After reading your question it seems you haven't yet made a distinction between the two possible kinds of books you could write. One would be giving the reader a fundamental understanding of how computers work, while the other would be giving them the basic knowledge needed to become either a casual or power user.
These two books are completely different and you should know which one you're writing, and not mix things up.
I personally would love a book that explains the basics of how RAM, TCP/IP, USB ports etc. work -- written in a way that somebody with no engineering background can grasp. But from the tone of your question I think what you're really leaning towards writing is a book that lets brand new computer users bypass the clueless stage. For this, you'd want to explain the differences between OSX, Windows, and Linux, and give users a good way to choose. You'd want to acquaint them with the main sorts of applications that exist -- word processors, spread sheets, browsers, etc. Then you'd explain a bit about each, like what a word processor is great at doing (things like on-the-fly spellcheck), and what it sucks at doing (book quality layout.)
Basically, you want to teach people the fundamentals of using each type of application, and keep them from using a screwdriver as a hammer (using Microsoft Word to typeset a book, for instance.)
You'd also want to write about the various peripherals you can install, like wireless cards, optical mice, and high-quality video and sound cards.
And finally, you'd want to make the writing engaging enough that people would actually read your book cover to cover. That's the biggest trick of all, and really, the only hard trick.
I've noticed that anytime a domain expires, it doesn't go back into the unused pool and become available to someone else. Most or all of the expired domain names get instantly sucked up the moment they expire by companies nobody's ever heard of that (I suppose) have contracts with the top domain registrars. I suppose this amounts to thousands or tens of thousands of domain names vanishing from circulation each year; domains that I have to think are essentially ransomed off by these bulk buyers, one by one, to anyone who really, really wants it.
I've got to think that, when purchased in bulk, it costs pennies, or perhaps tenths or even hundredths of pennies, in actual administrative costs to keep these domains registered each year.
Since costs of maintaining registration for expired domains can approach nothing, are we at risk of these re-registration companies eventually having permanent ownership of nearly every domain a person might think to register? Might it not be in the public interest to have a minimum annual registration fee per domain (say, three dollars), to help ensure that domains aren't held in perpetuity by speculators?
or is it merely a politicised 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency?"
Yeah, because God forbid those Europeans act unilaterally on a technological matter involving their self-interest. You would think that five years of the Bush administration would have convinced the rest of the world that we always have their interests at heart. OK, that's all I wanted to say, time to cook up another batch of Freedom Fries.
Re:video DRM is more tolerable than music DRM
on
A Look at Google DRM
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· Score: 1
It seems to that people keep forgetting an important point about Apple's DRM on downloaded music. Once you download the AAC files, you can burn the content to a CD, and then re-import the tracks as MP3s back into iTunes, including ID3 tags.
Sure, but if I buy a (non-DRM'd) CD in the store, that store-bought CD becomes my backup (the music I listen to gets ripped to my hard drive.) Under this setup, I don't have to pay for a blank disk for backup, I don't have to take the time to burn a copy, and my store-bought CD has a much longer life expectancy than a CD I burn. Plus I usually get lyrics and artwork.
CD prices have fallen so much that new CD's sometimes cost less than iTunes albums. And used CD's of music I want can often be had for $5 or so.
Of course, if a CD I want has DRM, there's no way I'm buying it.
video DRM is more tolerable than music DRM
on
A Look at Google DRM
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I know that many people here hate all forms of DRM. I hate it and won't accept it for my music purchases. I don't have the same misgivings about DRM where video is concerned.
I'm currently paying for Yahoo's unlimited streaming audio service. Five bucks a month gets me all I can eat. And at that price it's more than reasonable to me that I'm not buying license to any of what I listen to. Artists get paid a tiny amount every time I listen to a song. Nobody's getting stiffed.
But when I purchase music, as opposed to subscribing to a stream, DRM is a deal breaker. That's why I've never used the iTunes store and never will. I don't have to worry that five years from now I'll have a hard drive crash, or ten years from now I'll lose a password, and all my music purchases will be gone forever. I'm only going to buy music if it's mine for life, and if I can quickly and easily backup my music library whenever I wish.
Video offerings can be another story. Much of what I want to see is stuff I only want to watch once. I'm not interested in paying $30 a month on cable when about the only TV I watch is a weekly NFL game during the autumn. But I'd really like to pay a buck or two to see an NFL game every Sunday. And given that Google's already got the NBA, I bet they'll have the NFL by the start of next season. If I can pay $5 - $10 a month to watch my football, that'll save me tons of money over either getting cable or over going to a bar to watch the game.
As for DRM, in a case like this, why should I care? As long as the price is reasonable, why should I care that I can't share my video, or that I won't be able to watch it months from now? It's not music. Not only would I have no interest in watching a Giants game I already saw last October, you couldn't pay me to watch it again! And if well-designed DRM without a rootkit or something comparably evil gives the NFL and google enough safety to offer a bit of on-demand video at a fair price -- well, I think it's a great deal all around.
After all that space in the write-up mentioning that Apple also has a 30" monitor, I was waiting for Apple price. It's $2499, shipping included -- $300 more than what the Dell lists at.
They said they send some poor undergrad into the 120-foot wind shaft to polish the thing. Every once in a while you read about some slaughterhouse worker in the middle of cleaning out a meat grinder when somebody turns the damned thing on. Until now, I thought that was pretty much the grisliest way a person could die, but this looks infinitely more messy. You couldn't get me to crawl in there.
>The only media I can think of that is dead is the 8-Track and 70 RPM.
I think for purposes of this argument, we can fairly say that if it's not given at least an aisle at Best Buy, it's dead. LP's are dead as a doornail. VHS tapes will be soon. But I can't imagine the DVD section at Best Buy going away within the next three years. Keep in mind it's in the interests of the electronics industry to have DVD die off as soon as possible. And despite the fact that the MPEG-2 encryption was a rush job and has long since been blown away by newer codecs, DVD's remain an outstanding technology.
Whatever the next standard is, it won't have the clear advantages over DVD that DVD had over VHS. The several hundred million consumers who already own DVD players and stacks of DVDs have no urgent reason to jump to the next standard -- not until most of these people own high-def Televisions. DVD will be with us for some time.
I want styles too. It's useful for me when composing to see chapter and section headings. Word, WordPerfect, and OpenOffice all handle these quite nicely with their Style features. They'll get stripped out when I typeset but it's nice to see these things when composing and when printing out drafts.
I've used my share of text editors in the past, but I prefer writing books in a WYSIWYG environment. But as I mentioned elsewhere in this threat, the showing of page breaks really gets in the way if you're writing a book that will later be typeset. It's not relevant information and should be turned off...and both Word and WordPerfect allow this. If OpenOffice allowed this without entering View>Web Layout hell it would become my main word processor, since all things being equal I'd rather write books and articles on my Mac than have to run WordPerfect under XP.
Draft mode in WordPerfect is WYSIWYG. But they strip out the useless graphics showing page breaks. When I'm in the middle of rewriting a 25 page book chapter, I don't care at all where the page breaks are, because the whole thing is going to be typset later anyway. In WordPerfect, I don't have to keep track of my cursor skipping up and down from one page to the next and then back up again as I rewrite a sentence fifteen times. That useless page break information is hidden from me.
Whereas in OpenOffice, the only way to hide page break graphics (which are the most irritating thing in the world to deal with if you don't care about pagination) is to go:
View>Web Layout
And then the resultant view becomes a complete disaster...starting with the fact that the width of your text line doesn't reflect your margins, but rather just expands out to your window's width.
There's one thing OpenOffice.org lacks that both Word and WordPerfect have: a draft mode where you don't have to see page breaks and unnecessary layout visuals. To me, this seems like such a basic and important feature. My needs for formatting and fancy features are practically nonexistent--I just want to concentrate on my writing.
OpenOffice Writer does offer a "web layout", but it's just not the same.
I use OpenOffice all the time to dash out letters and so forth, but when I need to concentrate on my writing I always fire up WordPerfect. Lack of a good draft mode is all that's keeping me from using OpenOffice Writer exclusively. I'm sure tons of other writers feel the same way. And I can't imagine implementing this feature would be difficult.
And why are animals used for this testing? Isn't a main justification that they are incapable of reasoning? Here's a link with info on the effort to keep primates out of labs.
Sure, there are companies like Staples that have put effort into making sure their customers don't have to jump through needless hoops to get their rebates. But let's now talk about companies that INVENT needless hoops in the hopes of keeping your money. Oh, what a perfect time to share my little rebate story with you all. About four months back, I saw you could get one of those sweet little Motorola Razr cellphones for free from Buy.com, upon signing up with Cingular for two years. You would get a $200 rebate that covered the cost of the phone. I needed new cellphone service, so I went ahead and ordered the phone from Buy.com.
Naturally, I wasn't going to slack when it came to filling out a $200 rebate. Within a couple days of getting the phone I took an hour off to fill out the rebate form. Only one problem. The box they sent me didn't have the required UPC code. But whatever, I'm sure I could call them to straighten that out.
So I filled out the rest of the sheet and had almost everything together, and then I noticed: You had to wait six months before sending in your rebate. And at the six month period, you had to include your most recent cellphone bill.
What absolute stupidity. I mean, why couldn't they accept the rebate right away and say that you won't get paid for six months, when they do a check to make sure your cellphone account is in good standing? And it gets better. At the end of that six month period, you only have a thirty day window to get your rebate in!
How many consumers are this organized to send in a rebate not earlier than six months after purchase, and not later than seven months? Well, lucky for me, I am. I've made a note on iCal. I've also made a mental note: never purchase anything from Buy.com again.
Universal binaries built with the new version (and apparently all subsequent versions) will not work on systems running the older version of the OS.
Would somebody care to explain what aardwolf64 and Zonk think is too obvious to be worth stating in the summary? What exactly does this mean to people trying to pirate OSX, who exactly will be affected, and under what circumstances?
Not to attack or defend Dvorak's point of view on this subject, but the specifics of today's development match phase one of his "prophecy." That is, in his August 8 PC-Mag Article, Dvorak asserts that Apple is putting OSX for Intel out there knowing and expecting and intending for it to be cracked. This would be a way to slowly build up the user base of OSX users on white box systems, and getting them to a point where they are ready to abandon Windows. And the advantage of this strategy is that it Apple can play along acting as if they really aren't trying to compete with Windows, and in so doing perhaps not wake the sleeping giant in Redmond until it's too late.
I don't agree or disagree with Dvorak's column. I personally think Apple sees its long-term revenue in hardware. Regardless of whether Dvorak is guessing correctly here, phase one of his prophecy has now come to pass. Now, over the next few months, we'll see if Apple responds the way Dvorak predicts, and see whether his prophecy comes true. I personally doubt it, but we'll see.
If it's a fun and innovative videogame for a new platform, I'd welcome a review. Unless there's evidence that Slashdot or the reviewer have a financial interest in selling this game, I'm not inclined to complain.
Having said that, there have been loads of occasions on Slashdot when the submitted review is a thinly and ineptly disguised advertisement. It doesn't appear to me on first glance that this is one of those times.
Back in the day, laptops cost more than $1000 more than comparable desktops. Now, you can get a pretty decent laptop for $700. So it's not surprising that as the price difference between desktops and laptops has eroded, so too has the market share of desktops.
The question that interests me is: are laptops becoming any more durable? One of my main reasons that I bought an eMac instead of an iBook is that the eMac is probably Apple's most durable computer. And I know that laptops tend to be much more prone to failure.
It wasn't so long ago that if you bought a laptop, you could pretty much count on some kind of major failure within three years. I'm wondering if any good research has been done to show whether laptops are closing the gap with desktops in terms of reliability. If they are, I'm pretty sure my next computer will be a laptop.
What's the only thing that's easier to find on the Internet than free news? No, not porn, OK well maybe. But what I had in mind is people's opinions, posted on the web for all the world to see.
You can go anywhere on the web to find opinions on most any issue, nearly all of them freely accessible. Instapundit on the right, Daily Kos on the left, and million smaller sites in between.
In a web that's overflowing with opinions and analysis, much of it well-written, the NY Times thinks people will pay $50 a year to read theirs? What are they smoking?
Here is what will happen after the Times initiates its plan. Some corporate customers who already pull archived articles off will sign up for this $50 program and find they also have access to the Op-Ed page. Whoopdedoo!
But my bet is like four people in the US will pay the $50 a month for the sake of accessing the Times' Op-Ed section. If you can't sell the news online, you definitely can't sell opinions. And keep in mind that a huge portion of the Times' readership now comes from web surfers. What this means is that the Times has just voluntarily traded away much of its enormous political influence for maybe $200 a year. Amazing.
definitely a tech-demo thrill
on
Pac-Man Turns 25
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· Score: 5, Insightful
From the summary:
I think it's because the game is just plain fun, with no need to rely on tech-demo thrills to attract attention.
Twenty-five years ago, Pac-man was a tech-demo thrill. Compare it to Space Invaders, the previous blockbuster game, and it's a night and day difference in graphics, sound, and presentation.
But apart from that, I think one of the things that really made pac-man was being the first truly funny game to come along. And to invest each of the ghosts with a personality, and even make them chase differently, that's just genius.
And don't get me started on having the intermission shows, the fantastic sound effects, and the fruit prize intended to lure greedy gamers to their doom. It wasn't until the mid-80s, with Zaxxon, Pole Position, and especially Marble Madness, that Pac-Man lost its luster for me.
First of all, it was a shotgun--not a rifle. There's a very big difference there.
Yep, my mistake. You don't hunt birds with rifles, and I should have written shotgun rather than rifle.
Second of all, it was predawn--that means before dawn. Before dawn, it's generally dark. When it's dark, it's harder to see because there're less photons bouncing off of things and coming back to your eyes. The things that photons may bounce off of include turkeys and people. Kalin (the man who fired the gun) couldn't've seen White (the man who was shot) at that time, not to mention he was hidden behind the treeline--so even if it were day time, there would've been issues.
So, am I to take from this detailed explanation of photons, treelines, etc. that it's OK to just blast your rifle -- pardon me, shotgun -- in the dark in the direction of something that *might* be the kind of animal you're seeking? WTF?
For what it's worth, I think that hunting is often much easier to defend than animal agriculture. I have a detailed discussion of this in an appendix of my new book, Meat Market.
But the story of that particular hunter getting shot smacks of incompetence and recklessness, and it's weird to see you trying to defend what happened. The truth is that many hunters have no business setting foot in the woods with a firearm of any kind. And my contention is amply proven by the fact that you can read stories like this practically every day during hunting season.
Dude...don't you know what site you're visiting? But I have to say, it's refreshing to see a bias AGAINST cruelty on here for a change. Check out the majority of responses to this story for the typical Slashdot reader response: Beef is yummy. Let's eat meat. Screw PeTA. Etc.
But this time, here's a clear-cut case of something grotesquely cruel. I mean, how could a decent person say that it's OK to artificially stock animals in small fenced areas, and then have a remotely fired gun so people can blast these creatures through the Internet? Sorry, that's just flat-out wrong, and even most hunters would say so.
I thought I'd pass along a couple hunting-related links, taken from just the past couple of days. First, be sure to read Matthew Scully's superb article "Fear Factories," in this week's American Conservative. Animal rights is often incorrectly thought of as some fringe cause, only embraced by people on the left. Here, Scully writes brilliantly about why conservatives should hold animal agriculture in disdain. And he starts his article by mentioning this Internet hunting issue.
I publish Vegan.com, and I have some commentary on Scully's article on my podcast from yesterday. You might want to listen to that as well.
And, what the heck, here's another article taken just today from Fark. One hunter was in the woods making a turkey call. Another hunter came along, thought he was hearing a real bird, and shot the hunter. Because, after all, when you're packing a hunting rifle there's no reason to actually look to see if it's actually a turkey you're shooting.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming: Meat tastes good. Animal rights people are losers. I'm going to go out and have a thick bloody juicy steak -- yum! Because, after all, if PeTA sometimes pisses people off and chooses stupid battles, that clearly means that everytime they oppose cruelty a sensible person should side against them.
Call me crazy, but I fail to see what all the hubbub is about podcasting (I also dislike the name). I think it is kind of neat as an idea, but I just don't see any financial strategy behind this that is in anyway sustainable. This isn't meant to be flamebait, I am really curious.
Please take the sentence above and insert "the web" where "podcasting" is currently placed. You could say much the same thing about the web lacking a financial strategy for content-oriented sites, especially back in 1999. But it evolved, at least somewhat. The same thing will happen to podcasts.
Of greater importance, though, is that something can be totally paradigm-shifting but not generate a lot of cash. If 20 million people soon do most of their "radio" listening by podcast, the implications to society are enormous regardless of how much money is being made.
It has now sued over 10,000 file sharers for copyright infringement, making it a good time to ask if the RIAA will ever throw in the towel.
Doesn't your corner only throw in the towel if you're getting your ass kicked? From what I understand, the RIAA is settling nearly each of these cases out of court for a substantial profit. If that's the case, why would they ever throw in the towel?
Slashdot Mirror
These two books are completely different and you should know which one you're writing, and not mix things up.
I personally would love a book that explains the basics of how RAM, TCP/IP, USB ports etc. work -- written in a way that somebody with no engineering background can grasp. But from the tone of your question I think what you're really leaning towards writing is a book that lets brand new computer users bypass the clueless stage. For this, you'd want to explain the differences between OSX, Windows, and Linux, and give users a good way to choose. You'd want to acquaint them with the main sorts of applications that exist -- word processors, spread sheets, browsers, etc. Then you'd explain a bit about each, like what a word processor is great at doing (things like on-the-fly spellcheck), and what it sucks at doing (book quality layout.)
Basically, you want to teach people the fundamentals of using each type of application, and keep them from using a screwdriver as a hammer (using Microsoft Word to typeset a book, for instance.)
You'd also want to write about the various peripherals you can install, like wireless cards, optical mice, and high-quality video and sound cards.
And finally, you'd want to make the writing engaging enough that people would actually read your book cover to cover. That's the biggest trick of all, and really, the only hard trick.
I've got to think that, when purchased in bulk, it costs pennies, or perhaps tenths or even hundredths of pennies, in actual administrative costs to keep these domains registered each year.
Since costs of maintaining registration for expired domains can approach nothing, are we at risk of these re-registration companies eventually having permanent ownership of nearly every domain a person might think to register? Might it not be in the public interest to have a minimum annual registration fee per domain (say, three dollars), to help ensure that domains aren't held in perpetuity by speculators?
Yeah, because God forbid those Europeans act unilaterally on a technological matter involving their self-interest. You would think that five years of the Bush administration would have convinced the rest of the world that we always have their interests at heart. OK, that's all I wanted to say, time to cook up another batch of Freedom Fries.
Sure, but if I buy a (non-DRM'd) CD in the store, that store-bought CD becomes my backup (the music I listen to gets ripped to my hard drive.) Under this setup, I don't have to pay for a blank disk for backup, I don't have to take the time to burn a copy, and my store-bought CD has a much longer life expectancy than a CD I burn. Plus I usually get lyrics and artwork.
CD prices have fallen so much that new CD's sometimes cost less than iTunes albums. And used CD's of music I want can often be had for $5 or so.
Of course, if a CD I want has DRM, there's no way I'm buying it.
I'm currently paying for Yahoo's unlimited streaming audio service. Five bucks a month gets me all I can eat. And at that price it's more than reasonable to me that I'm not buying license to any of what I listen to. Artists get paid a tiny amount every time I listen to a song. Nobody's getting stiffed.
But when I purchase music, as opposed to subscribing to a stream, DRM is a deal breaker. That's why I've never used the iTunes store and never will. I don't have to worry that five years from now I'll have a hard drive crash, or ten years from now I'll lose a password, and all my music purchases will be gone forever. I'm only going to buy music if it's mine for life, and if I can quickly and easily backup my music library whenever I wish.
Video offerings can be another story. Much of what I want to see is stuff I only want to watch once. I'm not interested in paying $30 a month on cable when about the only TV I watch is a weekly NFL game during the autumn. But I'd really like to pay a buck or two to see an NFL game every Sunday. And given that Google's already got the NBA, I bet they'll have the NFL by the start of next season. If I can pay $5 - $10 a month to watch my football, that'll save me tons of money over either getting cable or over going to a bar to watch the game.
As for DRM, in a case like this, why should I care? As long as the price is reasonable, why should I care that I can't share my video, or that I won't be able to watch it months from now? It's not music. Not only would I have no interest in watching a Giants game I already saw last October, you couldn't pay me to watch it again! And if well-designed DRM without a rootkit or something comparably evil gives the NFL and google enough safety to offer a bit of on-demand video at a fair price -- well, I think it's a great deal all around.
You meant to write "a chair," didn't you?
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore?family=AppleDisplays
I think for purposes of this argument, we can fairly say that if it's not given at least an aisle at Best Buy, it's dead. LP's are dead as a doornail. VHS tapes will be soon. But I can't imagine the DVD section at Best Buy going away within the next three years. Keep in mind it's in the interests of the electronics industry to have DVD die off as soon as possible. And despite the fact that the MPEG-2 encryption was a rush job and has long since been blown away by newer codecs, DVD's remain an outstanding technology.
Whatever the next standard is, it won't have the clear advantages over DVD that DVD had over VHS. The several hundred million consumers who already own DVD players and stacks of DVDs have no urgent reason to jump to the next standard -- not until most of these people own high-def Televisions. DVD will be with us for some time.
I've used my share of text editors in the past, but I prefer writing books in a WYSIWYG environment. But as I mentioned elsewhere in this threat, the showing of page breaks really gets in the way if you're writing a book that will later be typeset. It's not relevant information and should be turned off...and both Word and WordPerfect allow this. If OpenOffice allowed this without entering View>Web Layout hell it would become my main word processor, since all things being equal I'd rather write books and articles on my Mac than have to run WordPerfect under XP.
Whereas in OpenOffice, the only way to hide page break graphics (which are the most irritating thing in the world to deal with if you don't care about pagination) is to go:
View>Web Layout
And then the resultant view becomes a complete disaster...starting with the fact that the width of your text line doesn't reflect your margins, but rather just expands out to your window's width.
OpenOffice Writer does offer a "web layout", but it's just not the same.
I use OpenOffice all the time to dash out letters and so forth, but when I need to concentrate on my writing I always fire up WordPerfect. Lack of a good draft mode is all that's keeping me from using OpenOffice Writer exclusively. I'm sure tons of other writers feel the same way. And I can't imagine implementing this feature would be difficult.
And why are animals used for this testing? Isn't a main justification that they are incapable of reasoning? Here's a link with info on the effort to keep primates out of labs.
Naturally, I wasn't going to slack when it came to filling out a $200 rebate. Within a couple days of getting the phone I took an hour off to fill out the rebate form. Only one problem. The box they sent me didn't have the required UPC code. But whatever, I'm sure I could call them to straighten that out.
So I filled out the rest of the sheet and had almost everything together, and then I noticed: You had to wait six months before sending in your rebate. And at the six month period, you had to include your most recent cellphone bill.
What absolute stupidity. I mean, why couldn't they accept the rebate right away and say that you won't get paid for six months, when they do a check to make sure your cellphone account is in good standing? And it gets better. At the end of that six month period, you only have a thirty day window to get your rebate in!
How many consumers are this organized to send in a rebate not earlier than six months after purchase, and not later than seven months? Well, lucky for me, I am. I've made a note on iCal. I've also made a mental note: never purchase anything from Buy.com again.
Would somebody care to explain what aardwolf64 and Zonk think is too obvious to be worth stating in the summary? What exactly does this mean to people trying to pirate OSX, who exactly will be affected, and under what circumstances?
I don't agree or disagree with Dvorak's column. I personally think Apple sees its long-term revenue in hardware. Regardless of whether Dvorak is guessing correctly here, phase one of his prophecy has now come to pass. Now, over the next few months, we'll see if Apple responds the way Dvorak predicts, and see whether his prophecy comes true. I personally doubt it, but we'll see.
If it's a fun and innovative videogame for a new platform, I'd welcome a review. Unless there's evidence that Slashdot or the reviewer have a financial interest in selling this game, I'm not inclined to complain.
Having said that, there have been loads of occasions on Slashdot when the submitted review is a thinly and ineptly disguised advertisement. It doesn't appear to me on first glance that this is one of those times.
The question that interests me is: are laptops becoming any more durable? One of my main reasons that I bought an eMac instead of an iBook is that the eMac is probably Apple's most durable computer. And I know that laptops tend to be much more prone to failure.
It wasn't so long ago that if you bought a laptop, you could pretty much count on some kind of major failure within three years. I'm wondering if any good research has been done to show whether laptops are closing the gap with desktops in terms of reliability. If they are, I'm pretty sure my next computer will be a laptop.
You can go anywhere on the web to find opinions on most any issue, nearly all of them freely accessible. Instapundit on the right, Daily Kos on the left, and million smaller sites in between.
In a web that's overflowing with opinions and analysis, much of it well-written, the NY Times thinks people will pay $50 a year to read theirs? What are they smoking?
Here is what will happen after the Times initiates its plan. Some corporate customers who already pull archived articles off will sign up for this $50 program and find they also have access to the Op-Ed page. Whoopdedoo!
But my bet is like four people in the US will pay the $50 a month for the sake of accessing the Times' Op-Ed section. If you can't sell the news online, you definitely can't sell opinions. And keep in mind that a huge portion of the Times' readership now comes from web surfers. What this means is that the Times has just voluntarily traded away much of its enormous political influence for maybe $200 a year. Amazing.
I think it's because the game is just plain fun, with no need to rely on tech-demo thrills to attract attention.
Twenty-five years ago, Pac-man was a tech-demo thrill. Compare it to Space Invaders, the previous blockbuster game, and it's a night and day difference in graphics, sound, and presentation.
But apart from that, I think one of the things that really made pac-man was being the first truly funny game to come along. And to invest each of the ghosts with a personality, and even make them chase differently, that's just genius.
And don't get me started on having the intermission shows, the fantastic sound effects, and the fruit prize intended to lure greedy gamers to their doom. It wasn't until the mid-80s, with Zaxxon, Pole Position, and especially Marble Madness, that Pac-Man lost its luster for me.
Yep, my mistake. You don't hunt birds with rifles, and I should have written shotgun rather than rifle.
Second of all, it was predawn--that means before dawn. Before dawn, it's generally dark. When it's dark, it's harder to see because there're less photons bouncing off of things and coming back to your eyes. The things that photons may bounce off of include turkeys and people. Kalin (the man who fired the gun) couldn't've seen White (the man who was shot) at that time, not to mention he was hidden behind the treeline--so even if it were day time, there would've been issues.
So, am I to take from this detailed explanation of photons, treelines, etc. that it's OK to just blast your rifle -- pardon me, shotgun -- in the dark in the direction of something that *might* be the kind of animal you're seeking? WTF?
For what it's worth, I think that hunting is often much easier to defend than animal agriculture. I have a detailed discussion of this in an appendix of my new book, Meat Market.
But the story of that particular hunter getting shot smacks of incompetence and recklessness, and it's weird to see you trying to defend what happened. The truth is that many hunters have no business setting foot in the woods with a firearm of any kind. And my contention is amply proven by the fact that you can read stories like this practically every day during hunting season.
Dude...don't you know what site you're visiting? But I have to say, it's refreshing to see a bias AGAINST cruelty on here for a change. Check out the majority of responses to this story for the typical Slashdot reader response: Beef is yummy. Let's eat meat. Screw PeTA. Etc.
But this time, here's a clear-cut case of something grotesquely cruel. I mean, how could a decent person say that it's OK to artificially stock animals in small fenced areas, and then have a remotely fired gun so people can blast these creatures through the Internet? Sorry, that's just flat-out wrong, and even most hunters would say so.
I thought I'd pass along a couple hunting-related links, taken from just the past couple of days. First, be sure to read Matthew Scully's superb article "Fear Factories," in this week's American Conservative. Animal rights is often incorrectly thought of as some fringe cause, only embraced by people on the left. Here, Scully writes brilliantly about why conservatives should hold animal agriculture in disdain. And he starts his article by mentioning this Internet hunting issue.
I publish Vegan.com, and I have some commentary on Scully's article on my podcast from yesterday. You might want to listen to that as well.
And, what the heck, here's another article taken just today from Fark. One hunter was in the woods making a turkey call. Another hunter came along, thought he was hearing a real bird, and shot the hunter. Because, after all, when you're packing a hunting rifle there's no reason to actually look to see if it's actually a turkey you're shooting.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming: Meat tastes good. Animal rights people are losers. I'm going to go out and have a thick bloody juicy steak -- yum! Because, after all, if PeTA sometimes pisses people off and chooses stupid battles, that clearly means that everytime they oppose cruelty a sensible person should side against them.
Please take the sentence above and insert "the web" where "podcasting" is currently placed. You could say much the same thing about the web lacking a financial strategy for content-oriented sites, especially back in 1999. But it evolved, at least somewhat. The same thing will happen to podcasts.
Of greater importance, though, is that something can be totally paradigm-shifting but not generate a lot of cash. If 20 million people soon do most of their "radio" listening by podcast, the implications to society are enormous regardless of how much money is being made.
Doesn't your corner only throw in the towel if you're getting your ass kicked? From what I understand, the RIAA is settling nearly each of these cases out of court for a substantial profit. If that's the case, why would they ever throw in the towel?