I guess the fault is mine. It is stupid to ask questions that people can't answer without condemning themselves.
But since I've already admitted that I'm stupid, I'll try a last time anyway...
Big advertisers pay a large sum of income of most magazines. The companies buying ads have total control of how they spend their ad money -- and getting good treatment in the articles and reviews is worth a lot of money to those companies.
Are you seriously expecting anyone to believe your claims that, given the above common interests, there is no influence?
(We're talking big advertisers here. Microsoft on "/." is hardly large.)
On closer consideration, I do think you answered my question of How much influence does a very large ad budget have over reviews and other content in the trade rags?
That you wrote a long and eloquent reply without answering that simple question makes me believe two things:
1. You do work for the press.
2. You're not going to answer the question.
Reading between the lines, those two points gives a very good answer! Thank you.
Almost 3 kB written less than 40 minutes after I posted... without answering my question!! You don't want to answer this simple question?
How much do ad budgets influence reviews (and other content)? No, I don't believe zero -- or 10 percent, for that matter.
it's hard to see how you could think that the size of someone's ad budget would be related to how they fared in hardware reviews.
I explicitly used software as an example and the previous discussion was about Mirosoft/SCO. There was no need to waste your time discussing hardware. (And, yes, obviously there are influencing factors from reviews of beta versions. Etc, etc. Not an answer.)
Frankly, if I had to give you one bit of advice about what you read (online or in print) it's to always read between the lines and never put your faith in just one opinion.
This when I gave an example (from middle of the '90s!!) when reviews and articles where totally different from both user experiences and columnists that could write freely... (I even started it with "I lost my innocence when"!) Search Oct-94 to Mar-95 on groups.google.com for "word 6" and "macintosh".
You are joking and/or condescending. Or just not answering a simple question with the tried and true method of starting a large discussion of other matters.
Tell us about the connection between size of ad budget and e.g. results on reviews...
I lost my innocence when Word 6 was released on the Mac and got good reviews in the trade rags -- while all Mac users hated it because it was both buggy and really slow. Word 6 was faster if you ran the Windows-version in VirtualPC (or what the emulator of the day was called; I talked to people that had tried but never tried).
The interesting thing was that the columnists in the Mac magazines hated it -- they had some deal wich didn't sign away their souls. If you're in the business, please inform me:
Can you still more or less trust the columnists in trade magazines or are they just supporting the ad sales team, too?
It would be interesting to see if most Anon comments to a story like this are written by the same person (like the temporary Amazon bug.)
Wouldn't that be a wonderful (temporary) bug in slashcode, too? I am willing to implement the bug myself, just to see what grubs are found beneath the rocks...
Pretty please with lots of sugar Cowboy Neal et al?
With the exception that fewer people will die because of such controversies in Knuth' case, because there aren't too many militant guerilla groups fighting for the right way to do seminumerical algorithms.
To help Knuth finishing "The Art of.." the guerilla's goal should be to legalize research into stem cells!
Then Knuth could take a decade off and do something like TeX again.:-)
(And lots of other people like me will have time to read it again...)
You obviously haven't seen the classified reports...
And you have read those classified reports from the 60's and 70's -- and now commit a crime by writing about it on the net...
If we believed that we'd be as stupid as you -- if you told the truth...:-)
(Anyway, there has been enough classified reports leaked the last decades, that we with certainty can say that the information from the intelligence community often is wrong by a large factor, so arguably you'd not want to take big risks...)
Corn has to be harvested. Usually this involves tractors, harvesters, and other large pieces of farm equipment that generally run on.. d'oh! More fossil fuel!
The idea was to run stuff like tractors on hydrogen created from ethanol...:-)
Again: You didn't provide any support this time either for your claims regarding other researchers doing straw man attacks on Gould that were equally bad as Gould's own intellectually dishonest arguments...
Gould rocked the boat in a discipline that wasn't exactly ready for it. And made money doing it. Man, I can figure why his "peer group" decided the best thing to do was dismiss him as a "Marxist."
Get real -- when Gould did his terrible ad hominem attacks on Wilson in popular press (etc) his opinions were quite mainstream for academia.
I've only seen Gould's politics discussed regarding why Gould did nonserious straw man arguments (and claims of racism regarding intelligence researchers) -- not as ad hominem arguments. If there are other examples (as you repeatedly claim), please give references.
What I said is that you'll be hard-pressed to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics.
OK, that is your position. Let's take an example:
I'm fanatic about sushi. Since I'm a self-professed fanatic my opinions can be disregarded regarding, say, city planning?
You find more or less large amounts of politics everywhere. And some people stand mostly above it -- and some don't. Your theories that Gould was hounded by his evol biology critics in a way that was as intellectually dishonest as he himself do need support... something you refuse to give.
Again -- I've read people livid about his dishonest way of
arguing, but I've not seen personal attacks without Gould starting.
Either support your claims that the evol biology critics of Gould acted at his low level -- or shut up. (As the US English idiom so non-charmingly put it: "S..t or get off the pot!")
(You didn't want to comment on that you claim that Gould misrepresents reality in his books -- which makes them uninteresting to people interested in learning about the world!?)
That alone is enough to make a lot of his peers very jealous. [...] Gould's "enemies" are as guilty of attacking a straw man as he is. (And he is very guilty of doing that -- it sells books.)
You are accusing other researchers of doing personal attacks and nonserious arguments here. That is quite serious. The criticism of Gould was specific on the points where he did straw man attacks. Can you back up your claims?
Note both that Gould generally refused to answer the specific points of critique and that your position more or less claims that his writing was to sell books ignoring reality -- which makes his writing uninteresting if you have the ambition to understand the world as well as possible!!
I never thought I'd say that I prefer books by a less cynical author!
I challenge you to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics, right-left, right-wrong.
Your argument is that if perfection is impossible in an aera, we can't grade something as more or less close to perfection! According to that "logic":
Since you can't cool anything to 0 K (absolute zero). Since that is the case, all termometers are irrelevant -- since perfection is impossible.
The specs on games these days are pretty insane compared to the average PC in the family home.
The idea with new games is to press the state of the art of graphics.
If you just want a good game experience then stick with the original U Tournament.:-)
(The problem with the original is that there are only three groups of people playing it now -- newbies, cheaters and very experienced players. The standard robots are more interesting than newbies and people that (with or without autoaim) can shoot 4 head shots in 2 seconds!)
I really waited for UT 2003. I hope 2004 is fun to play and not only looks good...
Trust me, there are plenty of biologists who think that Wilson shoulda stuck with fire ants.
Most critics of Wilson's "Sociobiology" I've seen (Lewontin, Rose, Gould, etc) seems to be more or less explicitly marxist. (And/or religious.)
Religious people (christans, marxists, etc) have problems of some kind with part of personality and intelligence being built in. (Don't explain -- I couldn't care less about old testament exegetics or the positions of young and old Marx.)
At least, the marxists are the only critics that I've seen. Can you give references to many others?
Anyway, the
criticism of Gould's books from prominent biologists should be much, much more than the criticism of Wilson's writing...
(Since it is outside their area I assume that few biologists have commented on the "mismeasure" book -- I just note that Gould was accused of doing straw man attacks by both
intelligence researchers and evolutionary biologists...)
There was a lot of
criticism of Gould, claiming he did straw man attacks from people like Ernst, George Williams, E O Wilson, Trivers, Maynard Smith, Hamilton.
Noone can force you to believe anything except by having the same thing repeated to you time and time again by someone you trust, from a very young age.
There is another group that have faith. Some mentally unstable people ("seekers") actively need a crutch and find religion.
I live in Sweden and I'm a hard line atheist. That make me unsual here, since most people here don't care enough about religion to have a considered opinion... (Less than 10% of the population go to church -- at all!)
When I had a vacation in Ireland the first time I was expecting to met a lot of religious nuts. Less than a few years before I went to Ireland, there was a vote on abortion and it was quite close (50/50).
But I didn't meet any religious nuts... people just hadn't thought about the problem and accepted what they had been taught as children. (Ireland probably isn't as homogenous today.)
I went to Ireland expecting to meet the "seeker" nutcases that use religion as an emotional crutch -- the kind you meet in university towns in Sweden -- but found people that grew up with religion and never questioned it, since noone discussed the subject. In fact, it was my first real meeting with religious people according to your "standard model"!
Your point is of course correct. But not relevant to my argument, which was that what I commented was stupid. (Try understanding the context before commenting.)
They will never be happy until they have a missile base and a McDonalds drive through on every chunk of rock in the solar system
That would be wonderful!
If US boosted enough material for military bases and for food production (remember -- McDonalds make their food out of local products!), they would have to build systems with low cost to orbit. Any university department could then send put instrument around any planet, which is the ideal situation.
But those cheap launch systems won't have anything to do with NASA... or maybe NASA will change now when they don't have to use their weight to kill any competition to the shuttle.
Guys, Apple is no more altruistic than Microsoft. Apple is only cool because they are the underdog.
Microsoft is not hated because they are unethical bastards, but because they are unethical condemned criminal monopolists that killed lots of competition by using that monopoly.
To add maiming to injury, Msoft seems to have bought the president administration to not even get a slap on their wrist after being found guilty!!
I half believe that the Open Software movement hadn't been half as strong if it was possible to compete with a monopoly. Now it is more or less the only game in town -- if you don't want to support criminals by working on their systems and hence make them more popular.
(-: Besides, it's probably against the law to be altruistic, unless you can convincingly claim to the share holders that it's a publicity stunts...:-)
Just leave work at work and enjoy doing outside things outside.
Personally, I loved taking my portable off for lunch, use mp3's on the machine with headphones and work until the battery was too low. Best and most productive work all day.
A job with flexible work hours is wonderful.:-)
Now, a job without flexible work time would be wonderful...:-(
The end of the Cold War definitely has put the role of the traditional Swedish military in question. The threat of an invasion is currently zero, and the only realistic way that could change would be a major and very sudden change in Russia.
That is obviously very unlikely...
Putin is obviously very democratic and Russia has been totally stable in the last century with no fast political changes...
Lots of things were acceptable not that long ago that aren't now.
Most of them are not acceptable now because we can afford to -- now... E.g., when we were poor in the west (60-70 years ago in many countries), lots of children worked here too.
Since we can't fix all the world's wrongs in other countries, what we can do is make certain the economic system is organized in the way that has proven to make the world a better place, in time.
This is just elaborating my point, which was that if Krugman saw a faster and better alternative, he'd proclaim that more often than he kicks at the Bush administration's economic.
(No, it doesn't work to share more equally -- that doesn't work well inside even a small country. If you want to contradict on this point, present a working alternative...)
Slashdot Mirror
But since I've already admitted that I'm stupid, I'll try a last time anyway...
Big advertisers pay a large sum of income of most magazines. The companies buying ads have total control of how they spend their ad money -- and getting good treatment in the articles and reviews is worth a lot of money to those companies.
Are you seriously expecting anyone to believe your claims that, given the above common interests, there is no influence?
(We're talking big advertisers here. Microsoft on "/." is hardly large.)
That you wrote a long and eloquent reply without answering that simple question makes me believe two things:
1. You do work for the press.
2. You're not going to answer the question.
Reading between the lines, those two points gives a very good answer! Thank you.
How much do ad budgets influence reviews (and other content)? No, I don't believe zero -- or 10 percent, for that matter.
I explicitly used software as an example and the previous discussion was about Mirosoft/SCO. There was no need to waste your time discussing hardware. (And, yes, obviously there are influencing factors from reviews of beta versions. Etc, etc. Not an answer.)
This when I gave an example (from middle of the '90s!!) when reviews and articles where totally different from both user experiences and columnists that could write freely... (I even started it with "I lost my innocence when"!) Search Oct-94 to Mar-95 on groups.google.com for "word 6" and "macintosh".
You are joking and/or condescending. Or just not answering a simple question with the tried and true method of starting a large discussion of other matters.
Tell us about the connection between size of ad budget and e.g. results on reviews...
I lost my innocence when Word 6 was released on the Mac and got good reviews in the trade rags -- while all Mac users hated it because it was both buggy and really slow. Word 6 was faster if you ran the Windows-version in VirtualPC (or what the emulator of the day was called; I talked to people that had tried but never tried).
The interesting thing was that the columnists in the Mac magazines hated it -- they had some deal wich didn't sign away their souls. If you're in the business, please inform me:
Can you still more or less trust the columnists in trade magazines or are they just supporting the ad sales team, too?
Wouldn't that be a wonderful (temporary) bug in slashcode, too? I am willing to implement the bug myself, just to see what grubs are found beneath the rocks...
Pretty please with lots of sugar Cowboy Neal et al?
To help Knuth finishing "The Art of .." the guerilla's goal should be to legalize research into stem cells!
Then Knuth could take a decade off and do something like TeX again. :-)
(And lots of other people like me will have time to read it again...)
And you have read those classified reports from the 60's and 70's -- and now commit a crime by writing about it on the net...
If we believed that we'd be as stupid as you -- if you told the truth... :-)
(Anyway, there has been enough classified reports leaked the last decades, that we with certainty can say that the information from the intelligence community often is wrong by a large factor, so arguably you'd not want to take big risks...)
This is the result of 30 seconds with Google.
The idea was to run stuff like tractors on hydrogen created from ethanol... :-)
In this case, "djeaux" bases his argument on that others are as bad as Gould was -- but repeatedly fails to give examples.
You didn't provide any support this time either for your claims regarding other researchers doing straw man attacks on Gould that were equally bad as Gould's own intellectually dishonest arguments... Get real -- when Gould did his terrible ad hominem attacks on Wilson in popular press (etc) his opinions were quite mainstream for academia.
I've only seen Gould's politics discussed regarding why Gould did nonserious straw man arguments (and claims of racism regarding intelligence researchers) -- not as ad hominem arguments. If there are other examples (as you repeatedly claim), please give references.
OK, that is your position. Let's take an example:
I'm fanatic about sushi. Since I'm a self-professed fanatic my opinions can be disregarded regarding, say, city planning?
You find more or less large amounts of politics everywhere. And some people stand mostly above it -- and some don't. Your theories that Gould was hounded by his evol biology critics in a way that was as intellectually dishonest as he himself do need support... something you refuse to give.
Again -- I've read people livid about his dishonest way of arguing, but I've not seen personal attacks without Gould starting.
Either support your claims that the evol biology critics of Gould acted at his low level -- or shut up. (As the US English idiom so non-charmingly put it: "S..t or get off the pot!")
(You didn't want to comment on that you claim that Gould misrepresents reality in his books -- which makes them uninteresting to people interested in learning about the world!?)
Note both that Gould generally refused to answer the specific points of critique and that your position more or less claims that his writing was to sell books ignoring reality -- which makes his writing uninteresting if you have the ambition to understand the world as well as possible!!
I never thought I'd say that I prefer books by a less cynical author!
Your argument is that if perfection is impossible in an aera, we can't grade something as more or less close to perfection! According to that "logic":
Since you can't cool anything to 0 K (absolute zero). Since that is the case, all termometers are irrelevant -- since perfection is impossible.
It might have been my attitude that made UT2K3 boring.
Instead of having fun I was looking over the differences compared with UT and writing a list of what kind of moves I needed to learn.
Maybe it was too close to the attitude I use for work. 1/2 :-)
But, then, lots of other people seem to have had my reaction.
If you just want a good game experience then stick with the original U Tournament. :-)
(The problem with the original is that there are only three groups of people playing it now -- newbies, cheaters and very experienced players. The standard robots are more interesting than newbies and people that (with or without autoaim) can shoot 4 head shots in 2 seconds!)
I really waited for UT 2003. I hope 2004 is fun to play and not only looks good...
Most critics of Wilson's "Sociobiology" I've seen (Lewontin, Rose, Gould, etc) seems to be more or less explicitly marxist. (And/or religious.)
Religious people (christans, marxists, etc) have problems of some kind with part of personality and intelligence being built in. (Don't explain -- I couldn't care less about old testament exegetics or the positions of young and old Marx.)
At least, the marxists are the only critics that I've seen. Can you give references to many others?
Anyway, the criticism of Gould's books from prominent biologists should be much, much more than the criticism of Wilson's writing...
(Since it is outside their area I assume that few biologists have commented on the "mismeasure" book -- I just note that Gould was accused of doing straw man attacks by both intelligence researchers and evolutionary biologists...)
There was a lot of criticism of Gould, claiming he did straw man attacks from people like Ernst, George Williams, E O Wilson, Trivers, Maynard Smith, Hamilton.
I live in Sweden and I'm a hard line atheist. That make me unsual here, since most people here don't care enough about religion to have a considered opinion... (Less than 10% of the population go to church -- at all!)
When I had a vacation in Ireland the first time I was expecting to met a lot of religious nuts. Less than a few years before I went to Ireland, there was a vote on abortion and it was quite close (50/50).
But I didn't meet any religious nuts... people just hadn't thought about the problem and accepted what they had been taught as children. (Ireland probably isn't as homogenous today.)
I went to Ireland expecting to meet the "seeker" nutcases that use religion as an emotional crutch -- the kind you meet in university towns in Sweden -- but found people that grew up with religion and never questioned it, since noone discussed the subject. In fact, it was my first real meeting with religious people according to your "standard model"!
Your point is of course correct. But not relevant to my argument, which was that what I commented was stupid. (Try understanding the context before commenting.)
(-: I think a less than charming US English idiom is relevant here -- "dumbass"! :-)
If US boosted enough material for military bases and for food production (remember -- McDonalds make their food out of local products!), they would have to build systems with low cost to orbit. Any university department could then send put instrument around any planet, which is the ideal situation.
But those cheap launch systems won't have anything to do with NASA... or maybe NASA will change now when they don't have to use their weight to kill any competition to the shuttle.
To add maiming to injury, Msoft seems to have bought the president administration to not even get a slap on their wrist after being found guilty!!
I half believe that the Open Software movement hadn't been half as strong if it was possible to compete with a monopoly. Now it is more or less the only game in town -- if you don't want to support criminals by working on their systems and hence make them more popular.
(-: Besides, it's probably against the law to be altruistic, unless you can convincingly claim to the share holders that it's a publicity stunts... :-)
A job with flexible work hours is wonderful. :-)
Now, a job without flexible work time would be wonderful... :-(
Putin is obviously very democratic and Russia has been totally stable in the last century with no fast political changes ...
Since we can't fix all the world's wrongs in other countries, what we can do is make certain the economic system is organized in the way that has proven to make the world a better place, in time.
This is just elaborating my point, which was that if Krugman saw a faster and better alternative, he'd proclaim that more often than he kicks at the Bush administration's economic.
(No, it doesn't work to share more equally -- that doesn't work well inside even a small country. If you want to contradict on this point, present a working alternative...)