I just watched "Pyramids on Mars" and "Talons of...". These had a great atmosphere and were fun to watch. But you ain't gonna convince me that these were science fiction. There was very little science fiction content, just a bunch of horror/science fiction cliches thrown together.
Ouch. Harsh, but I guess I can't really argue with you there, if your definition of science fiction requires actual "science." (Except for Talons, maybe... that little homonculous with the brain of pig sounded particularly nasty.)
Is Quatermass not sci-fi, then? Because that's what a lot of the Tom Baker and Pertwee era Whos seemed to be modeling themselves after. There were some rockets in the Quatermass stories, granted, and some theorizing, but not a lot of science, really.
Anyway, what's interesting is that I seem to remember early interviews in which Davies was quoted as saying he thought Doctor Who worked best as a horror show. Can't find them now, though.
On the other hand, the Empty Child/Doctor Dances had great science fiction content. And I thought Long Game and Unquiet Dead also had some good science fiction content.
"Empty Child/Doctor Dances" was clearly my favorite. "Long Game" had some good content, but again it was one of two out of a total of just thirteen episodes in which the plot was resolved by yet another cheap sci-fi plot device -- blowing up the big, unintelligible blob-monster at the end. (Historically, the Doctor hasn't really confronted all that many blob-monsters in the past.) "Unquiet Dead," similarly, had a glowing alien energy-being at the end. I mean, come on -- compare that to, say, "Seeds of Doom" or "Robot," where the stakes were raised as the plot progressed. By comparison, a stationary monster in a cellar (or top floor, whatever) just isn't that dramatic.
To me, that's one of the natural necessities of action or suspense drama: raising the stakes. But Russell seems so enamored of his characters that he never bothers to do it. There's something wrong at the beginning of the episode but we know that, by the end, the Doctor will figure it out and right it. You seldom get the impression that the Doctor or Rose are in any kind of danger, with the possible exception of the cliffhanger episodes ("Empty Child," again, being the most effective). But the cliffhangers get resolved in the first minute of the next episode in such a lame way that if they keep it up, nobody's going to pay attention to those either. I mean, come on -- "Haha, doesn't work on me after all, I'm an alien"? Fine then, time for me to head to the refrigerator to make a snack...
And in any case, the ship was only travelling through space.
Ah. So it must have gotten into the Dalek mothership through a window or something, yes? Maybe the side door? And that blinking light before they opened the door, that was just it turning un-invisible or something?
Using the extrapolator they picked up in Boomtown. It was a neat piece of continuity.
Clever writing, there. "Hey, we'll have the Doctor get a... a... um, a Gimzagawatzit from Planet Haggamaggagepisfranchilon, and then we can write it out of the story a couple episodes later. They'll be hanging onto the edges of their seats!"
Nah, it's just sheer laziness. Davies obviously isn't too bothered about writing a good sci-fi story. Which is fine; a lot of what passes for "good sci-fi" these days just strikes me as overlabored fanboyish garbage. But Davies' approach just seems to insult the intelligence a little bit too much, sometimes.
As a poster above mentioned, though: Taken cumulatively, the writing of the new show is a far, far step above most of the writing on later seasons of "classic" Who. I'll agree with anyone there.
Am I the only one who isn't totally sold on Russell Davies' ability as a science fiction writer? The interpersonal drama elements of the new Who were well done, but pretty much all the sci-fi was rubbish. At least two episodes ended with some kind of big beam from the sky hitting the Tardis as a way of resolving the plot. One episode had the Doctor developing some kind of force field so the Tardis wouldn't get hit by Dalek missiles (how can you get hit by a missile when your ship dematerializes to travel through both space AND time?). And when it came right down to it, the whole "Bad Wolf" plot thread was a huge letdown at the end and didn't really make any kind of sense at all. I'm hoping the second season is better, but I get the feeling that will depend on its relying more on independent writers rather than Mr. Davies himself. The two-parter with the gas mask zombies was the best one, and the direction I'd like to see them go. Try watching a bunch of Philip Hinchcliffe-era episodes starring Tom Baker and you'll see how the new series really sort of pales in comparison.
It seems to me that people think Sun is jumping on the bandwagon because Sun insists on using its own vanity license, rather than any of the pre-existing open source licenses. This leads people to believe that Sun is only putting one toe into open source but reserving the right to jump out any time the water gets too hot for it. Sort of an "open source license hokey-pokey."
I can't say whether that is or is not the intent of the CDDL; I can't speak for Sun. But from where I sit, the fact that Sun execs go around telling people that Sun is and always has been an open source friendly company, nay, that indeed it practically invented open source single-handedly -- well, that's not helping Sun's case. It makes the whole effort seem disingenuous.
I turn off real-time grammar checking, because it distracts me from the act of writing.
True, true. Actually no -- speaking as a professional writer myself, I don't turn off grammar checking because most of my sentences pass with no difficulty. Typically when I see something with a wavy green underline, I stop and ask, "Really? Really really?" And then I think about it for a second -- which is good -- and then decide, "No, that's BS, this thing is totally braindead," and continue.
But that's just it, though, you and I are professional writers. I want to hear from Joe Business Manager. The bulk of the English that gets written is written by people with no recollection of any formal training in writing. I'm always curious whether automatic grammar checkers are any use to those kinds of people. I suspect that they are.
So you think it is unethical to plan the content of a publications based around products advertisers have to sell?
Yes, and so do the trade organizations I just mentioned. Professional editors -- at least in the United States (so sorry to have offended your culture) -- go to great pains to disassociate themselves from the sales side of the business. This is known colloquially as the "church and state" doctrine, a reference to similar doctrines in the U.S. Constitution. It's a generally held standard of professional practice that is our responsibility to serve our readers, not advertisers. As soon as you are seen to be catering to the advertisers with your content, you compromise the integrity of your editorial product in the eyes of the reader and begin to irrevocably damage your brand. This may not be as important for a fashion magazine or something, but for a news and information source it is essential.
Why? How is that deceptive?
I didn't say it was deceptive. It does, however, mean that you are not a magazine but a catalog.
And why do you think all magazines come from America?
Why do you think you can read minds?
Do you think Infoworld should have more articles reviewing electric guitars?
No. But I also don't let IBM or Oracle decide what should be in my magazine. The distinction here, which is not really so subtle that you can't grasp it, is that you build a magazine around editorial product. That product caters to a certain audience. Presumably that audience has a value to a certain class or category of advertisers, and those advertisers will then pay to reach your audience. But as an editor, you do not cater your content to the advertiser. You cater it to your publication's brand, which represents your content in the eyes of the audience that you have cultivated and which your sales staff offers up to advertisers. See how it works?
Here's something else you may not realize. If I'm running an article one week on -- oh, say relational databases -- and Oracle hears about that and decides to buy a big two-page display ad to run right smack dab in the middle of my article, we won't do it. You may not believe that, but it's absolutely true. We may run it somewhere else in the issue, of course, but we won't run it alongside the relational database
content. Occasionally this can be very inconvenient for us. But this, again, is a general standard of practice for magazines in the United States -- though, again, I can only speak for news and information publications, not lifestyle books.
Or do you disagree, and therefore demonstrate a rather obvious problem with your reading and comprehension skills?
My, my. Let me guess -- when you were working at your magazine, they didn't let you answer the phone, did they?
Also, could you provide a link that says you are an editor, rather than one that says you're a columnist?
Again, a simple click would have revealed that, had you realized that a byline usually includes a title. If you want, though, you can try our masthead. That, too, will require some reading and at least one more click on your part.
And mark up the text for those links in a less deceptive fashion?
Deceptive? There you go with that word again. The links say what they are. What more did you want?
Perhaps you could read some Australian editorial ethics guidelines.
Who knows? Maybe they have none. I guess you'll have to tell me, based on your own experience of course.
Er, really. Relevant to both. You don't seem to have had experience in the industry (no problem, I probably don't have experience in various things you do) but call up an editor of any major magazine and ask them if they son't set out to create content relevant to the advertiser.
I don't need to call one up, actually, because I am one. You could have found that out with a couple of clicks.
I don't know what magazine you edit, but if you really set out to create content designed to please your advertisers, please tell me the name of your publication so I won't make the mistake of reading it. We don't do that at InfoWorld and I wouldn't want to work at any magazine that did. You may also want to bone up on editorial guidelines for ethical standards and practices, such as those published by the American Society of Business Publications Editors or the American Society of Magazine Editors.
Why is it our responsibility to come up with an alternative?
Look, I work in the magazine business. The magazine I work for does not charge for subscriptions. Thus, we get all of our revenue from advertising or some other form of sponsorship. And so therefore, yes, pretty much every penny of my salary comes from ads. Many of those ads are sold on our Web site.
And you know what? I use Firefox and Filterset.G and I wouldn't have it any other way. I block all ads, even Google ads, because I don't want to see ads when I surf the Web, period.
Am I being shortsighted? Am I cutting my own throat? Is my telling you all of this only going to encourage you all to do the same and put my publication out of business that much faster? I'm sorry, but I just can't see it that way.
I don't work in sales and I don't work in marketing. My job is to create content and make it appealing enough that it finds its way out to an audience. As far as I'm concerned, if I've convinced you to read it/look at it/listen to it/whatever, my job is done. Who gives a damn who's going to pay for it? That's what I work for a great big corporation for. Let them figure it out.
Seriously, plenty of people go to school, get degrees, and devote their whole careers to worrying about the question of how content is going to get paid for. From where I sit, they do that so I don't have to.
I look at it this way: If what I do has any value at all, then there will always be a demand for it. That demand ought to be translatable into dollars somehow. For the salespeople out there who bemoan the fact that people want to get rid of ads, here's a little Glengarry Glen Ross moment for you: "Third prize is you're fired." If a given sales technique isn't working and you're not closing sales and you're not bringing in revenue, then you need to think up something else.
But I don't. I just don't like the ads, so I make them go away without even looking at them. Yes, somebody should be giving that some thought. Just not me.
The magazine's value is to link consumers with advertisers, hopefully by content relevant to both.
Relevant to both? Not really. An advertiser is in the business of selling something. It's not in the business of reading magazines.
The "value" of a magazine, in the business sense, is to link advertisers to consumers, period. The advertiser doesn't need to get anything out of the content of the magazine. All the advertiser is paying for is access to the magazine's audience, which is shaped and defined by its content.
That's why you don't see enterprise software vendors advertising in cooking magazines. The rate of return isn't very high; that audience isn't particularly valuable to them.
There are two ways that a magazine can increase the value of its audience to an advertiser. One, it can have a bigger audience. And two, it can have a more targeted audience. That is, it can approach the advertiser and say, "Yes, you could advertise in that other magazine but you'll only get five percent response. Our audience, on the other hand, is richer/smarter/better informed/etc."
Magazines "prove" these assertions about their audiences to their advertisers through various forms of market research. One way is simply by taking surveys or holding focus groups. The ultimate in that may be qualified subscriptions, where potential readers fill out a survey in order to get a free subscription. It seems counterintuitive to give subscriptions away for free, maybe, but the idea here is that the magazines are tweaking their market research. It's easy to keep the value of your audience high when nobody can even get your magazine without answering your market research questions the way you want them answered.
Finally, another way magazines can generate revenue is through branding. They might be able to parlay their brand into other products, such as custom research or events. Those products will attract other kinds of sponsorship but it's still basically advertising.
And abstraction (in this case) is good, as it helps the developer concentrate on the relevant parts of the program.
OK, I understand what you're getting at, but I concur with some of the earlier posters to this topic. Here we are, implementing a Wiki, the very definition of which is a kind of message board that collects comments from participants and keeps them in a data store -- and you're saying the data storage part is not relevant? Abstraction is very useful in early phases of development, but I'd hope it was possible to crack open that abstraction and muck with the SQL etc. when it came time to optimize your app.
Paying Social Security at 1.5 (then) times the rate everybody else was, paying 2.5 times what everybody else was for medical insurance
Um, you realize that you're paying the exact same taxes you were paying before, right? It's just that before your employer would pay a portion of what the government wanted. Now you have to pay it all, because you are the employer. The plus side? You get to keep all the revenue -- minus, of course, the part that you set aside to re-invest into your business. But that's a whole 'nother story. If you can't even figure out your taxes, or hire an accountant to take care of them for you, and you don't know how to charge enough that you cover your costs, then maybe contracting really isn't for you.
In most cities there is office space available for people like you. Don't asume that all office space is designed for growing companies with lots of employees. There are often spaces available where several individuals share the same facilities but do completely separate things. A Web developer friend of mine had a place like this once. basically had a common entry area that included a kitchenette (microwave, coffee machine etc.), a couch, and a coffee table with a couple of magazines where clients could wait. Surrounding that was a bunch of offices. The lady in the office next to my friend was a field rep for Dole Pineapple. Another guy was some other kind of marketer. Another one was some kind of programmer. It wasn't a bad setup and, like you say, it gave him someplace to go to get away from the distractions of home and get some work done. Plus, during the downtime he could even chit-chat with his "coworkers" on a business-y level, even though they didn't actually work together. There's something to be said, psychologically, for occasionally seeing another human soul besides your immediate family during the work week.
Of course, this does take a certain amount of money. But look at it this way: If your billing structure isn't enough to accommodate the very basics, like a roof over your desk, then you're probably either not charging enough or not working hard enough. Sounds like you need to go out and find yourself another client.
I'm sure we'll see lots of dirty tricks like HD films having lots of extras and the normal DVDs being left as essentially bare bones to "encourage" people into upgrading.
Seems like a misguided tactic, considering how much of a problem the MPAA is having today with the millions of people who download AVI copies of movies even though they are inferior to DVD in quality and come with ZERO special features.
Plus, all your old movie favorites and classics will look like crap on HD-DVD without thousands and thousands of dollars worth of digital restoration. Think about it. It will cost even more to fix up an old 35mm print to look good on a high-resolution format than it does to clean them up for DVD.
HD-DVD won't catch on until movies are shot digitally and released to HD "in all their original glory."
Intel is big into the "digital home" market, with its VIIV platform and various peripherals designed to serve content over network links. Of course it wouldn't want this business compromised by controls in upcoming DVD formats. Hardly the champion of the little guy; Intel is championing its own business interests, nothing more.
So if you ask a software vendor whether it's better to buy expensive hardware or to save money on hardware and install more copies of software, what's he going to say? Even if you had a site license he'd still say that, because guess what... he's a software vendor. He's not in the business of solving your problems with hardware.
Oh, right. Because at your job you're a big shot. You're making a difference.
His point was not that we should all be mindless sheep. His point was the same point I see at least a half-dozen +5 posters making, which is that your company is never going to be loyal to you past the next round of layoffs and that you should have a life outside your job, because that's the important thing.
There's no need to be cynical just because other people are writing about topics you have no interest in.
I think the reason many people are cynical is because so many bloggers seem to write about either A.) topics that nobody (save, perhaps, the blogger) should have any interest in; or B.) topics the blogger doesn't actually seem to know anything about.
It's the same cynicism that causes us to ask exactly why someone would want to go on Jerry Springer and tell the world about his relationship with his sister. There is such a thing as bad publicity.
All the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet.
Hey, I guess it sounded good when you were bullshitting in the kitchen at the last party you went to. Now that you're sober, though, care to explain where all Microsoft's money keeps coming from?
I've looked over Google Print, and i see nothing for these authors to object over.
I've looked over the new fence and I see nothing for my neighbors to object over. I've made it out of high-quality steel chain-link, not the cheap aluminum kind, and I've painted it a pleasant hot pink -- a lucky color in my native country. If anything, this is a massive windfall for my neighbors. It's essentially free and unlimited luck for them. In conclusion, I believe the neighborhood association's suit is completely without merit and should be dismissed summarily.
Slashdot Mirror
Is Quatermass not sci-fi, then? Because that's what a lot of the Tom Baker and Pertwee era Whos seemed to be modeling themselves after. There were some rockets in the Quatermass stories, granted, and some theorizing, but not a lot of science, really.
Anyway, what's interesting is that I seem to remember early interviews in which Davies was quoted as saying he thought Doctor Who worked best as a horror show. Can't find them now, though.
"Empty Child/Doctor Dances" was clearly my favorite. "Long Game" had some good content, but again it was one of two out of a total of just thirteen episodes in which the plot was resolved by yet another cheap sci-fi plot device -- blowing up the big, unintelligible blob-monster at the end. (Historically, the Doctor hasn't really confronted all that many blob-monsters in the past.) "Unquiet Dead," similarly, had a glowing alien energy-being at the end. I mean, come on -- compare that to, say, "Seeds of Doom" or "Robot," where the stakes were raised as the plot progressed. By comparison, a stationary monster in a cellar (or top floor, whatever) just isn't that dramatic.To me, that's one of the natural necessities of action or suspense drama: raising the stakes. But Russell seems so enamored of his characters that he never bothers to do it. There's something wrong at the beginning of the episode but we know that, by the end, the Doctor will figure it out and right it. You seldom get the impression that the Doctor or Rose are in any kind of danger, with the possible exception of the cliffhanger episodes ("Empty Child," again, being the most effective). But the cliffhangers get resolved in the first minute of the next episode in such a lame way that if they keep it up, nobody's going to pay attention to those either. I mean, come on -- "Haha, doesn't work on me after all, I'm an alien"? Fine then, time for me to head to the refrigerator to make a snack...
Nah, it's just sheer laziness. Davies obviously isn't too bothered about writing a good sci-fi story. Which is fine; a lot of what passes for "good sci-fi" these days just strikes me as overlabored fanboyish garbage. But Davies' approach just seems to insult the intelligence a little bit too much, sometimes.
As a poster above mentioned, though: Taken cumulatively, the writing of the new show is a far, far step above most of the writing on later seasons of "classic" Who. I'll agree with anyone there.
Actually, not a big fan. Heresy, I know. I have fond memories of them, because I saw them as a wee child, but I don't really rate them that highly.
Am I the only one who isn't totally sold on Russell Davies' ability as a science fiction writer? The interpersonal drama elements of the new Who were well done, but pretty much all the sci-fi was rubbish. At least two episodes ended with some kind of big beam from the sky hitting the Tardis as a way of resolving the plot. One episode had the Doctor developing some kind of force field so the Tardis wouldn't get hit by Dalek missiles (how can you get hit by a missile when your ship dematerializes to travel through both space AND time?). And when it came right down to it, the whole "Bad Wolf" plot thread was a huge letdown at the end and didn't really make any kind of sense at all. I'm hoping the second season is better, but I get the feeling that will depend on its relying more on independent writers rather than Mr. Davies himself. The two-parter with the gas mask zombies was the best one, and the direction I'd like to see them go. Try watching a bunch of Philip Hinchcliffe-era episodes starring Tom Baker and you'll see how the new series really sort of pales in comparison.
I mean, after all, anybody can set up a Web site. How could a company possibly make money doing that??
It seems to me that people think Sun is jumping on the bandwagon because Sun insists on using its own vanity license, rather than any of the pre-existing open source licenses. This leads people to believe that Sun is only putting one toe into open source but reserving the right to jump out any time the water gets too hot for it. Sort of an "open source license hokey-pokey."
I can't say whether that is or is not the intent of the CDDL; I can't speak for Sun. But from where I sit, the fact that Sun execs go around telling people that Sun is and always has been an open source friendly company, nay, that indeed it practically invented open source single-handedly -- well, that's not helping Sun's case. It makes the whole effort seem disingenuous.
But that's just it, though, you and I are professional writers. I want to hear from Joe Business Manager. The bulk of the English that gets written is written by people with no recollection of any formal training in writing. I'm always curious whether automatic grammar checkers are any use to those kinds of people. I suspect that they are.
Here's something else you may not realize. If I'm running an article one week on -- oh, say relational databases -- and Oracle hears about that and decides to buy a big two-page display ad to run right smack dab in the middle of my article, we won't do it. You may not believe that, but it's absolutely true. We may run it somewhere else in the issue, of course, but we won't run it alongside the relational database content. Occasionally this can be very inconvenient for us. But this, again, is a general standard of practice for magazines in the United States -- though, again, I can only speak for news and information publications, not lifestyle books.
My, my. Let me guess -- when you were working at your magazine, they didn't let you answer the phone, did they? Again, a simple click would have revealed that, had you realized that a byline usually includes a title. If you want, though, you can try our masthead. That, too, will require some reading and at least one more click on your part. Deceptive? There you go with that word again. The links say what they are. What more did you want? Who knows? Maybe they have none. I guess you'll have to tell me, based on your own experience of course.I don't know what magazine you edit, but if you really set out to create content designed to please your advertisers, please tell me the name of your publication so I won't make the mistake of reading it. We don't do that at InfoWorld and I wouldn't want to work at any magazine that did. You may also want to bone up on editorial guidelines for ethical standards and practices, such as those published by the American Society of Business Publications Editors or the American Society of Magazine Editors.
Look, I work in the magazine business. The magazine I work for does not charge for subscriptions. Thus, we get all of our revenue from advertising or some other form of sponsorship. And so therefore, yes, pretty much every penny of my salary comes from ads. Many of those ads are sold on our Web site.
And you know what? I use Firefox and Filterset.G and I wouldn't have it any other way. I block all ads, even Google ads, because I don't want to see ads when I surf the Web, period.
Am I being shortsighted? Am I cutting my own throat? Is my telling you all of this only going to encourage you all to do the same and put my publication out of business that much faster? I'm sorry, but I just can't see it that way.
I don't work in sales and I don't work in marketing. My job is to create content and make it appealing enough that it finds its way out to an audience. As far as I'm concerned, if I've convinced you to read it/look at it/listen to it/whatever, my job is done. Who gives a damn who's going to pay for it? That's what I work for a great big corporation for. Let them figure it out.
Seriously, plenty of people go to school, get degrees, and devote their whole careers to worrying about the question of how content is going to get paid for. From where I sit, they do that so I don't have to.
I look at it this way: If what I do has any value at all, then there will always be a demand for it. That demand ought to be translatable into dollars somehow. For the salespeople out there who bemoan the fact that people want to get rid of ads, here's a little Glengarry Glen Ross moment for you: "Third prize is you're fired." If a given sales technique isn't working and you're not closing sales and you're not bringing in revenue, then you need to think up something else.
But I don't. I just don't like the ads, so I make them go away without even looking at them. Yes, somebody should be giving that some thought. Just not me.
The "value" of a magazine, in the business sense, is to link advertisers to consumers, period. The advertiser doesn't need to get anything out of the content of the magazine. All the advertiser is paying for is access to the magazine's audience, which is shaped and defined by its content.
That's why you don't see enterprise software vendors advertising in cooking magazines. The rate of return isn't very high; that audience isn't particularly valuable to them.
There are two ways that a magazine can increase the value of its audience to an advertiser. One, it can have a bigger audience. And two, it can have a more targeted audience. That is, it can approach the advertiser and say, "Yes, you could advertise in that other magazine but you'll only get five percent response. Our audience, on the other hand, is richer/smarter/better informed/etc."
Magazines "prove" these assertions about their audiences to their advertisers through various forms of market research. One way is simply by taking surveys or holding focus groups. The ultimate in that may be qualified subscriptions, where potential readers fill out a survey in order to get a free subscription. It seems counterintuitive to give subscriptions away for free, maybe, but the idea here is that the magazines are tweaking their market research. It's easy to keep the value of your audience high when nobody can even get your magazine without answering your market research questions the way you want them answered. Finally, another way magazines can generate revenue is through branding. They might be able to parlay their brand into other products, such as custom research or events. Those products will attract other kinds of sponsorship but it's still basically advertising.
In most cities there is office space available for people like you. Don't asume that all office space is designed for growing companies with lots of employees. There are often spaces available where several individuals share the same facilities but do completely separate things. A Web developer friend of mine had a place like this once. basically had a common entry area that included a kitchenette (microwave, coffee machine etc.), a couch, and a coffee table with a couple of magazines where clients could wait. Surrounding that was a bunch of offices. The lady in the office next to my friend was a field rep for Dole Pineapple. Another guy was some other kind of marketer. Another one was some kind of programmer. It wasn't a bad setup and, like you say, it gave him someplace to go to get away from the distractions of home and get some work done. Plus, during the downtime he could even chit-chat with his "coworkers" on a business-y level, even though they didn't actually work together. There's something to be said, psychologically, for occasionally seeing another human soul besides your immediate family during the work week.
Of course, this does take a certain amount of money. But look at it this way: If your billing structure isn't enough to accommodate the very basics, like a roof over your desk, then you're probably either not charging enough or not working hard enough. Sounds like you need to go out and find yourself another client.
Plus, all your old movie favorites and classics will look like crap on HD-DVD without thousands and thousands of dollars worth of digital restoration. Think about it. It will cost even more to fix up an old 35mm print to look good on a high-resolution format than it does to clean them up for DVD.
HD-DVD won't catch on until movies are shot digitally and released to HD "in all their original glory."
Intel is big into the "digital home" market, with its VIIV platform and various peripherals designed to serve content over network links. Of course it wouldn't want this business compromised by controls in upcoming DVD formats. Hardly the champion of the little guy; Intel is championing its own business interests, nothing more.
So if you ask a software vendor whether it's better to buy expensive hardware or to save money on hardware and install more copies of software, what's he going to say? Even if you had a site license he'd still say that, because guess what ... he's a software vendor. He's not in the business of solving your problems with hardware.
Oh, right. Because at your job you're a big shot. You're making a difference.
His point was not that we should all be mindless sheep. His point was the same point I see at least a half-dozen +5 posters making, which is that your company is never going to be loyal to you past the next round of layoffs and that you should have a life outside your job, because that's the important thing.
It's the same cynicism that causes us to ask exactly why someone would want to go on Jerry Springer and tell the world about his relationship with his sister. There is such a thing as bad publicity.
Blame MySQL AB. How many times have they announced a pre-release version of MySQL 5 now? It seems like I've been seeing announcements for years...