He's not a pianist or a drummer, that's for sure, but he's a hell of a musician. In that he makes music. That doesn't imply any skill at any particular instrument, although in this case, I think it's quite arguable that the computer is his instrument.
Although new instruments have had a history of being rejected by more conventional instrument players whenever they're introduced, I would have hoped that we'd moved beyond that now. (Did you know what harpsicord players thought of the piano when it was first introduced? It wasn't flattering, I'll bet.) Keyboards, synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, and other electronic devices are all valid tools for a musician to use. For that matter, so are 55-gallon drums and PVC pipe, at the other end of the spectrum.
This guy made music; therefore he is a musician. The fact that you think that 'anybody' could do this is irrelevant; everybody isn't doing this, or it wouldn't be notable and other people wouldn't be listening to it. Acting haughty because he doesn't have conventional instrumental skills is ridiculous.
However I doubt you'd want a Lexan windshield on a passenger car, because it would scratch too easily. Particularly since most people don't really wash their windshields, and just sort of let the wipers grind the stuff around while the nozzles squirt some blue water on it.
A cracked windshield is probably preferable to one that's translucent from being sandblasted with road grit. I suspect, though I don't know for sure, that the ones on race cars probably have a very short lifespan.
I agree. I don't really see the humor in this. Blind people already do a lot of things that perhaps most folks wouldn't expect that blind people are able to do. I mean, you wouldn't think that a blind person could go mountain biking, and there's a guy doing that, too. There's been a whole revolution in the past few years with people using human echolocation (yes, echolocation; like dolphins) to navigate and "see" via sound reflections.
Frankly the Texas law seems like a reasonable compromise between equal opportunity and safety. It allows for a sighted person to look through the scope to verify the target, so there's no increased risk versus regular hunting by sighted people. And it would allow the blind person to do everything else.
Who knows -- maybe blind people could turn out to be excellent hunters, in terms of listening for and tracking game. It really wouldn't surprise me if that was the case. But the people lambasting this seem to be, unconsciously or not, saying that blind people should just accept the limitations that society assumes they have, rather than push the boundaries to find what they're actually capable of, and I find that incredibly sad.
And in the short term, I suspect that the majority of people taking advantage of this law will probably be people who've been hunting for years and who have, by accident, disease, or other misfortune, gone blind. I doubt that Texas is going to all of a sudden be lousy with blind people with guns. Get real; there aren't that many blind people who probably want to go hunting, but those that do probably know more about it than most non-hunters will ever know.
To the home user, WPA is Click. Click. Done. He doesn't hate Microsoft. He has never hated Microsoft. He lives in a country where corporate hardball is the true national sport.
Actually WGA is a pain in the ass if he's using a pirated copy of Windows, which isn't atypical; somebody needs their OS reinstalled and because their computer never came with any installation media, they get a friend to help them out, except that the friend uses some hot ISOs they grabbed from #cablemodemwarez or Kazaa. The person may even be entitled to a legit copy of Windows on their computer, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily running one. A lot of the people I heard complaining about WinXP's WGA were in that category (because people who pirated it themselves are probably smart enough to know why it won't validate and don't try).
Also, a lot of people hate Microsoft. Aside from the IRS, Microsoft probably gets cursed at more often than any entity in existence. Every time a computer crashes, chances are somebody is mentally (or verbally) cursing Microsoft. They just don't hate Microsoft enough to want to do anything different. Outside of Microsoft fanboys, I haven't found anyone who's really enthused about Windows (or most other MS products) in general. They're not terribly exciting. But they're good enough. In fact, Microsoft's corporate motto ought to be those two words: "Good enough." When you're on top, that's the only standard that matters -- the standard you have to maintain so that people won't get fed up enough to leave.
Why has Redmond been so friendly to linux recently?
Well, they have to do something after Vista. And it's been a long time since I've heard of anything out of that advanced-OS research group they had going, the one that was supposed to totally redesign everything.
Maybe they're thinking that Apple didn't have a bad idea with OS X... but where Apple went with Mach and a BSD userland, Microsoft could take a Linux kernel and then wrap an interface and a Windows API compatibility layer around it. They'd still be able to hold on to the control that they're so desperate for, because the Windows compatibility layer would probably not be open source, and maybe they could even find some way to patent-encumber some changes that they'd make to the kernel, so that MSLinux programs wouldn't run on other distos, but they'd be able to claim that other Linux programs would?
Sounds farfetched, but then again if you had told me in 1994 or 1996 that Apple would completely toss out the MacOS kernel and buy somebody else's rather than developing it in house, I would have laughed at you, too.
Even if they never go down that road, the fact that it's been mentioned here means someone at MS must have at least thought about it. If they could find a way to produce a Linux derivative that people could easily migrate to, but not away from, I think they'd jump on it in a second.
I just hope that we evolve to the point of being able to put together a receiver/broadcast radio out of spare parts just like one could change a tire on a roadside.
Well, this isn't too hard to do, at least for an analog receiver. I suspect that I could probably build you at least an AM radio receiver out of parts in my car (particularly if cannibalizing the car was allowable), not including its radio, obviously.
But building a digital radio receiver out of spare parts? You've got to be kidding.
One of the things that most disappoints me about the transition to digital television, and digital radio which will surely follow, is that it's going to become a lot more difficult both to teach people about how the technology works, and to build or demonstrate it yourself. If you could build a digital radio yourself, what would it look like? A few chips on a board, and that's assuming you could get someone to even sell you the right chips (and that you had a SMD soldering workstation), not to mention the patents on the compression algorithms if you wanted to roll your own. It's just one more device that we've made "indistinguishable from magic" to a large percentage of our own population.
And for what? So that the FCC can auction off the bandwidth to the highest bidder; nothing you or I are probably ever going to see or benefit from. That agency has become a 'profit center,' dedicated to raking in the dough for the government, rather than any legitimate function in the public's interest.
I think that study has it's causation turned all around.
People who wear tweed coats are probably on average more well-informed than people wearing denim shirts with name patches, but that doesn't mean that putting on a tweed coat will magically make you smarter. It might be self-selective earlier on in the chain somewhere.
Fox News didn't exist a decade ago, and now it's the top cable news channel, beating out CNN. A whole lot of people chose to watch it. That underlying preference for the viewpoint that Fox espouses is what separates Fox viewers from PBS viewers. And that preference is probably closely linked to a lot of socioeconomic factors like income level, education level, and occupation, all of which could cause people to be more or less well-informed. Unless you control for all those factors, you can't say (and shouldn't imply) that Fox News makes you stupid. It might be that Fox News' viewers were stupid already.
Looking at the study you linked to (which is by SourceWatch, which I'd argue is somewhat liberally biased) was specifically considering 'misperceptions' concerning the Iraq war and other politically sensitive issues; ignoring the fact that people may in fact be choosing to hold those misperceptions more or less consciously. People are quite capable of believing fervently in things they know not to be true, or at least ought to suspect are not true; to say that something about Iraq is a 'misperception' ignores that someone may decide to support the war in Iraq first, and then choose to believe whatever information best substantiates their already-chosen stance. (On the other side, I know quite a few people who probably believe that G.W. Bush is worse than Hitler and eats a steady diet of nails and raw babies; any information that might detract from this image is quickly ignored.) I think the psychological term for this is confirmation bias. Really, to convincingly show which group of people were more or less informed in an abstract sense, you'd probably want to ask about politically neutral issues.
ATSC provides better reception in fringe areas; DVB-T's modulation scheme is aimed more towards urban viewers (better resistance to multipath, etc.). To put it bluntly, in the U.S., rural viewers were apparently considered more important than urban ones, so DVB-T got dumped in favor of ATSC. So if you live around tall buildings, consider yourself to have been screwed. (I think there was also a big, steaming helping of "Not Invented Here" syndrome; no red-blooded American (Senator) was going to support some pansy-ass European television format. That's like admitting we can't do better, and that's unpossible!)
Sadly, the changeover to digital TV could have been a golden opportunity for the world to settle on a single standard for television, something we've never had. I guess the significance of analog TV is waning, but I've spent my whole life thinking that the whole NTSC/PAL/SECAM incompatibility thing was really a waste, and that maybe when everyone switched to digital, they'd see the light and not go down that road again.
I don't have any idea where they think they're going to make money -- I wouldn't be forking over my dough to this guy and expecting any of it back, but then again I'm not a venture capitalist. I do think I understand a little more of what the site is about, though.
It's more than just "free web space," a la GeoCities. It's basically a prebuilt dynamic web site. You can take a look at one example here. It's sort of like a miniature Digg. The site creator and its users write the stories, like a blog, and can then vote on them and comment.
I think the key is that the content of the sites is under the GFDL, in order to qualify for the free hosting. At least I think this is the case, because the site goes on and on about "free software and content". I think that's where Wales' master plan comes in; it's a way of encouraging people to create more free content. One assumes that if this really takes off, they'll charge for hosting of non-free materials. But in the short term, it might greatly build the amount of content that's available under a free license, and which can be incorporated into other projects, like Wikipedia and the Commons.
Really it looks a bit like Sourceforge, only for blog-ish sites rather than OSS software projects. They handle some of the site maintenance and backend work, and in return you get a free website...assuming you meet their standards. If you don't, then you can pay for hosting (theoretically, at some point in the future).
The newspapers could have beaten Craigslist at their own game. They just never rose to the challenge.
I know that particularly among the over-40 set, the brand name of the local newspaper is a lot more valuable than "Craigslist" ("Who is 'Craig' and why does he have a 'list'?"). But their online classified site is atrocious. Seriously, it makes me want to just stab my eyes out. Up until fairly recently, it wasn't even searchable, and the information in each ad was the same paltry words as in the print version. The internet is a far better medium for classified ads than paper is; you can search and sort the ads in various ways (apartments in area 'foo' with rent between x and y), and drill down to read more information about a property, plus see photos.
The newspapers could have carried their brand names onto the internet and been the local websites of first resort. But they blew it. Craigslist stepped in and offered a better product for less money (free online ads, while the newspapers were still making you pay by the word for the dead-tree kind even if you didn't want it). It's not like the newspapers didn't have a chance. They had a natural advantage -- all that supposed talent they have working in their Classified offices should have guaranteed them some success. That Craigslist managed to overtake them despite that, just further demonstrates how much of a superior product CL is.
As far as newspapers providing a social good, I'm unconvinced that the services that newspapers provide won't be replicated elsewhere. If the public cares about news and commentary, someone will step in to provide it, just as CL stepped in to provide classified ads when the newspapers failed to get with the times. I think in the future they'll be less vertical integration in the news business. Rather than having the same company pay the reporters and publish the news, we'll have one company doing the reporting and putting together newsfeeds of related material, and then various publishing and 'outlet' companies subscribing to those feeds and communicating it to people. Just because the newspaper has been the way that it's been done in the past, doesn't mean it's the only way to serve that function.
Even while EBay hinders them in Europe to promote their own offering (EBay owns 30% of craigslist).
I'm confused. eBay doesn't own a controlling interest in Craigslist; they're only 25 or 30% at most, purchased from a departing executive. That doesn't give them much of a say in operations. How is Craigslist being hindered? They seem to be active in quite a few European cities.
I'd imagine that it might be tough to gain traction in a foreign market, since the only way I've ever heard of CL 'advertising' was by word-of-mouth. That seems like it would be a much bigger hindrance than the wishes of a minority stakeholder. Or am I missing something in the equation?
It takes no particular talent to sell a dollar for 50 cents.
If what they've done is so easy, why doesn't someone else just create a different but similarly-oriented site, monetize it, and laugh all the way to the bank?
They're providing a service that people want, and are apparently making ends meet while they do it. That's hardly "selling a dollar for 50 cents." Many sites can't even manage to do that.
What MarketWatch is arguing, is that perhaps they could make even more money than they're doing. Perhaps they could. But perhaps they'd also drive away some of their audience and leave themselves open to the 'next' Craigslist.
Just because they're not making risky business decisions doesn't make them fools; I thought anyone who'd survived the dot-com burst would realize that maybe a conservative stance is underrated when it comes to building a brand and business.
Similar to how many PC's have one of two brands of manufactured CPUs.
I think this is the key issue. The situation with LCD displays ought to look like the situation with CPUs, but it doesn't.
With CPUs, competition between the two major players has created a price war and feature war, giving consumers more power for less money on a basically monthly basis. Billions of dollars of research have been spent trying to further the cycle of better, faster, cheaper (and recently, more efficiently).
I think that one of the reasons that the LCD market is being investigated is that it doesn't show as much competition as other high-tech sectors that are dominated by a few major players. It ought to be a cutthroat marketplace, where companies are struggling hand-over-foot to outdo each other and deliver a better product to customers for less money. While it's true that prices have come down, it's not the sort of drops that we've seen in semiconductors, and that's a little suspicious. It starts to look as though maybe the major players in LCDs have all gotten together and said "we don't want to get into it like Intel and AMD, so let's agree to slow things down a bit..." and while that may be good for them, it's bad for consumers and also illegal.
You only have a case to whine if your provider has a monopoly by law.
The real problem starts to occur when companies -- any companies, really -- start to interfere in the political process and win concessions for themselves. Large companies have taken to buying influence in politics and using it as a way to protect themselves from competition. This adversely affects and distorts the market, which needs to have barriers to entry that are as low as possible in order to produce the best outcome for consumers, and operate in a regulatory framework that isn't being manipulated by actors in the market themselves.
Laissez faire on the part of the government with regard to companies would be fine, if the companies were doing the same to the political process. But when companies are habitually attempting to influence politics (on the local, state, and national levels, to a point where it's considered endemic and normal), then there is a valid reason for people wanting to interfere with the companies. You can't judge a company simply on the basis that it's acting according to the law, when it has helped shape the laws itself.
I think this all comes back to a key problem in the U.S. right now: we have forgotten the place of the corporation as an entity. It is not a person, and has no place in the political realm. It has no inherent rights in the same way a natural citizen does; all of its rights are granted, given to it by the citizens because they feel it will be beneficial to do so. It is the duty of corporations to continually justify their existence to the citizenry, because it is to them that they owe it.
So everyone wants complex things that they have no idea what it does? That makes a lot of sense. Sounds more like companies are just shoving things into stuff in the hopes people will say "I don't know what all they do but it has more buttons than that other one" and then buy it.
I thought it was sarcasm at first, too; then I realized they were serious. It's a little hard to take the article seriously after that.
Let's just look at their home pages: Yahoo's, which has no less than 12 panes, including one that's just a graphical advertisement -- oh, yeah, there's a search box around there somewhere, too; Google's, which is a logo and a search box. (Google's also manages to convey to me that today must be Edvard Munch's birthday.)
If Yahoo is the answer to 'ease of use,' somebody is asking the wrong question.
The 'net is big, it is great and most of all, it's international. And it doesn't matter jack whether the server I blog on is in the US or in Uzbekistan.
Right up until they build a National Firewall. Which of course, is the only way to keep our children safe. And to keep out the terrorists. And Mexicans.
When a law doesn't work, the politicians don't just give up and say "well, hey, that was a really dumb idea! Let's never do that again!" No, instead they find a way to make it enforceable. Which is why you always have to be concerned when someone is passing an unenforceable law. Look at what it would take to make it enforceable on everyone, and that's what they're going to be asking for next year after it gets passed, and falls flat on its face.
It's the water in D.C. I swear to God. Never have I seen so many people who really ought to know better, do so many stupid things.
I'm convinced the water there is contaminated with brain-eating parasites, there really is no other logical explanation.
FOSS versioning vs. commercial versioning
on
VLC 0.8.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
A lot of FOSS projects have v1.0 phobia, it seems. Not sure why that is, if they think that releasing a 1.0 version will cause all the developers to pack up and move on to another "new project," but I've seen it a lot.
If VLC were a commercial product, it would probably be at version 3.0 by now, at the very least.
Actually, in many cases you can convert the version numbers from "FOSS project format" to "commercial software marketing department format" by shifting all the decimal points to the right one place. So 0.8.6 would be Version 8.6, etc.
Okay, everybody say it with me now... what do you never, ever want to do? Upgrade any Apple product to a point-zero version. Ever.
They almost always suck, and sometimes they suck badly enough to take your data down with them. Mac OS 10.0? Major problems. iTunes 5.0? Adisaster. Aperture 1.0? Sucked (well, at least for $300 it sucked).
In almost every case, Apple has followed up with a point release that's made the software usable. Mac OS 10.0.4 was the first version I'd say wasn't actually dangerous to use; iTunes 5.0.1 stopped eating people's music libraries for lunch; Aperture 1.5 could have been a whole different program (but thankfully was a free upgrade).
Anything from Apple that ends in a zero should get treated like a public beta. It's obnoxious, and I don't know what the deal is with their QA, but they've been doing it for years, and with nearly absolute consistency. Anytime a major upgrade of a product comes out, you can count on there being a bug-fix point release in the next few weeks. This was my major reason for holding off on iTunes 7.0; I didn't have to go online to know that it was going to suck, they always do. 7.0.2 though, seems reasonable, although admittedly the interface is questionable.
Apple as a company, seems to work best when it's under the gun. Sometimes I think they put themselves there, by releasing a product that's just not ready for prime-time and pushing it out as an upgrade to unwitting users; but yet they always seem to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with an emergency patch. It's like they really don't start working until the pressure is really on and the users are screaming for blood.
I think you'd be silly to make a decision about the hardware based on the iTMS. Lots of people -- the majority of folks I know, actually -- use iPods and don't go near the Music Store. It's ridiculously overpriced; anyone in an urban area probably has a used CD store that's easier to browse and far cheaper, not to mention higher in quality.
I am in no way a fan of the iTMS, but the iPods themselves are hard to beat. Particularly the new Nano (the metal one); it clears up my biggest objection to the old model, namely that it got scratched too easily. I've played around with some of the competition's flash-based players and they're all clunky and obnoxious to use compared to the Nano. (Which is not to say the iPod couldn't be improved; I'd still like it to have more tactile feedback and some sort of voice prompting so you could use it without looking at the screen, but apparently in Cupertino nobody drives a car and thus they've never tried to use one at the same time.)
The iPod, combined with iTunes as a music-management program and nothing else, is a solid product; the iTMS should be considered independently, since it's not like the iPod is restricted to playing music from there or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not a pianist or a drummer, that's for sure, but he's a hell of a musician. In that he makes music. That doesn't imply any skill at any particular instrument, although in this case, I think it's quite arguable that the computer is his instrument.
Although new instruments have had a history of being rejected by more conventional instrument players whenever they're introduced, I would have hoped that we'd moved beyond that now. (Did you know what harpsicord players thought of the piano when it was first introduced? It wasn't flattering, I'll bet.) Keyboards, synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, and other electronic devices are all valid tools for a musician to use. For that matter, so are 55-gallon drums and PVC pipe, at the other end of the spectrum.
This guy made music; therefore he is a musician. The fact that you think that 'anybody' could do this is irrelevant; everybody isn't doing this, or it wouldn't be notable and other people wouldn't be listening to it. Acting haughty because he doesn't have conventional instrumental skills is ridiculous.
However I doubt you'd want a Lexan windshield on a passenger car, because it would scratch too easily. Particularly since most people don't really wash their windshields, and just sort of let the wipers grind the stuff around while the nozzles squirt some blue water on it.
A cracked windshield is probably preferable to one that's translucent from being sandblasted with road grit. I suspect, though I don't know for sure, that the ones on race cars probably have a very short lifespan.
Yeah, my girlfriend uses that so I'm vaguely aware that it exists ... I still can't find anything that loads as quickly as my current homepage, though.
Good old "about:blank".
I agree. I don't really see the humor in this. Blind people already do a lot of things that perhaps most folks wouldn't expect that blind people are able to do. I mean, you wouldn't think that a blind person could go mountain biking, and there's a guy doing that, too. There's been a whole revolution in the past few years with people using human echolocation (yes, echolocation; like dolphins) to navigate and "see" via sound reflections.
Frankly the Texas law seems like a reasonable compromise between equal opportunity and safety. It allows for a sighted person to look through the scope to verify the target, so there's no increased risk versus regular hunting by sighted people. And it would allow the blind person to do everything else.
Who knows -- maybe blind people could turn out to be excellent hunters, in terms of listening for and tracking game. It really wouldn't surprise me if that was the case. But the people lambasting this seem to be, unconsciously or not, saying that blind people should just accept the limitations that society assumes they have, rather than push the boundaries to find what they're actually capable of, and I find that incredibly sad.
And in the short term, I suspect that the majority of people taking advantage of this law will probably be people who've been hunting for years and who have, by accident, disease, or other misfortune, gone blind. I doubt that Texas is going to all of a sudden be lousy with blind people with guns. Get real; there aren't that many blind people who probably want to go hunting, but those that do probably know more about it than most non-hunters will ever know.
To the home user, WPA is Click. Click. Done. He doesn't hate Microsoft. He has never hated Microsoft. He lives in a country where corporate hardball is the true national sport.
Actually WGA is a pain in the ass if he's using a pirated copy of Windows, which isn't atypical; somebody needs their OS reinstalled and because their computer never came with any installation media, they get a friend to help them out, except that the friend uses some hot ISOs they grabbed from #cablemodemwarez or Kazaa. The person may even be entitled to a legit copy of Windows on their computer, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily running one. A lot of the people I heard complaining about WinXP's WGA were in that category (because people who pirated it themselves are probably smart enough to know why it won't validate and don't try).
Also, a lot of people hate Microsoft. Aside from the IRS, Microsoft probably gets cursed at more often than any entity in existence. Every time a computer crashes, chances are somebody is mentally (or verbally) cursing Microsoft. They just don't hate Microsoft enough to want to do anything different. Outside of Microsoft fanboys, I haven't found anyone who's really enthused about Windows (or most other MS products) in general. They're not terribly exciting. But they're good enough. In fact, Microsoft's corporate motto ought to be those two words: "Good enough." When you're on top, that's the only standard that matters -- the standard you have to maintain so that people won't get fed up enough to leave.
Why has Redmond been so friendly to linux recently?
... but where Apple went with Mach and a BSD userland, Microsoft could take a Linux kernel and then wrap an interface and a Windows API compatibility layer around it. They'd still be able to hold on to the control that they're so desperate for, because the Windows compatibility layer would probably not be open source, and maybe they could even find some way to patent-encumber some changes that they'd make to the kernel, so that MSLinux programs wouldn't run on other distos, but they'd be able to claim that other Linux programs would?
Well, they have to do something after Vista. And it's been a long time since I've heard of anything out of that advanced-OS research group they had going, the one that was supposed to totally redesign everything.
Maybe they're thinking that Apple didn't have a bad idea with OS X
Sounds farfetched, but then again if you had told me in 1994 or 1996 that Apple would completely toss out the MacOS kernel and buy somebody else's rather than developing it in house, I would have laughed at you, too.
Even if they never go down that road, the fact that it's been mentioned here means someone at MS must have at least thought about it. If they could find a way to produce a Linux derivative that people could easily migrate to, but not away from, I think they'd jump on it in a second.
I just hope that we evolve to the point of being able to put together a receiver/broadcast radio out of spare parts just like one could change a tire on a roadside.
Well, this isn't too hard to do, at least for an analog receiver. I suspect that I could probably build you at least an AM radio receiver out of parts in my car (particularly if cannibalizing the car was allowable), not including its radio, obviously.
But building a digital radio receiver out of spare parts? You've got to be kidding.
One of the things that most disappoints me about the transition to digital television, and digital radio which will surely follow, is that it's going to become a lot more difficult both to teach people about how the technology works, and to build or demonstrate it yourself. If you could build a digital radio yourself, what would it look like? A few chips on a board, and that's assuming you could get someone to even sell you the right chips (and that you had a SMD soldering workstation), not to mention the patents on the compression algorithms if you wanted to roll your own. It's just one more device that we've made "indistinguishable from magic" to a large percentage of our own population.
And for what? So that the FCC can auction off the bandwidth to the highest bidder; nothing you or I are probably ever going to see or benefit from. That agency has become a 'profit center,' dedicated to raking in the dough for the government, rather than any legitimate function in the public's interest.
I think that study has it's causation turned all around.
People who wear tweed coats are probably on average more well-informed than people wearing denim shirts with name patches, but that doesn't mean that putting on a tweed coat will magically make you smarter. It might be self-selective earlier on in the chain somewhere.
Fox News didn't exist a decade ago, and now it's the top cable news channel, beating out CNN. A whole lot of people chose to watch it. That underlying preference for the viewpoint that Fox espouses is what separates Fox viewers from PBS viewers. And that preference is probably closely linked to a lot of socioeconomic factors like income level, education level, and occupation, all of which could cause people to be more or less well-informed. Unless you control for all those factors, you can't say (and shouldn't imply) that Fox News makes you stupid. It might be that Fox News' viewers were stupid already.
Looking at the study you linked to (which is by SourceWatch, which I'd argue is somewhat liberally biased) was specifically considering 'misperceptions' concerning the Iraq war and other politically sensitive issues; ignoring the fact that people may in fact be choosing to hold those misperceptions more or less consciously. People are quite capable of believing fervently in things they know not to be true, or at least ought to suspect are not true; to say that something about Iraq is a 'misperception' ignores that someone may decide to support the war in Iraq first, and then choose to believe whatever information best substantiates their already-chosen stance. (On the other side, I know quite a few people who probably believe that G.W. Bush is worse than Hitler and eats a steady diet of nails and raw babies; any information that might detract from this image is quickly ignored.) I think the psychological term for this is confirmation bias. Really, to convincingly show which group of people were more or less informed in an abstract sense, you'd probably want to ask about politically neutral issues.
ATSC provides better reception in fringe areas; DVB-T's modulation scheme is aimed more towards urban viewers (better resistance to multipath, etc.). To put it bluntly, in the U.S., rural viewers were apparently considered more important than urban ones, so DVB-T got dumped in favor of ATSC. So if you live around tall buildings, consider yourself to have been screwed. (I think there was also a big, steaming helping of "Not Invented Here" syndrome; no red-blooded American (Senator) was going to support some pansy-ass European television format. That's like admitting we can't do better, and that's unpossible!)
Sadly, the changeover to digital TV could have been a golden opportunity for the world to settle on a single standard for television, something we've never had. I guess the significance of analog TV is waning, but I've spent my whole life thinking that the whole NTSC/PAL/SECAM incompatibility thing was really a waste, and that maybe when everyone switched to digital, they'd see the light and not go down that road again.
I don't have any idea where they think they're going to make money -- I wouldn't be forking over my dough to this guy and expecting any of it back, but then again I'm not a venture capitalist. I do think I understand a little more of what the site is about, though.
It's more than just "free web space," a la GeoCities. It's basically a prebuilt dynamic web site. You can take a look at one example here. It's sort of like a miniature Digg. The site creator and its users write the stories, like a blog, and can then vote on them and comment.
I think the key is that the content of the sites is under the GFDL, in order to qualify for the free hosting. At least I think this is the case, because the site goes on and on about "free software and content". I think that's where Wales' master plan comes in; it's a way of encouraging people to create more free content. One assumes that if this really takes off, they'll charge for hosting of non-free materials. But in the short term, it might greatly build the amount of content that's available under a free license, and which can be incorporated into other projects, like Wikipedia and the Commons.
Really it looks a bit like Sourceforge, only for blog-ish sites rather than OSS software projects. They handle some of the site maintenance and backend work, and in return you get a free website...assuming you meet their standards. If you don't, then you can pay for hosting (theoretically, at some point in the future).
Senator McCain, is that you?
Wow, that's pretty neat.
... that page ought to have a warning sign on it, it hurts my brain just to look at for too long.)
(Take a look at Excite's
The newspapers could have beaten Craigslist at their own game. They just never rose to the challenge.
I know that particularly among the over-40 set, the brand name of the local newspaper is a lot more valuable than "Craigslist" ("Who is 'Craig' and why does he have a 'list'?"). But their online classified site is atrocious. Seriously, it makes me want to just stab my eyes out. Up until fairly recently, it wasn't even searchable, and the information in each ad was the same paltry words as in the print version. The internet is a far better medium for classified ads than paper is; you can search and sort the ads in various ways (apartments in area 'foo' with rent between x and y), and drill down to read more information about a property, plus see photos.
The newspapers could have carried their brand names onto the internet and been the local websites of first resort. But they blew it. Craigslist stepped in and offered a better product for less money (free online ads, while the newspapers were still making you pay by the word for the dead-tree kind even if you didn't want it). It's not like the newspapers didn't have a chance. They had a natural advantage -- all that supposed talent they have working in their Classified offices should have guaranteed them some success. That Craigslist managed to overtake them despite that, just further demonstrates how much of a superior product CL is.
As far as newspapers providing a social good, I'm unconvinced that the services that newspapers provide won't be replicated elsewhere. If the public cares about news and commentary, someone will step in to provide it, just as CL stepped in to provide classified ads when the newspapers failed to get with the times. I think in the future they'll be less vertical integration in the news business. Rather than having the same company pay the reporters and publish the news, we'll have one company doing the reporting and putting together newsfeeds of related material, and then various publishing and 'outlet' companies subscribing to those feeds and communicating it to people. Just because the newspaper has been the way that it's been done in the past, doesn't mean it's the only way to serve that function.
Even while EBay hinders them in Europe to promote their own offering (EBay owns 30% of craigslist).
I'm confused. eBay doesn't own a controlling interest in Craigslist; they're only 25 or 30% at most, purchased from a departing executive. That doesn't give them much of a say in operations. How is Craigslist being hindered? They seem to be active in quite a few European cities.
I'd imagine that it might be tough to gain traction in a foreign market, since the only way I've ever heard of CL 'advertising' was by word-of-mouth. That seems like it would be a much bigger hindrance than the wishes of a minority stakeholder. Or am I missing something in the equation?
It takes no particular talent to sell a dollar for 50 cents.
If what they've done is so easy, why doesn't someone else just create a different but similarly-oriented site, monetize it, and laugh all the way to the bank?
They're providing a service that people want, and are apparently making ends meet while they do it. That's hardly "selling a dollar for 50 cents." Many sites can't even manage to do that.
What MarketWatch is arguing, is that perhaps they could make even more money than they're doing. Perhaps they could. But perhaps they'd also drive away some of their audience and leave themselves open to the 'next' Craigslist.
Just because they're not making risky business decisions doesn't make them fools; I thought anyone who'd survived the dot-com burst would realize that maybe a conservative stance is underrated when it comes to building a brand and business.
Similar to how many PC's have one of two brands of manufactured CPUs.
I think this is the key issue. The situation with LCD displays ought to look like the situation with CPUs, but it doesn't.
With CPUs, competition between the two major players has created a price war and feature war, giving consumers more power for less money on a basically monthly basis. Billions of dollars of research have been spent trying to further the cycle of better, faster, cheaper (and recently, more efficiently).
I think that one of the reasons that the LCD market is being investigated is that it doesn't show as much competition as other high-tech sectors that are dominated by a few major players. It ought to be a cutthroat marketplace, where companies are struggling hand-over-foot to outdo each other and deliver a better product to customers for less money. While it's true that prices have come down, it's not the sort of drops that we've seen in semiconductors, and that's a little suspicious. It starts to look as though maybe the major players in LCDs have all gotten together and said "we don't want to get into it like Intel and AMD, so let's agree to slow things down a bit..." and while that may be good for them, it's bad for consumers and also illegal.
You only have a case to whine if your provider has a monopoly by law.
The real problem starts to occur when companies -- any companies, really -- start to interfere in the political process and win concessions for themselves. Large companies have taken to buying influence in politics and using it as a way to protect themselves from competition. This adversely affects and distorts the market, which needs to have barriers to entry that are as low as possible in order to produce the best outcome for consumers, and operate in a regulatory framework that isn't being manipulated by actors in the market themselves.
Laissez faire on the part of the government with regard to companies would be fine, if the companies were doing the same to the political process. But when companies are habitually attempting to influence politics (on the local, state, and national levels, to a point where it's considered endemic and normal), then there is a valid reason for people wanting to interfere with the companies. You can't judge a company simply on the basis that it's acting according to the law, when it has helped shape the laws itself.
I think this all comes back to a key problem in the U.S. right now: we have forgotten the place of the corporation as an entity. It is not a person, and has no place in the political realm. It has no inherent rights in the same way a natural citizen does; all of its rights are granted, given to it by the citizens because they feel it will be beneficial to do so. It is the duty of corporations to continually justify their existence to the citizenry, because it is to them that they owe it.
This never seizes to amaze me.
... I suggest a good synthetic blend for the winter.
You might want to put some oil on that
So everyone wants complex things that they have no idea what it does? That makes a lot of sense. Sounds more like companies are just shoving things into stuff in the hopes people will say "I don't know what all they do but it has more buttons than that other one" and then buy it.
Or, in other words, "This one goes to 11!"
I thought it was sarcasm at first, too; then I realized they were serious. It's a little hard to take the article seriously after that.
Let's just look at their home pages: Yahoo's, which has no less than 12 panes, including one that's just a graphical advertisement -- oh, yeah, there's a search box around there somewhere, too; Google's, which is a logo and a search box. (Google's also manages to convey to me that today must be Edvard Munch's birthday.)
If Yahoo is the answer to 'ease of use,' somebody is asking the wrong question.
The 'net is big, it is great and most of all, it's international. And it doesn't matter jack whether the server I blog on is in the US or in Uzbekistan.
Right up until they build a National Firewall. Which of course, is the only way to keep our children safe. And to keep out the terrorists. And Mexicans.
When a law doesn't work, the politicians don't just give up and say "well, hey, that was a really dumb idea! Let's never do that again!" No, instead they find a way to make it enforceable. Which is why you always have to be concerned when someone is passing an unenforceable law. Look at what it would take to make it enforceable on everyone, and that's what they're going to be asking for next year after it gets passed, and falls flat on its face.
It's the water in D.C. I swear to God. Never have I seen so many people who really ought to know better, do so many stupid things.
I'm convinced the water there is contaminated with brain-eating parasites, there really is no other logical explanation.
A lot of FOSS projects have v1.0 phobia, it seems. Not sure why that is, if they think that releasing a 1.0 version will cause all the developers to pack up and move on to another "new project," but I've seen it a lot.
If VLC were a commercial product, it would probably be at version 3.0 by now, at the very least.
Actually, in many cases you can convert the version numbers from "FOSS project format" to "commercial software marketing department format" by shifting all the decimal points to the right one place. So 0.8.6 would be Version 8.6, etc.
Okay, everybody say it with me now ... what do you never, ever want to do? Upgrade any Apple product to a point-zero version. Ever.
They almost always suck, and sometimes they suck badly enough to take your data down with them. Mac OS 10.0? Major problems. iTunes 5.0? A disaster. Aperture 1.0? Sucked (well, at least for $300 it sucked).
In almost every case, Apple has followed up with a point release that's made the software usable. Mac OS 10.0.4 was the first version I'd say wasn't actually dangerous to use; iTunes 5.0.1 stopped eating people's music libraries for lunch; Aperture 1.5 could have been a whole different program (but thankfully was a free upgrade).
Anything from Apple that ends in a zero should get treated like a public beta. It's obnoxious, and I don't know what the deal is with their QA, but they've been doing it for years, and with nearly absolute consistency. Anytime a major upgrade of a product comes out, you can count on there being a bug-fix point release in the next few weeks. This was my major reason for holding off on iTunes 7.0; I didn't have to go online to know that it was going to suck, they always do. 7.0.2 though, seems reasonable, although admittedly the interface is questionable.
Apple as a company, seems to work best when it's under the gun. Sometimes I think they put themselves there, by releasing a product that's just not ready for prime-time and pushing it out as an upgrade to unwitting users; but yet they always seem to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with an emergency patch. It's like they really don't start working until the pressure is really on and the users are screaming for blood.
I think you'd be silly to make a decision about the hardware based on the iTMS. Lots of people -- the majority of folks I know, actually -- use iPods and don't go near the Music Store. It's ridiculously overpriced; anyone in an urban area probably has a used CD store that's easier to browse and far cheaper, not to mention higher in quality.
I am in no way a fan of the iTMS, but the iPods themselves are hard to beat. Particularly the new Nano (the metal one); it clears up my biggest objection to the old model, namely that it got scratched too easily. I've played around with some of the competition's flash-based players and they're all clunky and obnoxious to use compared to the Nano. (Which is not to say the iPod couldn't be improved; I'd still like it to have more tactile feedback and some sort of voice prompting so you could use it without looking at the screen, but apparently in Cupertino nobody drives a car and thus they've never tried to use one at the same time.)
The iPod, combined with iTunes as a music-management program and nothing else, is a solid product; the iTMS should be considered independently, since it's not like the iPod is restricted to playing music from there or anything.