Here's a hint: if you turn your cell phone off, no one can find you. Furthermore, if you're still paranoid, you can always leave it at home, or in your cave, or whatever.
If you're still more paranoid, you can wrap tinfoil around your cell phone and head. If you need instructions as to how that should be done, this forum is an excellent place to find individuals with enormous experience.
I read somewhere -- I think the NYT -- a comparison between this strike and the steelworkers' strikes in the 1980s: in both cases, the striking workers in both industries might be on the cusp of changes that make their strikes irrelevant.
Anyway, I suspect the relative power of TV as currently delivered has reached its peak. Over the long run, this and the rise of the Internet seems like a good thing, but then again my entertainment of choice is reading, as the link no doubt shows.
If the content is anything like the free iTunes giveaways, I'll pay not to read. As I said here:
* Overall, the issue of context for reviews makes me think about why trusted criticism and publishing gatekeepers are so important: you're more likely to read a book or review about a subject if you have a preexisting indicators that you aren't wasting your time and that someone has vetted whatever you're reading. This could be generalized to the chicken-and-egg problem of blogs more generally: you don't have credibility until you have enough fame to generate credibility.
The major issue with "free" is often the quality -- but I suspect Tor is mostly doing this for the publicity, which, judging from a front page post on/., is already working.
I know, another article bashing Vista, what could be more banal. (Kids! That word, meaning "trite" or "unoriginal", is pronounced "ba-NAHL". If you say it the wrong way like I did in an interview, it sounds naughty and you sound stupid.)
"Banal" can be pronounced with two unstressed syllables, as you do, or it can rhyme with *giggle* *giggle* anal. Notice that in Merriam-Webster's online, banal has THREE possible pronunciations. One of them is BANE-all. The Oxford English that comes with OS X seems to agree. In an interview, I'd probably pronounce it with unstressed syllables, but in casual conversation you should pronounce it however you want.
On a tangent, Language Log often cites examples of hyper-(in)correctness like yours.
Interestingly enough, Bob Woodward came to speak at Clark University when I was an undergrad, and during the Q & A some idiot got up and blathered a conspiratorial question about the CIA and censorship that was about as stupid as your post. Woodward responded with something to the effect of, "Do you think anyone could stop me from publishing something that's true?" he went on to say?" It was a rhetorical question from someone who actually knows what's he's talking about directed at a fool weaned on Internet conspiracy theories, and it was as effective a silencer of your type as I've ever seen.
James Fallows wrote a book called Breaking the News about these problems, and while it's nice to have more testimony backing up his comments, the idea that network news has been anything more than insipid in recent memory has long been known. Of course, part of the problem is in the mirror -- how many people subscribe to The Atlantic and The Economist compared to the number who watch morning "news" shows? As with many complaints about consumer culture (and consumer culture is what Hockenberry describes), the reality is that networks are in part or in whole responding to the market.
Sure, the sensationalism is short-sighted, much like the cuts in media attention to books described in Gail Poole's Faint Praise, but each short-term decision has a logic behind it. Unhappy with it? Me too. But we can only vote with our eyeballs and wallets, and hope that media companies eventually take note. Judging from how long ago Fallows published Breaking the News and how little seems to have changed since, I'm not overly optimistic.
For those of you who buy books regularly, do you really read them 3+ times? Or is there some other reason you do it instead of going to the library?
Sometimes I'll read books multiple times, and the probability that I do so increases with the time I've had a book. For example, I bought Heart of Darkness when I was 16, read it then, read it twice more for class in college, and then read it again recently. In addition, it's not unusual for me to mark up books as I'm reading them, or, occasionally, get them signed. Friends sometimes borrow them. There's also something to be said for efficiency: most books these days come from Amazon, where shipping is free over $25, most books are discounted 5 - 40% (usually 20 - 25%), and I can expend a minimal amount of finding them.
To be sure, I don't keep every book I buy, and the ones I don't keep either go back on Amazon or to the local thrift store. If you rarely reread books, you're correct that you don't have much to gain -- provided that you live near enough to a library to make it there. The bls says average wages in the U.S. are $19/hour or so; so if you spend an extra 30 or 40 minutes going there and back, you might be in effect spending as much as the value of the book just getting there and back.
A little of this analysis is philosophical, too: you think buying books a tremendous waste of money and paper; I think of them as, in part, showing a facet of my personality to visitors. Who's right? I'm not sure, but I read enough to have considered the issues.
And what the hell does "potential software base" mean? I have no idea, but I do know that lots of Mac applications exist. That doesn't even count some of the big ones, like those produced by Omni or something like Delicious Library and DEVONtechnologies.
Content. As long as you don't mind paying Amazon or Sony for virtually every book, and are willing to risk investing in books you might not be able to access in five years, either works.
Did he get some kind of wizard trick to summon the dead spirit of JRR Tolkein to write a new novel which to utilize as a sequel?
Actually, Christopher Tolkien effectively did that with the terrible Children of Hurin.
Still, as other posters have noted, the Books of Lost Tales, Silmarillion, and ROTK appendices together would provide a lot of material for potential sequels, and I think the story of the Elves in the first age could actually be wonderful, although Jackson would have to compress millennia of history into a timeline measured in a few years. How the hell will he get through 400 years of the quiet between the Elves and Morgoth otherwise? But it could be done, and probably better than Christopher Tolkien.
Good question: I tried to ask "What were the best books, movies, games, and media released in 2007?" The question might yield somewhat meaningful results, and I'd been thinking about the issue after seeing the NYTimes' best books.
Instead, the submission was rejected in favor of one discussing consumer electronic junk.
Another commenter further down has an excellent post on the subject of why FireWire is a good protocol; it nicely complements my post about why, even though the protocol is good, it's effectively lost in the marketplace and is unlikely to matter very much.
Apple reduced the fee too late, and if it's anything above $0 it's too high. Go read Joel's software on the chicken and egg to discover the problems with both.
Connectors are all fine well, but the time and energy necessary to buy, hang on to, and connect them makes such connectors a niche market. The operative word is convenience, and the more technical version of it is Metcalfe's law. Everyone has USB, therefore everyone makes USB devices, and therefore more people get USB. Apple killed (or at least harmed) the virtuous cycle that might've made FW a standard in 1998 - 2000. Now only a very small number of machines (relative to the size of the market) have FW800, and that number is unlikely to rise because of the chicken and egg problem.
If a protocol is released in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I've read a variety of posts about the problems with FireWire (see here and here from what I found on Google), and the big problem is that FireWire didn't become a de facto standard seven or eight years ago when it was really needed. These days, it seems like few computers other than Macs ship with FireWire standard, and I've never seen a laptop in the wild outside of Macs with a six-pin FireWire 400 port, let alone 800.
I've heard this is chiefly due to Apple's initial intransigence regarding licensing; they demanded $1 per computer to use the "FireWire" name, making other device makers really angry. Considering how slim hardware margins are, no one was going to go for it. FireWire 400 is still technically superior to USB 2.0 in many ways, even today, but it's never reached the market penetration it needs, and now USB 2.0 is "good enough" for most purposes.
I use a Mac and so do many family members, and I've long counseled them to get only FireWire drives for backups. When Leopard came out, some were shopping for drives, and I found that I could not find FW400/USB 2 drives for as little as plain USB 2.0 drives. In other words, the FireWire premium for HDs appears to be at least $30. Not a good sign for market penetration.
Now FW 3200 is being discussed when FW 800 already seems dead on arrival in consumer land, and only supported to the limited extent it is by Apple. Not making it backwards compatible with FW400 was an idiotic decision that ensured whatever chance it had in the market was gone. In the meantime, eSATA and the like have come along and perhaps obviated the need for many FireWire applications altogether.
To be fair, however, by the time I came along to make the decision I gather the balance of power had already shifted to Wordpress. Does anyone know what the original appeal of MT was over Wordpress? I've been reading this thread, my post history shows, but I haven't seen any solid explanations of their histories.
While they might be open source, the additional and very important question is are they easy to use? Or, more broadly, is the system easy to use? I wrote about my experience with Wordpress in another post, and most impressive part of the system is how easy and fast it is to setup and use.
Even if parts of MT are open source, if they're not put together in a nice, slick package, a lot of people, including me, are going to stay away until someone else does the heavy lifting for us.
Sure, I could figure out how to make it all work, but I don't especially want to. The same general principle applies to Linux and OS X, explaining why I use the latter.
Well spoken. When I was evaluating blogging systems for my personal site, a book/literature blog, I chose Wordpress for almost the exact reason you describe; although the lack of an "export" function bothered me, I used it anyway because I write my posts in Textmate and upload with the blogging bundle. Since then, however, Wordpress has added an export feature, eliminating even that hurdle. I liked the default plug-in scheme and the numerous other plug-ins already there, as they allowed me to focus on writing rather than on solving technical problems.
More recently I began a business blog called Grant Writing Confidential with my Dad, and I had Wordpress install by our ISP because I was already familiar with it, in addition to all the advantages listed by the GP. By then, Wordpress had impressed me sufficiently that Movable type wasn't even in the running because I hadn't found any limitations or major irritations in Wordpress.
The big knock on Wordpress is that so many of the themes make it obvious that you're using a Wordpress blog. This has some validity and is true for my blogs, although a little bit less so for the second. Still, I think the reason so many blogs use a two- or three-column style is because it's logical way to organize a blog. Few people criticize books because they (mostly) have a spine and two covers and a table of contents and what not, while all that varies between them is art. I suspect we're entering that general phase of blogging, which also makes it easier to read blogs because you only have to figure out where the common elements are, rather than a whole new system for each blog.
In other words, Wordpress/Blogger motifs are creating a common user interface, making the presentation less important and the content more important. Sounds like my conception of what "Web 2.0" should be doing: making this easier on us. I'm not the first person to have thought along these lines, but it's still worth noticing. For that matter,/. could do worse than use the web-based posting window of Wordpress, with its "visual" and "code" views (he mutters to himself as he checks all his paragraph tags).
Oh, and I forgot to add: cable often costs in excess of $50 a month, or $600 per year; if the couple in the OP prefer reading to celebrity gossip channels, they might simply be allocating the $600/month you spend on G4 TV towards books.
To elaborate on the parent comment, they probably haven't spent all that much anyway, especially if they've been collecting books for more than 20 years; even if each book costs about $10 in today's dollars, that's about $1750 per year over 20 years, or about $875 per person per year. The yearly average could be a lot less, depending on how long they've been buying and keeping books, whether they habitually shop used, receive books/bookstore certificates as gifts, steal from the library or friends*, or whatever.
The submitter does sound like a very rich man: intellectually and emotionally, which I would always take over an Escalade.
I ask rhetorically because so much fantasy isn't. People like this argue that books are all a matter of opinion, which is true in a superficial, theoretical way, but the reality is that some authors are capable of fresh, interesting, and insightful writing, and some recycle the same schlock endlessly.
Most of the negative comments in the first link also apply to The Wheel of Time, a series I read before I knew any better.
He's missing the point, which isn't the device itself, but How you get things to the device. I've talked about the content issue here, which began a/. post.
As for the idea that the Kindle "saves" money, it depends on whether the person with it primarily reads hardcover books they buy. If so, then it *might*. But that assumes the Kindle service doesn't disappear in four years, and it also assumes that readers are willing to pay for blogs and newspapers they mostly receive free online right now. In addition, it also discounts libraries, used copies, and borrowing from friends; I would guess that about a third of the books I read come from friends or libraries, and it's not unusual for me to loan books out. It's also not unusual for me to resell books I don't like on Amazon. Given all that, I'm not convinced his cost argument is a good one, and the others I've already addressed.
I do see a need for an e-book device and think they'll eventually take off, but first the legal and social issues have to be overcome.
Slashdot Mirror
It also helps if you decide how you're going to compensate them too.
Now that you've done the recruiting, do the interviews, which he's also discussed.
Further questions? Read his website. Mine's about books, so it's not likely to be all that helpful for programmers.
If you're still more paranoid, you can wrap tinfoil around your cell phone and head. If you need instructions as to how that should be done, this forum is an excellent place to find individuals with enormous experience.
Anyway, I suspect the relative power of TV as currently delivered has reached its peak. Over the long run, this and the rise of the Internet seems like a good thing, but then again my entertainment of choice is reading, as the link no doubt shows.
The major issue with "free" is often the quality -- but I suspect Tor is mostly doing this for the publicity, which, judging from a front page post on /., is already working.
"Banal" can be pronounced with two unstressed syllables, as you do, or it can rhyme with *giggle* *giggle* anal. Notice that in Merriam-Webster's online, banal has THREE possible pronunciations. One of them is BANE-all. The Oxford English that comes with OS X seems to agree. In an interview, I'd probably pronounce it with unstressed syllables, but in casual conversation you should pronounce it however you want.
On a tangent, Language Log often cites examples of hyper-(in)correctness like yours.
Interestingly enough, Bob Woodward came to speak at Clark University when I was an undergrad, and during the Q & A some idiot got up and blathered a conspiratorial question about the CIA and censorship that was about as stupid as your post. Woodward responded with something to the effect of, "Do you think anyone could stop me from publishing something that's true?" he went on to say?" It was a rhetorical question from someone who actually knows what's he's talking about directed at a fool weaned on Internet conspiracy theories, and it was as effective a silencer of your type as I've ever seen.
Sure, the sensationalism is short-sighted, much like the cuts in media attention to books described in Gail Poole's Faint Praise, but each short-term decision has a logic behind it. Unhappy with it? Me too. But we can only vote with our eyeballs and wallets, and hope that media companies eventually take note. Judging from how long ago Fallows published Breaking the News and how little seems to have changed since, I'm not overly optimistic.
So how does this differ from business as usual?
Sometimes I'll read books multiple times, and the probability that I do so increases with the time I've had a book. For example, I bought Heart of Darkness when I was 16, read it then, read it twice more for class in college, and then read it again recently. In addition, it's not unusual for me to mark up books as I'm reading them, or, occasionally, get them signed. Friends sometimes borrow them. There's also something to be said for efficiency: most books these days come from Amazon, where shipping is free over $25, most books are discounted 5 - 40% (usually 20 - 25%), and I can expend a minimal amount of finding them.
To be sure, I don't keep every book I buy, and the ones I don't keep either go back on Amazon or to the local thrift store. If you rarely reread books, you're correct that you don't have much to gain -- provided that you live near enough to a library to make it there. The bls says average wages in the U.S. are $19/hour or so; so if you spend an extra 30 or 40 minutes going there and back, you might be in effect spending as much as the value of the book just getting there and back.
A little of this analysis is philosophical, too: you think buying books a tremendous waste of money and paper; I think of them as, in part, showing a facet of my personality to visitors. Who's right? I'm not sure, but I read enough to have considered the issues.
And what the hell does "potential software base" mean? I have no idea, but I do know that lots of Mac applications exist. That doesn't even count some of the big ones, like those produced by Omni or something like Delicious Library and DEVONtechnologies.
Since I haven't seen Joel on Software's "Bionic Office" article yet, I'll post it here. The big takeaway: minimize noise and maximize convenience.
Content. As long as you don't mind paying Amazon or Sony for virtually every book, and are willing to risk investing in books you might not be able to access in five years, either works.
Actually, Christopher Tolkien effectively did that with the terrible Children of Hurin .
Still, as other posters have noted, the Books of Lost Tales, Silmarillion, and ROTK appendices together would provide a lot of material for potential sequels, and I think the story of the Elves in the first age could actually be wonderful, although Jackson would have to compress millennia of history into a timeline measured in a few years. How the hell will he get through 400 years of the quiet between the Elves and Morgoth otherwise? But it could be done, and probably better than Christopher Tolkien.
Good question: I tried to ask "What were the best books, movies, games, and media released in 2007?" The question might yield somewhat meaningful results, and I'd been thinking about the issue after seeing the NYTimes' best books.
Instead, the submission was rejected in favor of one discussing consumer electronic junk.
Another commenter further down has an excellent post on the subject of why FireWire is a good protocol; it nicely complements my post about why, even though the protocol is good, it's effectively lost in the marketplace and is unlikely to matter very much.
Apple reduced the fee too late, and if it's anything above $0 it's too high. Go read Joel's software on the chicken and egg to discover the problems with both.
Connectors are all fine well, but the time and energy necessary to buy, hang on to, and connect them makes such connectors a niche market. The operative word is convenience, and the more technical version of it is Metcalfe's law. Everyone has USB, therefore everyone makes USB devices, and therefore more people get USB. Apple killed (or at least harmed) the virtuous cycle that might've made FW a standard in 1998 - 2000. Now only a very small number of machines (relative to the size of the market) have FW800, and that number is unlikely to rise because of the chicken and egg problem.
I've read a variety of posts about the problems with FireWire (see here and here from what I found on Google), and the big problem is that FireWire didn't become a de facto standard seven or eight years ago when it was really needed. These days, it seems like few computers other than Macs ship with FireWire standard, and I've never seen a laptop in the wild outside of Macs with a six-pin FireWire 400 port, let alone 800.
I've heard this is chiefly due to Apple's initial intransigence regarding licensing; they demanded $1 per computer to use the "FireWire" name, making other device makers really angry. Considering how slim hardware margins are, no one was going to go for it. FireWire 400 is still technically superior to USB 2.0 in many ways, even today, but it's never reached the market penetration it needs, and now USB 2.0 is "good enough" for most purposes.
I use a Mac and so do many family members, and I've long counseled them to get only FireWire drives for backups. When Leopard came out, some were shopping for drives, and I found that I could not find FW400/USB 2 drives for as little as plain USB 2.0 drives. In other words, the FireWire premium for HDs appears to be at least $30. Not a good sign for market penetration.
Now FW 3200 is being discussed when FW 800 already seems dead on arrival in consumer land, and only supported to the limited extent it is by Apple. Not making it backwards compatible with FW400 was an idiotic decision that ensured whatever chance it had in the market was gone. In the meantime, eSATA and the like have come along and perhaps obviated the need for many FireWire applications altogether.
To be fair, however, by the time I came along to make the decision I gather the balance of power had already shifted to Wordpress. Does anyone know what the original appeal of MT was over Wordpress? I've been reading this thread, my post history shows, but I haven't seen any solid explanations of their histories.
Even if parts of MT are open source, if they're not put together in a nice, slick package, a lot of people, including me, are going to stay away until someone else does the heavy lifting for us.
Sure, I could figure out how to make it all work, but I don't especially want to. The same general principle applies to Linux and OS X, explaining why I use the latter.
More recently I began a business blog called Grant Writing Confidential with my Dad, and I had Wordpress install by our ISP because I was already familiar with it, in addition to all the advantages listed by the GP. By then, Wordpress had impressed me sufficiently that Movable type wasn't even in the running because I hadn't found any limitations or major irritations in Wordpress.
The big knock on Wordpress is that so many of the themes make it obvious that you're using a Wordpress blog. This has some validity and is true for my blogs, although a little bit less so for the second. Still, I think the reason so many blogs use a two- or three-column style is because it's logical way to organize a blog. Few people criticize books because they (mostly) have a spine and two covers and a table of contents and what not, while all that varies between them is art. I suspect we're entering that general phase of blogging, which also makes it easier to read blogs because you only have to figure out where the common elements are, rather than a whole new system for each blog.
In other words, Wordpress/Blogger motifs are creating a common user interface, making the presentation less important and the content more important. Sounds like my conception of what "Web 2.0" should be doing: making this easier on us. I'm not the first person to have thought along these lines, but it's still worth noticing. For that matter, /. could do worse than use the web-based posting window of Wordpress, with its "visual" and "code" views (he mutters to himself as he checks all his paragraph tags).
Oh, and I forgot to add: cable often costs in excess of $50 a month, or $600 per year; if the couple in the OP prefer reading to celebrity gossip channels, they might simply be allocating the $600/month you spend on G4 TV towards books.
The submitter does sound like a very rich man: intellectually and emotionally, which I would always take over an Escalade.
* Note to the humor impaired: this is a joke.
Most of the negative comments in the first link also apply to The Wheel of Time, a series I read before I knew any better.
As for the idea that the Kindle "saves" money, it depends on whether the person with it primarily reads hardcover books they buy. If so, then it *might*. But that assumes the Kindle service doesn't disappear in four years, and it also assumes that readers are willing to pay for blogs and newspapers they mostly receive free online right now. In addition, it also discounts libraries, used copies, and borrowing from friends; I would guess that about a third of the books I read come from friends or libraries, and it's not unusual for me to loan books out. It's also not unusual for me to resell books I don't like on Amazon. Given all that, I'm not convinced his cost argument is a good one, and the others I've already addressed.
I do see a need for an e-book device and think they'll eventually take off, but first the legal and social issues have to be overcome.