Funny you should mention that--yesterday I submitted a story about sex offender laws that links to this Economist piece that calls such laws unjust and ineffective. Now that the Illinois story got posted, I suppose/. has exceeded its moral panic issue for the day, but it's nonetheless intriguing that the backlash stories are now cropping up.
With all due respect, the recent New Yorker article "Suffering Souls" differs, and that periodical is well-known for having more fastidious fact checkers than Slashdot:
Finally, the emphasis in the word "psychopath" on an internal sickness was at odds with liberal mid-century social thought, which tended to look for external causes of social deviancy; "sociopath," coined in 1930 by the psychologist G. E. Partridge, became the preferred term. In 1958, the American Psychiatric Association used the term "sociopathic personality" to describe the disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the 1968 edition, the condition was renamed "general antisocial personality disorder."
The whole article is worth reading if you want to understand this research in particular and the subject in general.
You know, I'm sure they used to say the same thing about Wordperfect, remember them ?
And in those days, the total number of computers bought every year exceeded the entire previous install base, year after year. Since the neighborhood of the late '90s, however, that hasn't been true. Today, if you want to get people to switch operating systems/word processors/e-mail clients/whatever, you have to get people who already have computers to consciously change their behavior. This is really, really hard to do. That's the difference between WordPerfect's dominance in the '80s and Word's dominance today.
If, by "professional writer," you mean someone actually producing text, the main needs are a good text editor, which can be found many places.
With all due respect, I don't think you know what you're talking about. A good text editor, even one that'll give you diffs, is nowhere near as fast and as easy as Word's track changes system. As Philip Greenspun, well-known Microsoft shill, says regarding his book writing project:
At least at Macmillan, everyone collaborates using Microsoft Word. I'd wanted to write my book in HTML using Emacs, the text editor I've been using since 1978. That way I wouldn't have to do any extra work to produce the on-line edition and I wouldn't be slowed down by leaving Emacs (the world's most productive text editor, though a bit daunting for first-time users and useless for the kind of fancy formatting that one can do with Frame, Pagemaker, or Word). Macmillan said that the contract provision to use Word was non-negotiable and now I understand why.
Microsoft Word incorporates a fairly impressive revision control system. With revision control turned on, you can see what you originally wrote with a big line through it. If you put the mouse over the crossed-out text, Word tells you that "Angela Allen at Ziff Davis Press crossed this out on March 1, 1997 at 2:30 pm." Similarly, new text shows up in a different color and Word remembers who added it. Finally, it is possible to define special styles for, say, Tech Reviewer Comments. These show up in a different color and won't print in the final manuscript.
As for your comment about free software, I'd observe that a) everyone I have to collaborate with has Word and b) only one other person I know has OO.org, which also looks hideously ugly on OS X and, when I've tried to use it, crashes frequently. Most professional writers appear to use Word. That they don't migrate en masse to text editors, which have been around since at least the 1970s, shows that there must be some advantage, even if it's merely network effects, to using Word.
I know it's popular to hate on Word around here, but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad. I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking.
The other thing is that Word does a lot of stuff that other word processors I've used (Pages, Nisus Writer, Mellel) don't, or don't do quite as well, or whatever: toggling between page layout/continuous text, track changes/markup, and so forth. The latter is a particular problem for me because other people often have to read my work, and everyone I know uses Word. I don't have to convert files back and forth.
Word's styles still leave much to be desired--I can't get a style that will just say "Chapter 7: Tests" without an overly long space between 7: and Tests, but it's good enough.
dicking around on your Mac for attention does not actually constitute working. It constitutes "dicking around".
Seriously. I was just going to post on this very subject: it seems like people who are doing genuinely difficult and/or novel work don't want ceaseless distractions and ways of being interrupted; they want an environment conducive to flow. I collected some of the literature and essays on the subject in my post Laptops, students and distraction.
The total number of engagements by the entire fleet of F14's you could count on one hand.
Indeed. Those who doubt the wisdom of this comment should read Mark Bowden's The Last Ace in the Atlantic, which also repeats the much-noted fact that no U.S. planes have been shot down by hostile forces in a war since Korea. U.S. firepower is so overwhelming as to be aerially undefeatable at the moment, and that's not even accounting for the rest of NATO and Israel.
At least the ratio of honest criticism to paid shill will be lower than the current system.
Do you have any evidence to support that claim? I ask because although there are plenty of problems with the current processes federal agencies use to review proposal submissions, corruption is seldom one. Most agencies use either staffers, who have little incentive towards the kinds of corruption you imply are rampant, or peer reviewers, who often have to be wrangled into the work.
In any event, if you actually display some knowledge about how the current system of funding distribution works, I would love to read it. If not, you might find reading my blog, Grant Writing Confidential, of interest.
This is an unusual tactic but one that makes a certain amount of sense: the amount of money going through many federal agencies right now is somewhat like the proverbial alligator being digested by a python. My family's business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, and we've been writing about these kinds of logistical problems for a while; see for example, this post, or, if you want an alligator's worth of general stimulus posts, all these.
The upshot is that too many agencies have too much money to cover regulation reviews, RFP development, technical support once RFPs have been issued, reviewers once RFPs have been received, and program officers to oversee awards once they've been made. These problems have been fairly well-known among nonprofits and grant writers for some time; that they're now making it to/. can't help but warm my heart, especially since I think we're writing a BTOP and BIP.
I remember in 1991, I purchased a NeXTstation. It had a beautiful, usable GUI layered over a powerful multitasking Unix operating system, with development tools that were not rivaled on any platform until at least a decade later.
And that workstation cost vastly more than generic Windows boxes, which is why generic Windows boxes took over and Next's great ideas fizzled until they became OS X a decade later. Part of Microsoft's genius is realizing that normal people can't or won't pay $10,000 for a computer.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but the Adhost e-mail servers are also working. I don't know if this is because their main site is coming back online or if it's because their backup worked.
Adhost oversees two sites for my family's business: http://www.seliger.com and http://blog.seliger.com. At least part of the Fisher Plaza data center seems to be up at the moment because seliger.com will load for me, while blog.seliger.com won't. When I figured this out a few hours ago, I sent an e-mail to Adhost and got this as part of the response:
We have been advised by the building engineering team that they anticipate restoring power to the Plaza East building in plus or minus 4 hours. We sincerely hope this is an accurate number and, if not, we will let you know as soon as we receive new information from the engineers.
Imagine my surprise at learning that the problem is big enough to make/.. Actually, what's even more surprising is the unplanned outage in the first place: I don't recall Adhost ever going down for this long, especially in the middle of the day.
Sure they can--for example, some people with RSI problems swear by the Kinesis Advantage, which has an unusual design that allegedly prevents some wrist/elbow problems. Even barring that, it's still possible to improve on the Model M, even if no one has.
And this is coming from the guy who wrote this glowing review of the Unicomp Customizer, which is a modern Model M.
Great post. For more on the subject of how incredibly far Germany (and Japan) were from atomic weapons, try Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
See the Drobos at the linked page. No eSATA, but perhaps you can get an eSATA -> firewire 800 or iSCSI (sp?) dongle. The best part about them is ease-of-use.
I was going to post this as a separate comment, but I'd rather piggyback it here as an addition: for many people, the question is not getting the absolute lowest price, but getting the best price relative to performance. For SSDs, making day-to-day applications faster because of the improvements cited in the parent comment is vastly more useful than saving $100. Furthermore, if SSDs "fail" by becoming read only, the savings from the avoidance of catastrophic hard drive failure would be so great for many people that not buying them would be utterly foolish.
They have an agenda which relies upon them beating the bloggers at their own game. They should absolutely not be trusted in regards to this article.
I hate to break it to you, but the WSJ article implies that you can make money blogging. My article on Grant Writing Confidential argues otherwise. You may want to read the articles on which you're commenting with more care.
The blogs that have been successful have used affiliate adds that advertise to sell a product from say Amazon.com or Barnes and Nobel or some other company that you link to a book or product that has something to do with what you are blogging on and they pay you back a fraction of the purchase.
Even those don't make much. Joel Spolsky has said that referrals from Joel on Software make ~$100 a month. Megan McArdle of The Atlantic says she gets about enough to fund her book habit too. Both are very well-known, highly trafficked sites. If they can't make it, who can? Almost no one: and that's the point. People read articles like the one from the WSJ and think they can make it, causing me to shake my head at the level delusion said articles not only show but propagate to others.
I'm not sure why people ever thought blogs could make money.
I'm guessing because articles like the WSJ one I linked to stoke the idea. Hence the importance of Penelope Trunk's comments (and, less humbly given the source, mine) as a counterweight.
Having a good, professional blog is a way of showing people what you can do, and it inspires confidence,
Indeed, and that's the point of the second half of the original post: you're not going to make money through selling ads, or whatever. Rather, anything you might make is indirect through signaling your expertise in a way that's exceedingly difficult if not effectively impossible to fake.
Given that Grant Writing Confidential doesn't sell ads, you must be using Milo Minderbinder's Catch-22 system of capitalism, with me as Yossarian, who says, "I don't understand why you buy eggs for seven cents apiece in Malta and sell them for five cents." Milo responds, "But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don't make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share."
Actually, come to think of it, that's a better description of blogs and money making than any other I think I've read.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny you should mention that--yesterday I submitted a story about sex offender laws that links to this Economist piece that calls such laws unjust and ineffective. Now that the Illinois story got posted, I suppose /. has exceeded its moral panic issue for the day, but it's nonetheless intriguing that the backlash stories are now cropping up.
The whole article is worth reading if you want to understand this research in particular and the subject in general.
See my comment here.
And in those days, the total number of computers bought every year exceeded the entire previous install base, year after year. Since the neighborhood of the late '90s, however, that hasn't been true. Today, if you want to get people to switch operating systems/word processors/e-mail clients/whatever, you have to get people who already have computers to consciously change their behavior. This is really, really hard to do. That's the difference between WordPerfect's dominance in the '80s and Word's dominance today.
With all due respect, I don't think you know what you're talking about. A good text editor, even one that'll give you diffs, is nowhere near as fast and as easy as Word's track changes system. As Philip Greenspun, well-known Microsoft shill, says regarding his book writing project:
As for your comment about free software, I'd observe that a) everyone I have to collaborate with has Word and b) only one other person I know has OO.org, which also looks hideously ugly on OS X and, when I've tried to use it, crashes frequently. Most professional writers appear to use Word. That they don't migrate en masse to text editors, which have been around since at least the 1970s, shows that there must be some advantage, even if it's merely network effects, to using Word.
The other thing is that Word does a lot of stuff that other word processors I've used (Pages, Nisus Writer, Mellel) don't, or don't do quite as well, or whatever: toggling between page layout/continuous text, track changes/markup, and so forth. The latter is a particular problem for me because other people often have to read my work, and everyone I know uses Word. I don't have to convert files back and forth.
Word's styles still leave much to be desired--I can't get a style that will just say "Chapter 7: Tests" without an overly long space between 7: and Tests, but it's good enough.
Seriously. I was just going to post on this very subject: it seems like people who are doing genuinely difficult and/or novel work don't want ceaseless distractions and ways of being interrupted; they want an environment conducive to flow. I collected some of the literature and essays on the subject in my post Laptops, students and distraction.
I love it when vast, highly improbable, claims without a citation like this one get modded up.
Where are you getting this information?
Indeed. Those who doubt the wisdom of this comment should read Mark Bowden's The Last Ace in the Atlantic, which also repeats the much-noted fact that no U.S. planes have been shot down by hostile forces in a war since Korea. U.S. firepower is so overwhelming as to be aerially undefeatable at the moment, and that's not even accounting for the rest of NATO and Israel.
Do you have any evidence to support that claim? I ask because although there are plenty of problems with the current processes federal agencies use to review proposal submissions, corruption is seldom one. Most agencies use either staffers, who have little incentive towards the kinds of corruption you imply are rampant, or peer reviewers, who often have to be wrangled into the work.
In any event, if you actually display some knowledge about how the current system of funding distribution works, I would love to read it. If not, you might find reading my blog, Grant Writing Confidential, of interest.
The upshot is that too many agencies have too much money to cover regulation reviews, RFP development, technical support once RFPs have been issued, reviewers once RFPs have been received, and program officers to oversee awards once they've been made. These problems have been fairly well-known among nonprofits and grant writers for some time; that they're now making it to /. can't help but warm my heart, especially since I think we're writing a BTOP and BIP.
And that workstation cost vastly more than generic Windows boxes, which is why generic Windows boxes took over and Next's great ideas fizzled until they became OS X a decade later. Part of Microsoft's genius is realizing that normal people can't or won't pay $10,000 for a computer.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but the Adhost e-mail servers are also working. I don't know if this is because their main site is coming back online or if it's because their backup worked.
Imagine my surprise at learning that the problem is big enough to make /.. Actually, what's even more surprising is the unplanned outage in the first place: I don't recall Adhost ever going down for this long, especially in the middle of the day.
And this is coming from the guy who wrote this glowing review of the Unicomp Customizer, which is a modern Model M.
Great post. For more on the subject of how incredibly far Germany (and Japan) were from atomic weapons, try Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
See the Drobos at the linked page. No eSATA, but perhaps you can get an eSATA -> firewire 800 or iSCSI (sp?) dongle. The best part about them is ease-of-use.
I was going to post this as a separate comment, but I'd rather piggyback it here as an addition: for many people, the question is not getting the absolute lowest price, but getting the best price relative to performance. For SSDs, making day-to-day applications faster because of the improvements cited in the parent comment is vastly more useful than saving $100. Furthermore, if SSDs "fail" by becoming read only, the savings from the avoidance of catastrophic hard drive failure would be so great for many people that not buying them would be utterly foolish.
The problem is that even if you do love the subject, you're still probably not going to make money from blogging--which is part of my point.
I hate to break it to you, but the WSJ article implies that you can make money blogging. My article on Grant Writing Confidential argues otherwise. You may want to read the articles on which you're commenting with more care.
(Cue jokes in 3... 2... 1...)
Funny you should say that--Penelope Trunk did write a post called Blog ROI: Consider measuring the success of your blog by if it improves your sex life. Alas, that wasn't what I had in mind for the article I wrote...
Even those don't make much. Joel Spolsky has said that referrals from Joel on Software make ~$100 a month. Megan McArdle of The Atlantic says she gets about enough to fund her book habit too. Both are very well-known, highly trafficked sites. If they can't make it, who can? Almost no one: and that's the point. People read articles like the one from the WSJ and think they can make it, causing me to shake my head at the level delusion said articles not only show but propagate to others.
I'm guessing because articles like the WSJ one I linked to stoke the idea. Hence the importance of Penelope Trunk's comments (and, less humbly given the source, mine) as a counterweight.
Indeed, and that's the point of the second half of the original post: you're not going to make money through selling ads, or whatever. Rather, anything you might make is indirect through signaling your expertise in a way that's exceedingly difficult if not effectively impossible to fake.
Actually, come to think of it, that's a better description of blogs and money making than any other I think I've read.