Sadly I agree with you that consumers will go with what's cheapest, though it just hit me that today of all day's proves the opposite. Detroit made cheap cars. But people chose more expensive but better cars, at least I think that's a viable theory. Nonetheless I think that you're generally correct.
But my point is that the original article seemed to indicate that there would be equivalent investigative journalism on HuffPo that there currently is in print. Or at least it can approximate it. But I doubt that's true, as the thread to which I responded also argued, because HuffPo hasn't thought of all the costs involved in true, investigative journalism.
You seem to be saying that people will accept the cheapest news they can find, regardless of quality. And I'm afraid you may be right. But that's not the same as saying that they'll also get investigative journalism. That isn't done cheaply. They may get something. But they won't get something equivalent to print investigative journalism.
Sorry I've been "paradigmed-shifted" to death. Paradigm shifts are recognized long after the fact. Contemporaneous paradigm-shifts are not paradigm-shifts at all: they're someone trying to further their own objectives coupled with wishful thinking about the future.
I don't know how many times I've read this identical analysis about the future of journalism: all successful journalists will be BRANDS. We'll see. My guess is that in 5 years any journalists that are still around will look back at the self-promotional branding of the last few years they same way that older journalists look back at photos of themselves wearing flower-patterned bell-bottoms....... Did I really look like that? Did I really do that?
I tend to agree with you but given the populace's ignorance about journalism(see the idiotic replies to the original post that ignore it and instead choose it as a stepping off point for rants of the left and right political persuasion) it's hard to believe that anyone will understand the importance of what you say.
We now seem to have a generation of people who believe that only the web produces anything of importance, that anything of importance can be completely comprehended in the 30 seconds that it takes to read the lengthiest web post, that all information wants to be free, and that this 'free-ness' has no cost to anyone. You're talking about cost and it sure seems to me that the vast majority of people who comment on the press (whether print, broadcast, or web) don't have the slightest idea about COST. It's a nasty little detail that they'd prefer to ignore.
Highly rewarding short-term strategies will result in the negligence of long-term possibilities.
I can't disagree with you on that. Financial Times had a lengthy article on this last summer I think, long before the real meltdown.
But I do think that it's a mistake to say that this was just a matter of over-leveraging, or of compensation. I do partially blame it on speed.
When you can do things quickly, whether the speed is through internet connectivity, computing power or whatever there is a tendency to blindly trust the accuracy of the information. I once needed to code some AP election tables so that they would appear in a newspaper with new calculations and formatting. It looked great and worked quickly. I TRUSTED that speedy computation and formatting. But I happened to notice that when the live returns started coming in they totaled more than 100%. Oops. It all looked good but it wasn't. My experience is that people are far too trusting with the speedy results that technology gives them.
Not being a participant in any of this I only have an outsider's perspective. But something obviously went wrong in many places: CDOs and other structured investments that were very risky; ratings agencies that said they weren't; people eager to make a fast buck, both buyers and sellers. But I wonder how many of the so-called adults in the room, the investment banks and ratings agencies among others, weren't a bit intoxicated by technology: the models worked, the bets were safe. I wonder if they'd been slower and done more investigation by hand if they'd have come to different conclusions.
Or maybe as others have suggested I'm just confusing speed with greed.
Re:Age of Speed on Wall St.
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The Age of Speed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Thanks for the link. I'm unfamiliar with him but did read, too speedily I have to say, his thoughts on the crash. Unfortunately, and I'm not trying to be obnoxious, they strike me as unproven theories at best, and more likely just nonsense.
Perhaps due to my age I've lived through a number of movements, of life-changing, consciousness-changing events. Guess what? The changes were minor. Life didn't change, nor did human consciousness.
Where did the current crisis stem from? the answer is: subprime mortgages; housing credit that proved unsustainable; land. The victims are the hundred of thousands of people who are going to lose their homes. The whole concept of sedentarism had already been challenged by immigrants, exiles, deportations, refugees - and the delocalisation of economic activities. This phenomenon is bound to increase
So what the financial crisis is really a challenge to the 'concept of sedentarism?' I don't think so. The problem with writers such as this is that they know enough about a number of subjects to theorize possible connections between seemingly dissimilar fields. When I first read Marshall McLuhan I was dazzled by his abilities to do this. The problem is that it's like a magician. The audience is too busy being dazzled to notice the tricks, lack of proof, illogic, etc.
Since I've never read him before I don't feel right in criticizing further. Perhaps I'd find more in further reading. But so far I have to say, in spite of what I think are your good intentions regarding him, that I don't find much there.
But I would add I read him quickly. I've found that I always read more speedily, and with less comprehension on the web. Maybe I need to slow down and read a book............
Re:Age of Speed on Wall St.
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The Age of Speed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's true. There is much that can be done more quickly. And I for one won't argue with being able to do my taxes more quickly, or many of other such things.
But I wonder what's been lost. For instance why has the Slow Food movement been so popular for so long. Why do I find blogs about slow painting? Why is there a Take Back Your Time day? As far as I'm concerned there's been a tremendous loss. And of course the poem by Stephen Dobyns in one of the first replies indicates this. We are all hurrying. But for what?
I don't think people, and it certainly seems like this book and this reviewer, slow down enough to say: wait a minute! What's the hurry? What have I just lost by being in such a hurry? What have I gained? How do they balance out?
If the book reviewed talked about that I'd be interested. If it just says speed is inevitable and here are some quick hints for dealing with it then I say no thanks.
Re:Age of Speed on Wall St.
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The Age of Speed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually I was thinking more along the lines of the speed with which CDOs and other structured financial investments were created and sold, without anyone SLOWING DOWN enough to say, you know this sounds like a lot of BS to me..............
If you view Wall St. as nothing more than the ability to trade, then yes 'speed' has given more people the ability to trade quickly. But as a consequence it's also contributed to the substitution of speculation for investment (see John Bogle's new book, 'Enough'). Many people would say I think that speed has been the problem with Wall St. as well in speculation gaining the ascendancy over investment.
It looks so easy with our speedy tools: the price is $9.00 on my screen right here; 30 seconds later it's $9.95 on this screen here. So I sell. That is the Wall St. of day-traders and speed does help. It is not investment.
My guess is that in five years when there's been enough time to sort all of this out that people will say speculation was one of the biggest problems here. That and the abandonment of investment. For example do you buy a house as a long term investment, something that you live in for a long period of time. Or do you buy it for speculation, for a quick profit. I couldn't prove it but I think it's true that most of the speed that you say has been valuable for Wall St. was only valuable if you consider to be Wall St. a speculative entity rather than an investment one.
I think we do agree on panic though. It can move a whole lot more speedily now. I wouldn't be surprised in fact if the huge volatility swings that we see these days are more due to the speed of communication than to anything inherent in the market. But if so then that's one more instance where speed doesn't seem so good. Not that there's much that can be done about it.
Age of Speed on Wall St.
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The Age of Speed
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I wonder if the author did an analysis of how the Age of Speed helped Wall St. to come to its fabulous current state.
The reviewer says we "live in the age of speed." Maybe so. I see plenty of people doing things too quickly. But does that mean we live in the "age of speed?" How does it differ from the age of non-speed? Is it an improvement, an inevitability? Did we lose something? Would the financial disaster we're in right now have been better off without so much speed?
Before reading more about how to cope with the age of speed, I'd prefer to see something explaining just what it is. Otherwise I'm sure not going to spend my valuable time reading it. Right now it just sounds like a buzz phrase.
Re:The original Parrot was an April Fool's joke
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Parrot 1.0.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the reminder! That was an enjoyable few days.
You're absolutely right! Where in the world do these clueless people come from that accuse the rest of the world of being 'clueless?' I've learned over the years that as soon as I hear someone shouting 'clueless' I can stop listening.
People who think news content is free and just floats about in the ether ready to be plucked remind me of people who go into a grocery store and are horribly shocked when they see something recognizable as an animal in the meat section. Well guess what meat comes from animals. And news comes from hardworking reporters, editors, systems people, et al. It costs money; it ain't for free. Most news worth reading on the internet came from someone who got paid to do it and then was put online by someone else.
I am so sick of hearing uninformed nonsense about 'information wanting to be free.'
The sooner we get over this 'everything is free' mentality the sooner the economy will come to life again.
Spare me the "we live in the blah blah blah age." That's what is spouted forth in every 'age' as a substitute for real thought.
There is little evidence that advertising does pay, and as the original article in WSJ points out, it's even less likely to do so in the coming months.
Finally there are some people like me who have a real distaste for advertising. It may just be that more people would prefer to pay small micropayments than to sort through junk advertising. That's the point of some responses. Micropayments may be the answer for both producers and consumers of whatever the 'age' is offering.
I happen to think you're right. This is particularly true if you focus on the producers of a product rather than the consumers. My particular perspective on this is newspapers which are slowly going out of business, for a number of reasons but one of which is that they're giving away their expensive content for free online. But newspapers are not alone. There are many good businesses that are going out of business due to free online replacements. I think most people knew that this party could not last (see Peggy Noonan in Saturday's WSJ on the GoldmansachsHead Disease, where the party never ends). I don't care what the hype says, nothing is free, including the internet.
But micropayments, at least in theory, offer a compromise: payment for the producer and low price for the consumer.
I always prefer print books and print papers. I've only met two people in my age group who prefer the web. Maybe we just grew up experiencing and understanding the virtue of slowly reading something and allowing it time to sink in. I've never personally experienced that on the web. I've read some very thoughtful stuff by some very smart people and I've read all sorts of other things that have proven valuable. But none match the slow and I think deeper understanding that comes from reading PRINT.
Tell me I'm a dinosaur or whatever. I know what I experience and the web doesn't begin to compare with print. I'm waiting for the day, and I think it will come, when I start seeing people who've grown up on the web come to the same conclusion. The question is how many companies that produce print products will still be around.
Right you are. And when it's too late and there no longer is substantial journalism around people will say "hmm this online news is shit news", to misquote an earlier commentor. Unfortunately it will be too late.
I wonder why people don't compare journalism to baseball. If you want you can go and watch your local little league team. I have no doubt that it will be honestly enjoyable for some people. But many people want to see the best teams. So they pay the high prices to see MLB. But now that people can write their own stories on the web everyone thinks they're a journalist. They're not a journalist anymore than your local little leaguer is Sandy Koufax.
Online reminds me a lot of the 60s when the counterculture, of which I was a proud part, was going to revolutionize everything. It didn't. Some good came out of it. Some bad. One day online will sort itself out and we'll see what's good and what's bad. Unfortunately I'm afraid by that time that substantial journalism will be dead.
I agree with all you said. Except that journalism is dying and that what is on the web is a very sad and miserly imitation of it, doodads or no. I'm afraid that it is not evolving despite the wealth of opinion, not often disinterested opinion, to the contrary.
I'm afraid that when it is too late people will realize that it in fact did die and that the many claims of evolution were just flat out wrong. It is dying and no one seems to care, outside of journalists that is.
You want content, not doodads. I couldn't agree with you more. Unfortunately it gets less likely each day that you will continue to be able to get content, at least substantial, thoughtful, in-depth content.
Cars and the internet are very similar: they lead people to think that they have more power than they really do and so they act as though they have this power, stating things that they'd never say face to face and driving in a way that they wouldn't if running down a hallway with real people. The anonymous internet can make anyone think that they are King Pundit himself. Cars turn 90 pound weaklings into 2 ton goliaths. Both fool people into thinking that they are far more powerful than they really are.
In both cases people are isolated from their environment and think that they are more powerful than they are. They do and say very stupid and rude things. But just what would happen if the police visited their house because they said something a little too strong to the wrong person, or if they actually hit someone in the middle of exercising their road rage? I think reality would come crashing down and they'd realize that their fantasies were much more violent than they would like their real life to be. And they have far less power than they thought that they had.
Unfortunately there's something with both the internet and cars that encourages very bad anti-social behavior. This isn't justifiable anger. It's cowardly anti-social behavior. And it's generally done anonymously. If someone says something angry and at least uses his name I have a lot more respect for them. Attacking the anonymous angerphiliac is not an ad hominem attack because there's no hominem to attack. But I digress. My point is that anonymity leads people to say things more strongly and more rudely than they would if they actually used their name. And in that sense it just makes the internet and worse place to be.
My hope is that most websites will eventually drop all comments, or at least institute a somewhat functional ranking system such as slashdots. Otherwise people will eventually just give up. The rude junk that passes for comments just isn't worth the time.
Francis Fukuyama has an interesting article on this in the current issue of Newsweek. The following link is to the relevant page of article.
Reagan abandoned the idea that you only spent what you took in for the idea that tax-cuts were self-funding. Sounds like the ways CDOs were sold. The risk was spread so broadly that no one could ever get hurt. This is called The Rose-Colored Glasses for the Rich economic theory. When things benefit the rich, and Wall St. salesmen, put on your rose-colored glasses and pretend not to see any possible negatives.
That's the conclusion I've come to after glancing at all level 4-5 comments.
What you think on the issue is up to you but I would hope that you could come up with better justifications than "all unions are crooks", "only the lazy get rewarded," etc. If that's your knowledge of unions what is your knowledge of IT? Still using an abacus? Tin cans and string for networking?
Choose your side either way but don't expect me to take such ancient cliches seriously.
Replying to myself: there is of course a good reason for declaring the type of a Java variable twice. I wasn't thinking when I wrote that. Still it does make Java seem very complicated compared to the straightforward 'x="anythinganytime"' of Perl.
Cowboy Perl, Rise of Scripting and Fear of Brevity
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Why Corporates Hate Perl
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm primarily a Perl programmer, though I do some Java and Ruby.
Someone mentioned Damian Conway's book 'Perl Best Practices' and all I can say is that if Perl had had that book 10 years ago it would have a better reputation than it does now. In my 15 or so years of experience with Perl I think that its worst problem is the Cowboy Coders, who often mistake obfuscation for genius. It sure seems like the early days of Perl were also the days of Cowboy Coders. Books like 'Perl Best Practices' try to salvage the best of Perl from the worst practices of the Cowboy Coders.
On the other hand I have no sympathy with those who don't like what Perl looks like. I may be fearful of sharp knives too. But if they get the job done better than a blunt one then the thing to do is learn how to use them. Perl's brevity can lead to difficult to read and maintain code but it also makes it very powerful. Much can be done in a small space. Using Perl, along with the guidelines of Damian Conway, I think anyone can write very good, powerful, legible and maintainable code. It is not a bad language.
However there are times when trying to hold in my mind exactly what some 4-5 level deep dereferencing variable in Perl really refers to that I prefer the more verbose but easier understood style of Java. Perl is full of shortcuts. They are very powerful, but sometimes do require a lot of concentration before their meaning can be understood. For someone who uses Perl everyday the shortcuts probably make perfect sense. For everyone else it can take a long amount of staring before any of it makes sense. Does this make it bad? I don't think so. It's just that it's not as immediately comprehensible as some languages. On the other hand imagine a Perl programmer faced with the verbiage of Java. The same type of blank look sometimes comes over my face when I switch from Perl to Java: I think, my God, there's a lot of verbiage here. Why does it have to be so big. Why do I need to declare the type of the variable not once but TWICE? What could be worse than that?
The one thing I can say about Java is that rarely do I run across a surprise because something is in a scalar rather than a list context. Java is pretty straightforward. Perl has a lot of things, like context, that aren't straightforward.
Finally I have to wonder about Groovy, Ruby and other popular scripting languages. Why in the world does Java need Groovy (about which I confess I know little)? From what I can see some people are seeing the virtues of scripting languages, especially dynamically typed languages. So it looks like Java users are a bit jealous of the ease of scripting languages of Perl, even with all of their possible problems.
To me it's understandable: a scripting language can be great for getting something done quickly. It's just that if very good coding practices aren't followed the code can either have hidden bugs and/or be difficult to maintain.
To conclude I think that the very presence of languages like Groovy show that there is always a demand for scripting languages. Perl is among the best. It's just got an awfully dirty history and a lot of bad habits that may need to be overcome to make it as popular as it should be.
So you're saying that everyone is biased the same way at any given newspaper? That's not the case and anyone who ever set foot in a newspaper would know this. I will gladly admit that at times I've been embarrassed by the liberal bias that I've seen on occasions. But a newspaper is a collection of strong willed and strongly opinionated people. Those who think differently still speak up and their views are heard. The idea that newspapers are an idealogical monolith is one based on wishful thinking rather than analysis. It's a great idea to bandy about, and it gives a convenient enemy to those looking for enemies, but it has little basis in reality.
That said I came upon this story today that offers another perspective on the plight of newspapers. Count me among the pessimists mentioned in the article.
The most basic economic truth, sad to say, of the last 100 years, seems to be that Convenience Trumps All. So as you say, making something a little bit easier can make it more widely adopted.
I say 'sad to say' because few people seem to notice what is lost in the 'easiness'. It might be digital photography versus photographic film, or 150 years ago photographic film versus drawings/engravings. It's most noticeable to me in the absolute collapse of printed newspapers in the U.S. over the last year or two and their replacement by the shallow news one can find on the internet. I hate to see this happen, just as others in the past have seen their favorite medium, replaced by something of inferior quality but greater convenience. Though this bothers me quite a bit it seems to be pretty incontrovertible: Convenience Wins. Of course some might mention this in terms of Linux/Windows but I won't go into that.............
Right. But I think now more than ever most companies are very wary of anyone who might question the corporate orthodoxy. As I recall one of the problems with the recent bank scandal in France was that some people saw things that seemed questionable but said nothing because 'it wasn't their job.' When I see that I translate it, perhaps incorrectly, to mean 'I brought this up before and was shot down. So now I know to just be quiet and never express any doubt about anything'. People rarely get in trouble for just being quiet and agreeing.
Expressing doubt about something is mainly taken the wrong way, as a criticism. I think strong people and strong companies know that however much they may at first dislike an opinion that contradicts their own, that it's also very valuable. It's really free advice. They can then take it or leave it but they at least have gotten the chance to see something, often something important, from another perspective. Most companies I think just don't want to hear other opinions, regardless of how tactfully expressed.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly I agree with you that consumers will go with what's cheapest, though it just hit me that today of all day's proves the opposite. Detroit made cheap cars. But people chose more expensive but better cars, at least I think that's a viable theory. Nonetheless I think that you're generally correct.
But my point is that the original article seemed to indicate that there would be equivalent investigative journalism on HuffPo that there currently is in print. Or at least it can approximate it. But I doubt that's true, as the thread to which I responded also argued, because HuffPo hasn't thought of all the costs involved in true, investigative journalism.
You seem to be saying that people will accept the cheapest news they can find, regardless of quality. And I'm afraid you may be right. But that's not the same as saying that they'll also get investigative journalism. That isn't done cheaply. They may get something. But they won't get something equivalent to print investigative journalism.
Sorry I've been "paradigmed-shifted" to death. Paradigm shifts are recognized long after the fact. Contemporaneous paradigm-shifts are not paradigm-shifts at all: they're someone trying to further their own objectives coupled with wishful thinking about the future.
I don't know how many times I've read this identical analysis about the future of journalism: all successful journalists will be BRANDS. We'll see. My guess is that in 5 years any journalists that are still around will look back at the self-promotional branding of the last few years they same way that older journalists look back at photos of themselves wearing flower-patterned bell-bottoms....... Did I really look like that? Did I really do that?
I tend to agree with you but given the populace's ignorance about journalism(see the idiotic replies to the original post that ignore it and instead choose it as a stepping off point for rants of the left and right political persuasion) it's hard to believe that anyone will understand the importance of what you say.
We now seem to have a generation of people who believe that only the web produces anything of importance, that anything of importance can be completely comprehended in the 30 seconds that it takes to read the lengthiest web post, that all information wants to be free, and that this 'free-ness' has no cost to anyone. You're talking about cost and it sure seems to me that the vast majority of people who comment on the press (whether print, broadcast, or web) don't have the slightest idea about COST. It's a nasty little detail that they'd prefer to ignore.
Highly rewarding short-term strategies will result in the negligence of long-term possibilities.
I can't disagree with you on that. Financial Times had a lengthy article on this last summer I think, long before the real meltdown.
But I do think that it's a mistake to say that this was just a matter of over-leveraging, or of compensation. I do partially blame it on speed.
When you can do things quickly, whether the speed is through internet connectivity, computing power or whatever there is a tendency to blindly trust the accuracy of the information. I once needed to code some AP election tables so that they would appear in a newspaper with new calculations and formatting. It looked great and worked quickly. I TRUSTED that speedy computation and formatting. But I happened to notice that when the live returns started coming in they totaled more than 100%. Oops. It all looked good but it wasn't. My experience is that people are far too trusting with the speedy results that technology gives them.
Not being a participant in any of this I only have an outsider's perspective. But something obviously went wrong in many places: CDOs and other structured investments that were very risky; ratings agencies that said they weren't; people eager to make a fast buck, both buyers and sellers. But I wonder how many of the so-called adults in the room, the investment banks and ratings agencies among others, weren't a bit intoxicated by technology: the models worked, the bets were safe. I wonder if they'd been slower and done more investigation by hand if they'd have come to different conclusions.
Or maybe as others have suggested I'm just confusing speed with greed.
Thanks for the link. I'm unfamiliar with him but did read, too speedily I have to say, his thoughts on the crash. Unfortunately, and I'm not trying to be obnoxious, they strike me as unproven theories at best, and more likely just nonsense.
Perhaps due to my age I've lived through a number of movements, of life-changing, consciousness-changing events. Guess what? The changes were minor. Life didn't change, nor did human consciousness.
Where did the current crisis stem from? the answer is: subprime mortgages; housing credit that proved unsustainable; land. The victims are the hundred of thousands of people who are going to lose their homes. The whole concept of sedentarism had already been challenged by immigrants, exiles, deportations, refugees - and the delocalisation of economic activities. This phenomenon is bound to increase
So what the financial crisis is really a challenge to the 'concept of sedentarism?' I don't think so. The problem with writers such as this is that they know enough about a number of subjects to theorize possible connections between seemingly dissimilar fields. When I first read Marshall McLuhan I was dazzled by his abilities to do this. The problem is that it's like a magician. The audience is too busy being dazzled to notice the tricks, lack of proof, illogic, etc.
Since I've never read him before I don't feel right in criticizing further. Perhaps I'd find more in further reading. But so far I have to say, in spite of what I think are your good intentions regarding him, that I don't find much there.
But I would add I read him quickly. I've found that I always read more speedily, and with less comprehension on the web. Maybe I need to slow down and read a book............
That's true. There is much that can be done more quickly. And I for one won't argue with being able to do my taxes more quickly, or many of other such things.
But I wonder what's been lost. For instance why has the Slow Food movement been so popular for so long. Why do I find blogs about slow painting? Why is there a Take Back Your Time day? As far as I'm concerned there's been a tremendous loss. And of course the poem by Stephen Dobyns in one of the first replies indicates this. We are all hurrying. But for what?
I don't think people, and it certainly seems like this book and this reviewer, slow down enough to say: wait a minute! What's the hurry? What have I just lost by being in such a hurry? What have I gained? How do they balance out?
If the book reviewed talked about that I'd be interested. If it just says speed is inevitable and here are some quick hints for dealing with it then I say no thanks.
Actually I was thinking more along the lines of the speed with which CDOs and other structured financial investments were created and sold, without anyone SLOWING DOWN enough to say, you know this sounds like a lot of BS to me..............
If you view Wall St. as nothing more than the ability to trade, then yes 'speed' has given more people the ability to trade quickly. But as a consequence it's also contributed to the substitution of speculation for investment (see John Bogle's new book, 'Enough'). Many people would say I think that speed has been the problem with Wall St. as well in speculation gaining the ascendancy over investment.
It looks so easy with our speedy tools: the price is $9.00 on my screen right here; 30 seconds later it's $9.95 on this screen here. So I sell. That is the Wall St. of day-traders and speed does help. It is not investment.
My guess is that in five years when there's been enough time to sort all of this out that people will say speculation was one of the biggest problems here. That and the abandonment of investment. For example do you buy a house as a long term investment, something that you live in for a long period of time. Or do you buy it for speculation, for a quick profit. I couldn't prove it but I think it's true that most of the speed that you say has been valuable for Wall St. was only valuable if you consider to be Wall St. a speculative entity rather than an investment one.
I think we do agree on panic though. It can move a whole lot more speedily now. I wouldn't be surprised in fact if the huge volatility swings that we see these days are more due to the speed of communication than to anything inherent in the market. But if so then that's one more instance where speed doesn't seem so good. Not that there's much that can be done about it.
I wonder if the author did an analysis of how the Age of Speed helped Wall St. to come to its fabulous current state.
The reviewer says we "live in the age of speed." Maybe so. I see plenty of people doing things too quickly. But does that mean we live in the "age of speed?" How does it differ from the age of non-speed? Is it an improvement, an inevitability? Did we lose something? Would the financial disaster we're in right now have been better off without so much speed?
Before reading more about how to cope with the age of speed, I'd prefer to see something explaining just what it is. Otherwise I'm sure not going to spend my valuable time reading it. Right now it just sounds like a buzz phrase.
Thanks for the reminder! That was an enjoyable few days.
You're absolutely right! Where in the world do these clueless people come from that accuse the rest of the world of being 'clueless?' I've learned over the years that as soon as I hear someone shouting 'clueless' I can stop listening.
People who think news content is free and just floats about in the ether ready to be plucked remind me of people who go into a grocery store and are horribly shocked when they see something recognizable as an animal in the meat section. Well guess what meat comes from animals. And news comes from hardworking reporters, editors, systems people, et al. It costs money; it ain't for free. Most news worth reading on the internet came from someone who got paid to do it and then was put online by someone else.
I am so sick of hearing uninformed nonsense about 'information wanting to be free.'
The sooner we get over this 'everything is free' mentality the sooner the economy will come to life again.
Spare me the "we live in the blah blah blah age." That's what is spouted forth in every 'age' as a substitute for real thought.
There is little evidence that advertising does pay, and as the original article in WSJ points out, it's even less likely to do so in the coming months.
Finally there are some people like me who have a real distaste for advertising. It may just be that more people would prefer to pay small micropayments than to sort through junk advertising. That's the point of some responses. Micropayments may be the answer for both producers and consumers of whatever the 'age' is offering.
I happen to think you're right. This is particularly true if you focus on the producers of a product rather than the consumers. My particular perspective on this is newspapers which are slowly going out of business, for a number of reasons but one of which is that they're giving away their expensive content for free online. But newspapers are not alone. There are many good businesses that are going out of business due to free online replacements. I think most people knew that this party could not last (see Peggy Noonan in Saturday's WSJ on the GoldmansachsHead Disease, where the party never ends). I don't care what the hype says, nothing is free, including the internet.
But micropayments, at least in theory, offer a compromise: payment for the producer and low price for the consumer.
I always prefer print books and print papers. I've only met two people in my age group who prefer the web. Maybe we just grew up experiencing and understanding the virtue of slowly reading something and allowing it time to sink in. I've never personally experienced that on the web. I've read some very thoughtful stuff by some very smart people and I've read all sorts of other things that have proven valuable. But none match the slow and I think deeper understanding that comes from reading PRINT.
Tell me I'm a dinosaur or whatever. I know what I experience and the web doesn't begin to compare with print. I'm waiting for the day, and I think it will come, when I start seeing people who've grown up on the web come to the same conclusion. The question is how many companies that produce print products will still be around.
where!? any more jobs?
just kidding. good for you. i'm sure you're not alone in making a good living from perl. it still works, headache-inducing syntax and all.
Right you are. And when it's too late and there no longer is substantial journalism around people will say "hmm this online news is shit news", to misquote an earlier commentor. Unfortunately it will be too late.
I wonder why people don't compare journalism to baseball. If you want you can go and watch your local little league team. I have no doubt that it will be honestly enjoyable for some people. But many people want to see the best teams. So they pay the high prices to see MLB. But now that people can write their own stories on the web everyone thinks they're a journalist. They're not a journalist anymore than your local little leaguer is Sandy Koufax.
Online reminds me a lot of the 60s when the counterculture, of which I was a proud part, was going to revolutionize everything. It didn't. Some good came out of it. Some bad. One day online will sort itself out and we'll see what's good and what's bad. Unfortunately I'm afraid by that time that substantial journalism will be dead.
I agree with all you said. Except that journalism is dying and that what is on the web is a very sad and miserly imitation of it, doodads or no. I'm afraid that it is not evolving despite the wealth of opinion, not often disinterested opinion, to the contrary.
I'm afraid that when it is too late people will realize that it in fact did die and that the many claims of evolution were just flat out wrong. It is dying and no one seems to care, outside of journalists that is.
You want content, not doodads. I couldn't agree with you more. Unfortunately it gets less likely each day that you will continue to be able to get content, at least substantial, thoughtful, in-depth content.
Cars and the internet are very similar: they lead people to think that they have more power than they really do and so they act as though they have this power, stating things that they'd never say face to face and driving in a way that they wouldn't if running down a hallway with real people. The anonymous internet can make anyone think that they are King Pundit himself. Cars turn 90 pound weaklings into 2 ton goliaths. Both fool people into thinking that they are far more powerful than they really are.
In both cases people are isolated from their environment and think that they are more powerful than they are. They do and say very stupid and rude things. But just what would happen if the police visited their house because they said something a little too strong to the wrong person, or if they actually hit someone in the middle of exercising their road rage? I think reality would come crashing down and they'd realize that their fantasies were much more violent than they would like their real life to be. And they have far less power than they thought that they had.
Unfortunately there's something with both the internet and cars that encourages very bad anti-social behavior. This isn't justifiable anger. It's cowardly anti-social behavior. And it's generally done anonymously. If someone says something angry and at least uses his name I have a lot more respect for them. Attacking the anonymous angerphiliac is not an ad hominem attack because there's no hominem to attack. But I digress. My point is that anonymity leads people to say things more strongly and more rudely than they would if they actually used their name. And in that sense it just makes the internet and worse place to be.
My hope is that most websites will eventually drop all comments, or at least institute a somewhat functional ranking system such as slashdots. Otherwise people will eventually just give up. The rude junk that passes for comments just isn't worth the time.
Francis Fukuyama has an interesting article on this in the current issue of Newsweek. The following link is to the relevant page of article.
Reagan abandoned the idea that you only spent what you took in for the idea that tax-cuts were self-funding. Sounds like the ways CDOs were sold. The risk was spread so broadly that no one could ever get hurt. This is called The Rose-Colored Glasses for the Rich economic theory. When things benefit the rich, and Wall St. salesmen, put on your rose-colored glasses and pretend not to see any possible negatives.
That's the conclusion I've come to after glancing at all level 4-5 comments.
What you think on the issue is up to you but I would hope that you could come up with better justifications than "all unions are crooks", "only the lazy get rewarded," etc. If that's your knowledge of unions what is your knowledge of IT? Still using an abacus? Tin cans and string for networking?
Choose your side either way but don't expect me to take such ancient cliches seriously.
Replying to myself: there is of course a good reason for declaring the type of a Java variable twice. I wasn't thinking when I wrote that. Still it does make Java seem very complicated compared to the straightforward 'x="anythinganytime"' of Perl.
I'm primarily a Perl programmer, though I do some Java and Ruby.
Someone mentioned Damian Conway's book 'Perl Best Practices' and all I can say is that if Perl had had that book 10 years ago it would have a better reputation than it does now. In my 15 or so years of experience with Perl I think that its worst problem is the Cowboy Coders, who often mistake obfuscation for genius. It sure seems like the early days of Perl were also the days of Cowboy Coders. Books like 'Perl Best Practices' try to salvage the best of Perl from the worst practices of the Cowboy Coders.
On the other hand I have no sympathy with those who don't like what Perl looks like. I may be fearful of sharp knives too. But if they get the job done better than a blunt one then the thing to do is learn how to use them. Perl's brevity can lead to difficult to read and maintain code but it also makes it very powerful. Much can be done in a small space. Using Perl, along with the guidelines of Damian Conway, I think anyone can write very good, powerful, legible and maintainable code. It is not a bad language.
However there are times when trying to hold in my mind exactly what some 4-5 level deep dereferencing variable in Perl really refers to that I prefer the more verbose but easier understood style of Java. Perl is full of shortcuts. They are very powerful, but sometimes do require a lot of concentration before their meaning can be understood. For someone who uses Perl everyday the shortcuts probably make perfect sense. For everyone else it can take a long amount of staring before any of it makes sense. Does this make it bad? I don't think so. It's just that it's not as immediately comprehensible as some languages. On the other hand imagine a Perl programmer faced with the verbiage of Java. The same type of blank look sometimes comes over my face when I switch from Perl to Java: I think, my God, there's a lot of verbiage here. Why does it have to be so big. Why do I need to declare the type of the variable not once but TWICE? What could be worse than that?
The one thing I can say about Java is that rarely do I run across a surprise because something is in a scalar rather than a list context. Java is pretty straightforward. Perl has a lot of things, like context, that aren't straightforward.
Finally I have to wonder about Groovy, Ruby and other popular scripting languages. Why in the world does Java need Groovy (about which I confess I know little)? From what I can see some people are seeing the virtues of scripting languages, especially dynamically typed languages. So it looks like Java users are a bit jealous of the ease of scripting languages of Perl, even with all of their possible problems.
To me it's understandable: a scripting language can be great for getting something done quickly. It's just that if very good coding practices aren't followed the code can either have hidden bugs and/or be difficult to maintain.
To conclude I think that the very presence of languages like Groovy show that there is always a demand for scripting languages. Perl is among the best. It's just got an awfully dirty history and a lot of bad habits that may need to be overcome to make it as popular as it should be.
So you're saying that everyone is biased the same way at any given newspaper? That's not the case and anyone who ever set foot in a newspaper would know this. I will gladly admit that at times I've been embarrassed by the liberal bias that I've seen on occasions. But a newspaper is a collection of strong willed and strongly opinionated people. Those who think differently still speak up and their views are heard. The idea that newspapers are an idealogical monolith is one based on wishful thinking rather than analysis. It's a great idea to bandy about, and it gives a convenient enemy to those looking for enemies, but it has little basis in reality.
That said I came upon this story today that offers another perspective on the plight of newspapers. Count me among the pessimists mentioned in the article.
The most basic economic truth, sad to say, of the last 100 years, seems to be that Convenience Trumps All. So as you say, making something a little bit easier can make it more widely adopted.
I say 'sad to say' because few people seem to notice what is lost in the 'easiness'. It might be digital photography versus photographic film, or 150 years ago photographic film versus drawings/engravings. It's most noticeable to me in the absolute collapse of printed newspapers in the U.S. over the last year or two and their replacement by the shallow news one can find on the internet. I hate to see this happen, just as others in the past have seen their favorite medium, replaced by something of inferior quality but greater convenience. Though this bothers me quite a bit it seems to be pretty incontrovertible: Convenience Wins. Of course some might mention this in terms of Linux/Windows but I won't go into that.............
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/web3point0/
It was obvious that Web 3.0 was the answer more than 2 years ago. Why are slashdotters so slow?
Right. But I think now more than ever most companies are very wary of anyone who might question the corporate orthodoxy. As I recall one of the problems with the recent bank scandal in France was that some people saw things that seemed questionable but said nothing because 'it wasn't their job.' When I see that I translate it, perhaps incorrectly, to mean 'I brought this up before and was shot down. So now I know to just be quiet and never express any doubt about anything'. People rarely get in trouble for just being quiet and agreeing.
Expressing doubt about something is mainly taken the wrong way, as a criticism. I think strong people and strong companies know that however much they may at first dislike an opinion that contradicts their own, that it's also very valuable. It's really free advice. They can then take it or leave it but they at least have gotten the chance to see something, often something important, from another perspective. Most companies I think just don't want to hear other opinions, regardless of how tactfully expressed.