it via the old-fashioned Web is about as significant as the difference between someone who likes to maximize all his application windows and someone who doesn't.
No matter how many people have blogged poetic about the supposed RSS Revolution, the technology (if it even deserves to be called such) really isn't that groundbreaking or important. Its most useful application is probably content syndication, allowing partner Web sites to share content in an automated fashion. Some people will probably always like to use it to check the headlines on their favorite news sites or to avoid having to surf to dozens of different blogs. On the other hand, people whose only real interest in the Internet is e-mail, Soulseek, and MySpace probably will never have much of a reason to care about it. And you may be shocked to learn just what percentage of PC users fall into the latter category.