We're with you in scoffing at the idea that Hollywood churns out Charlie Kaufmans or William Faulkners -- but it's worth pointing out that movies based on video games have been, almost universally, excruciatingly bad.
Even next to such pedestrian fare as the run-of-the-mill Ahnold ouvre... Well, "Kindergarten Cop" would pretty well kick the pants of any "Warcraft" title. Not to mention the painful voice acting.
(My choice for a model gaming company in this sense would be the pre-MS Bungie. Marathon Series. Myth and Myth II. They had the production values in order and did things right.)
You'd expect, for example, one month before they're due to ship, Apple would know enough about the final design to give us some idea of battery life on the things.
Nail on the head there. That was the suspicious detail. The elements of the press that are actually still reporting (as opposed to parroting press releases with a smidge of blog-level speculation or spin like the whinging about the MacBook name) did mention the omission, too. That whiff was in the air.
We have good reason to be skeptical about the first generation of these laptops. The PowerBook 5300 wasn't under Jobs, but it was the first laptop with the new PPC chip back in the day -- and it was rushed to market because Apple's former hegemony in the portable market had crashed due to a lack of models for a couple of years. The 5300 was a lemon. There's history here.
Steve J's keynote sure seems to have rushed the MacBook announcement. He wanted to promote the availability (orderability) of both models during the speech, and he did it even if they weren't ready. Simple as that. And maybe he should get called on it.
(But I'd still be in line to buy one once they're out. Rrr. RDF, RDF.)
Nintendo = Japanese company. They heavily advertise and have a very deep market penetration there. Microsoft = American, they heavily advertise and have great market penetration here.
MS fully intended the 360 to at least crack the Japanese market. It just hasn't. We're not even talking about people buying the system; we're talking about whether they're even curious about it on launch day, yes? And they're not.
If you go to a game store here you see the exact opposite. The 360 has people huddled around and fighting over the chance to play COD2, and the DS is laying around unplayed.
Judging by my kids and their friends, the reason they're looking at the 360 in the store is because their parents aren't going to be spending that kind of coin. The circle around my kids, anyway, definitely do own the DSes though. Because I could afford it. (And honestly because I wanted to send mail to my kids in Animal Crossing. They're 12, it's good to communicate.)
Had a plumber in a while ago who was a real talker and a bit of a flake. While he was under the kitchen sink fixing my bad work, he saw that the iMac on the low counter there was showing iTunes where the kids had left it.
The plumber's take on the RIAA and those horrible pirates was:
People discovered that they could do all these cool things with song files -- remix, carry them in their mp3 players, rip, burn -- and there was an enormous demand to do those things. The pressure of that demand caused all sorts of leaks in the RIAA's old pipe full of money.
The RIAA, naturally, started running around in a panic trying to plug the leaks. For every one they plugged, they got more; the demand created that much pressure, and it's not going to be possible to sue every pirate or plug every spot in an entire pipe. It stops being a pipe at that point and turns into something else.
What they needed to do was add a release valve that they could control, but they didn't want to do that. It took third parties like Jobs with iTunes to show them how the pressure could go in a place they directed it. Now that they've let a bit of the pressure out, they're still trying to plug holes though. They don't see that they should concentrate on a workable new system that gets people the water they need rather than setting up a bunch of jury-rigged patches for problems with the old one.
He also included a choice word or two about the "plumber's crack" in the RIAA's thinking, but I won't repeat that here.;-)
They aren't asking for the tape to solve a crime. They are asking for it to see if maybe a crime could have been committed. That is evil.
What they're doing is trying to make the argument that a crime hypothetically could be committed under circumstances like those on your security tape. It's like they're looking at the tapes from Pump-n-Go's chain of convenience stores and saying "Man, all those Snickers bars are there for the taking -- we have to intervene as a society to prevent shoplifting."
This log request isn't about showing that particular kids saw particular sites. It's an attempt to make the argument that the government has a "clear and compelling interest" in enforcing (already-determined-to-be-unconstitutional) anti-pRon internet laws. Justice is trying to show that ordinary searches get back dirty sites so often that the government has to intervene -- you knew it was coming -- to protect the children.
They seem to have missed the other half of those earlier court decisions, in which the two earlier laws were shot down because less restrictive approaches than requiring a credit card to get at stuff were available. The idea of minimal intrusion isn't on these people's radar, not when it comes to personal rights. Here they are, asking to see every search on Google in an open-ended fishing expedition for Crissakes. Man.
(I'm still trying to get my head around the time and money spent on analysts [or developers or whoever] just to determine which sites are the dirty ones in the search returns. Way to spend my taxes, small government conservatives. How much money did Ashcroft spend to cover the torso of that statue behind him during press conferences, again?)
"We are trying to sell for as low as $200, but that seems unlikely, so we're determining whether $225 or $250 is a better price point; we're just going to tell you under $300 so that when we announce it at $225 or $250 you'll be happily surprised. (Plus if we're lucky enough to get the manufacturing costs low enough to sell it at $200, you'll probably mess your pants)"
In terms of a) stressing the characteristics of the system that have to do with game play and b) pitching their product at a price I can imagine paying, Nintendo's the only console maker that's even in the game at this point. If there's any decent lineup of games at launch, they're going to get my Christmas business -- for my to-be-13-year-old kids.
They're the company that's trying something interesting, and they're also the company that isn't overreaching the price point by $200. It's not a difficult choice.
PRon has always cut across political lines in peculiar ways. Gore's "dirty lyrics" paean to socially conservative fears comes to mind.
This would be a good little example of how the ends don't justify the means -- a point W. Bush and company seem to be particularly vague about. I don't seem to recall Clinton authorizing extraconstitutional NSA activities, either, come to think of it. Funny thing.
Personally, I'm glad that there's a group willing to defend our rights no matter who's President at the time.
The ACLU also defended Rush Limbaugh against what it considered to be government intrusion into his medical records -- you recall his Oxycontin "doctor shopping" case. They've represented unpopular opinions at most points on the political spectrum.
Yes, it's a group that operates according to principle and not partisan positioning. That earns it the eternal enmity of those whose real credo is maintaining the status quo in order to keep a grip on power. (Let's all take a moment to consider which of our two parties essentially supports the ACLU, and which made being a "card carrying member" of the ACLU a dirty epithet in the 1988 election cycle.)
(The parent poster missed the distinction between the law that was passed and the overreaching attempt to get Google's records, of course.)
I own a Dimage Z5 -- a cool design with a nice mix of features, including a 12x optical zoom with image stablization which I appreciate for nature shots. Having said that, it was a camera with some conspicuous tradeoffs. The default image settings simply weren't sharp enough, and bumping them up meant leaving the auto settings which you sometimes do want for snap situations. The manual focus system was worthless. And so on.
A few months after I bought my Z5, Canon effectively leapfrogged it with their own new IS model, also using AAs which was a selling point for me. Maybe Konica Minolta drove that new model some, so they had their positive competitive effect on the market, but they didn't have a clear winner in my book for more than a few months, and I'm someone who actually bought their product.
They had their own way of doing things, though. The design of the Z5 is one of those ones you immediately recognize as having some thought to it, even if you don't like it in use (which I did). You hate to see another independent voice vanish.
The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.
One imagines the dedicated team of talented evaluators at Justice combing the list of returned sites, carefully categorizing them as pRon or non-pRon. No waste of tax dollars there -- noooo. Glad to see we're spending our dollars on the big issues that face us as a society.
The Supreme Court decision back in June 04 went back, again, to the first amendment. The series of decisions made over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) and the earlier Communications Decency Act, came back to the laws not being "narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest" and to whether less restrictive alternatives were available.
In response to those two reservations, Bush and company are apparently looking to prove how very compelling their government interest is -- by showing that kids are awash in the stuff on Google. Apparently the part where they get access to this enormous, open-ended source of information about searches doesn't set off any bells with them about the other half of that decision -- where the idea was to minimize the restrictiveness of the law and keep government intrusion to a minimum.
These were the "small government" conservatives, right?
Since we appear to be having the grammar discussion despite CmdrTaco's request...
Makes me laugh. I had an old girlfriend who pulled that kind of thing on me.
Taco basically spends a big chunk of his text dismissing problems he has with grammar, coming across as incredibly defensive, and then says that's not something he wants to talk about. Guess what -- he gets tons of feedback about this, because it's obviously a conspicuous weakness of his, and he's prickly about it. Belittling his critics was a try at a preemptive strike.
But at the end of the day, I think he's right: the meaning is more important than avoiding any given spelling or grammatical error.
Remind me again: Why do we have to choose between the two? It's only five or six sentences, you know?
There's a reason Taco's the guy people go after over stuff like this. Bluntly, it's because he's not that competent and he comes across as a dick about it.
We'd all accept a certain "raw"-ness. Taco, as an editor, is long since past "raw" and into the area of sleepwalking. He doesn't give a rip about whether he's posting a dupe, putting stories that are basically trolls on the home page, or posting stuff he hasn't re-read. He's defensive about not being able (or willing) to get those things right for whatever reasons, and he puts up the typical "Geeks are cool because they're SO about the content" screen to cover his ego. That's what this home page story was about, and it's just dripping with dismissive arrogance.
All's I'm saying is, try doing your job well before you get all dismissive with your critics. Taco's not making that effort.
Even assuming it's not very important - usually, I admit, it isn't - it does take some time to parse incorrectly formed sentences.
Like I said, it's not any one thing -- it's the weight of all those little "I don't care" slip-ups put together that shoots the site in the foot.
I mean, the guy just wrote a front page story about how much care he takes in posting stories, and it's basically riddled with signs of laziness and indifference. Think he could have bothered to look it over a little?
He wants us to pay to see those goof-ups early, too. That's where I get off the train.
Essentially Taco's argument here is that the site started as his blog, and that he wants to continue to regard it as the equivalent (to use your analogy) to a cable access talk show, rather than a polished source of news.
There's a middle ground, but the effort to clean up language would be so very, very beneath him. Apparently he wouldn't care how the picture quality was on his cable access station, and it's so very cool and informal of him not to give a rip, because he's really a content man.
I'm not a paying subscriber. Paying for a service entails certain expectations that Slashdot isn't meeting at the moment. The glaringly apparent laziness of the editors is the biggest mark against the site.
It's not just the "to long" business. Several of Taco's sentences show lapses in basic editorial skill that stick out like that proverbial sore thumb. A quotation at the end of a sentence almost never strands the period outside the quotes, and so on. These are basic matters of editorial style, or really of editorial consciousness. Anyone who's written a college-level paper shouldn't make those mistakes.
No single minor gaffe makes a story worthless, but the cumulative effect vitiates the site's attempt to show any sort of professional face to the world.
If you're already paring back links and language, how hard would it be to pay a tiny bit of attention to language? You've only got five or six sentences to deal with, having pared things back as you describe, but the stuff on the home page is routinely riddled with phrasing and spelling worthy of middle school. That looks amateurish and degrades the site.
Posts are a different matter, people can be more casual there. The stories ought to be clean.
Apple's first PPC laptap, the 5300, was a disaster. They'd had a huge lapse with the wait from the old 040 chip laptops -- "Duos" being the last of that breed and the first docking laptops around IIRC -- and the new PPC machines, and then the 5300 was a lemon.
As a test of the difference between Steve Jobs and Gil Amelio, the MacBook is interesting. We've already had the slight delay -- you know Jobs wanted to announce the MacBook was orderable during his keynote too. The name is lame, in a way that's decidedly not Apple's style.
I don't know. Seems like one to wait on, but I'm tempted. So tempted. RDF... taking... control... must... fight... the power...
Reagan couldn't fill Eisenhower's shoes, let alone Ben Franklin's.
What are we come to? Even if you believed wholeheartedly in everything Reagan stood for, there's no way you could make an argument that he was anything like the epochal figure Ben Franklin was for more than one area of our national life.
I guess Reagan was at least known as a minor actor (and the McCarthyist head of the Screen Actor's Guild), so he did at least have one other mark by his name. Next to "First person to map the gulf currents" -- one of Franklin's lesser accomplishments -- how does "Bedtime for Bonzo" stack up, though?
That was a pretty charming lapse in the parent post -- the French court didn't support England's rabble of colonists out of idealism, they did it for reasons of state. But:
They then found themselves with a bunch of veteran soldiers coming home having learned from their American comrades the importance of words like 'liberte', 'egalite' and 'fraternite'. Whoops.
To suggest that the French revolution began because of returning soldiers who'd seen it all in America would be a mistake. You want that model, go look at ancient Rome; the collapse of the Republic is punctuated by a succession of returning armies lining the halls of government and agitating for land grants. French events were a heck of a lot more complex than that, and the inheritance from America happened more in the Salons than in any military camps.
Franklin was involved with a succession of aristocratic French ladies during the revolution. He was getting around.
The letters back and forth with his various amours aren't explicit, but Ben was no prude, not by a mile, at any point in his life. (You're right that he was, er, active as a young man; he visited "houses of ill repute" in England.)
For that matter he married in a relatively informal way -- Deborah Reid and he sort of moved in together and presented it as a marriage, and so it was accepted as a common law thing. Not that unusual back then.
Franklin didn't take the aphorisms and advice presented in Poor Richard's all that seriously, really. He was printing the books to make money, and the little sayings got readership. There was lively competition among the rival Almanacs back then. He also wrote scurrilous stuff under pseudonyms in his newspapers, with the same sort of open-minded sense of fun. Very Jonathan Swift-ish.
The result is that his stuff is fun, basically, instead of coming across as prating moralism from a stuffed shirt.
The contrast with today's hypocritical moral scolds -- William Bennett, we do remember your gambling habit -- couldn't be more striking. Franklin could think for himself, and his morality wasn't a matter of social conventions. (When quaker groups were agitating against slavery in 1790, Franklin backed them as one of the last acts of his public life.) Bennett et al, on the other hand, are all about reinforcing norms by buttressing them with "the accepted version" -- meaning the stale, lifeless version -- of various moral parables. Death to read to your kids, just lifeless.
Happened to pick up a copy of "The First American," by H.W. Brands, a couple of years back. Excellent biography.
The book spends its preface on Franklin's mid-career appearance for a sort of intellectual pillory in "the cockpit" in London. The sort of public roasting one got from the establishment powers there was accepted to be the dishing of a person's public career. For Franklin that supposed disaster was a turning point; he'd been desperately trying to get the London establishment to understand the point of view of the colonies, and getting spite back for his efforts made him ask what he really was, if not a loyal subject of the King. His answer was that he was an American -- and what did that mean, exactly?
I haven't read the more popular book, but Brands's was excellent, starting with that decision to phrase it around that moment when his identity really changed. It does justice to his intellectual pursuits -- chimneys, electricity, the "harmonium" -- but it's mostly shaped by his public life, in the outlines.
You use the word "match" interestingly -- in a way that lets us know you aren't that familiar with baseball's more esoteric statistical flights. They're "games," not "matches," to start. But more to the point, baseball keeps stats no other sport can touch for detail. Which means --
Since the match results are public knowledge and the mathematical methods to work out the stats are both public knowledge and trivial, the result is public knowledge and can't be owned.
-- which means your point about the methods being "trivial" is far from true. Examples:
Real baseball wonks like to keep track of such stats as how often a player hit a fly ball, a ground ball, a ball to short left, a ball to deep right, a ball with a certain trajectory, and so on. That's for batting. For fielding the game used to maintain a simple percentage representing plays in which someone participating and errors they committed, but the list of fielding stats (still in very active developement) has increased dramatically to include "range factor" at first (how many plays someone makes per game on average) , adjusted range factors that look at the balls hit toward them (compensating for any tendency of a pitcher to encourage or discourage balls hit to third base for example), ratings of throwing arms, and so on...
This is a set of information that, until very recently, baseball didn't have around. And before someone says that fantasy leagues don't use the more esoteric stuff -- they're exactly the people who usually want it. It was a group of hard core fans, rallying around the whole Bill James "baseball abstract" "sabermetrics" way of thinking, that created a demand for the welter of new information, and who initially organized people to gather that info.
The effort that goes into gathering those stats is far, far, far from "trivial." It takes an army of folks scoring and tracking and so on, and lots of technology, to get that data down and to keep it in a usuable form. That Barry Bonds hit 70 home runs is public information, sure. That he pulls fastballs X percentage of the time, or hits a certain percentage from certain areas of the strike zone, or tends to watch pitches at a certain pitch count in his at bats, those are not immediately obvious from the usual box score. With the trajectory of batted balls, even the methods used to control records of that would not be apparent to Joe fan. MLB (or whoever) invests a lot of effort to get that information.
From the MLB perspective, individual teams also invest serious money in trying to develop their own stat models as a competitive advantage.
I'm not sure where the line is, and MLB probably needs to find a way to sell this to its fans better. Alienating fantasy leagues is idiotic. That's their "base." But this ain't as simple as trying to copyright obvious public domain information.
May I please have more cooling rather than less?
on
New iMac disassembled
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The G5 iMacs have also supposedly suffered from a rash of "bulging capacitor" and heat-related problems. The anecdotal stuff I've heard runs from thinking it's simple heat management to talk about power surges and so on... Kind of disturbing.
If we have to choose between quiet and cool -- and I'd rather not, but this design has a history -- I'll lean toward the machine that doesn't croak six months after I buy it. Better still, waiting six or nine months on this model in its new incarnation seems wise.
(Or the MacBook instead, but no guarantees there either...)
Slashdot Mirror
Even next to such pedestrian fare as the run-of-the-mill Ahnold ouvre... Well, "Kindergarten Cop" would pretty well kick the pants of any "Warcraft" title. Not to mention the painful voice acting.
(My choice for a model gaming company in this sense would be the pre-MS Bungie. Marathon Series. Myth and Myth II. They had the production values in order and did things right.)
Nail on the head there. That was the suspicious detail. The elements of the press that are actually still reporting (as opposed to parroting press releases with a smidge of blog-level speculation or spin like the whinging about the MacBook name) did mention the omission, too. That whiff was in the air.
We have good reason to be skeptical about the first generation of these laptops. The PowerBook 5300 wasn't under Jobs, but it was the first laptop with the new PPC chip back in the day -- and it was rushed to market because Apple's former hegemony in the portable market had crashed due to a lack of models for a couple of years. The 5300 was a lemon. There's history here.
Steve J's keynote sure seems to have rushed the MacBook announcement. He wanted to promote the availability (orderability) of both models during the speech, and he did it even if they weren't ready. Simple as that. And maybe he should get called on it.
(But I'd still be in line to buy one once they're out. Rrr. RDF, RDF.)
MS fully intended the 360 to at least crack the Japanese market. It just hasn't. We're not even talking about people buying the system; we're talking about whether they're even curious about it on launch day, yes? And they're not.
If you go to a game store here you see the exact opposite. The 360 has people huddled around and fighting over the chance to play COD2, and the DS is laying around unplayed.
Judging by my kids and their friends, the reason they're looking at the 360 in the store is because their parents aren't going to be spending that kind of coin. The circle around my kids, anyway, definitely do own the DSes though. Because I could afford it. (And honestly because I wanted to send mail to my kids in Animal Crossing. They're 12, it's good to communicate.)
The plumber's take on the RIAA and those horrible pirates was:
People discovered that they could do all these cool things with song files -- remix, carry them in their mp3 players, rip, burn -- and there was an enormous demand to do those things. The pressure of that demand caused all sorts of leaks in the RIAA's old pipe full of money.
The RIAA, naturally, started running around in a panic trying to plug the leaks. For every one they plugged, they got more; the demand created that much pressure, and it's not going to be possible to sue every pirate or plug every spot in an entire pipe. It stops being a pipe at that point and turns into something else.
What they needed to do was add a release valve that they could control, but they didn't want to do that. It took third parties like Jobs with iTunes to show them how the pressure could go in a place they directed it. Now that they've let a bit of the pressure out, they're still trying to plug holes though. They don't see that they should concentrate on a workable new system that gets people the water they need rather than setting up a bunch of jury-rigged patches for problems with the old one.
He also included a choice word or two about the "plumber's crack" in the RIAA's thinking, but I won't repeat that here. ;-)
What they're doing is trying to make the argument that a crime hypothetically could be committed under circumstances like those on your security tape. It's like they're looking at the tapes from Pump-n-Go's chain of convenience stores and saying "Man, all those Snickers bars are there for the taking -- we have to intervene as a society to prevent shoplifting."
This log request isn't about showing that particular kids saw particular sites. It's an attempt to make the argument that the government has a "clear and compelling interest" in enforcing (already-determined-to-be-unconstitutional) anti-pRon internet laws. Justice is trying to show that ordinary searches get back dirty sites so often that the government has to intervene -- you knew it was coming -- to protect the children.
They seem to have missed the other half of those earlier court decisions, in which the two earlier laws were shot down because less restrictive approaches than requiring a credit card to get at stuff were available. The idea of minimal intrusion isn't on these people's radar, not when it comes to personal rights. Here they are, asking to see every search on Google in an open-ended fishing expedition for Crissakes. Man.
(I'm still trying to get my head around the time and money spent on analysts [or developers or whoever] just to determine which sites are the dirty ones in the search returns. Way to spend my taxes, small government conservatives. How much money did Ashcroft spend to cover the torso of that statue behind him during press conferences, again?)
You're repeating talking points.
In terms of a) stressing the characteristics of the system that have to do with game play and b) pitching their product at a price I can imagine paying, Nintendo's the only console maker that's even in the game at this point. If there's any decent lineup of games at launch, they're going to get my Christmas business -- for my to-be-13-year-old kids.
They're the company that's trying something interesting, and they're also the company that isn't overreaching the price point by $200. It's not a difficult choice.
This would be a good little example of how the ends don't justify the means -- a point W. Bush and company seem to be particularly vague about. I don't seem to recall Clinton authorizing extraconstitutional NSA activities, either, come to think of it. Funny thing.
The ACLU also defended Rush Limbaugh against what it considered to be government intrusion into his medical records -- you recall his Oxycontin "doctor shopping" case. They've represented unpopular opinions at most points on the political spectrum.
Yes, it's a group that operates according to principle and not partisan positioning. That earns it the eternal enmity of those whose real credo is maintaining the status quo in order to keep a grip on power. (Let's all take a moment to consider which of our two parties essentially supports the ACLU, and which made being a "card carrying member" of the ACLU a dirty epithet in the 1988 election cycle.)
(The parent poster missed the distinction between the law that was passed and the overreaching attempt to get Google's records, of course.)
A few months after I bought my Z5, Canon effectively leapfrogged it with their own new IS model, also using AAs which was a selling point for me. Maybe Konica Minolta drove that new model some, so they had their positive competitive effect on the market, but they didn't have a clear winner in my book for more than a few months, and I'm someone who actually bought their product.
They had their own way of doing things, though. The design of the Z5 is one of those ones you immediately recognize as having some thought to it, even if you don't like it in use (which I did). You hate to see another independent voice vanish.
One imagines the dedicated team of talented evaluators at Justice combing the list of returned sites, carefully categorizing them as pRon or non-pRon. No waste of tax dollars there -- noooo. Glad to see we're spending our dollars on the big issues that face us as a society.
The Supreme Court decision back in June 04 went back, again, to the first amendment. The series of decisions made over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) and the earlier Communications Decency Act, came back to the laws not being "narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest" and to whether less restrictive alternatives were available.
In response to those two reservations, Bush and company are apparently looking to prove how very compelling their government interest is -- by showing that kids are awash in the stuff on Google. Apparently the part where they get access to this enormous, open-ended source of information about searches doesn't set off any bells with them about the other half of that decision -- where the idea was to minimize the restrictiveness of the law and keep government intrusion to a minimum.
These were the "small government" conservatives, right?
Makes me laugh. I had an old girlfriend who pulled that kind of thing on me.
Taco basically spends a big chunk of his text dismissing problems he has with grammar, coming across as incredibly defensive, and then says that's not something he wants to talk about. Guess what -- he gets tons of feedback about this, because it's obviously a conspicuous weakness of his, and he's prickly about it. Belittling his critics was a try at a preemptive strike.
But at the end of the day, I think he's right: the meaning is more important than avoiding any given spelling or grammatical error.
Remind me again: Why do we have to choose between the two? It's only five or six sentences, you know?
There's a reason Taco's the guy people go after over stuff like this. Bluntly, it's because he's not that competent and he comes across as a dick about it.
We'd all accept a certain "raw"-ness. Taco, as an editor, is long since past "raw" and into the area of sleepwalking. He doesn't give a rip about whether he's posting a dupe, putting stories that are basically trolls on the home page, or posting stuff he hasn't re-read. He's defensive about not being able (or willing) to get those things right for whatever reasons, and he puts up the typical "Geeks are cool because they're SO about the content" screen to cover his ego. That's what this home page story was about, and it's just dripping with dismissive arrogance.
All's I'm saying is, try doing your job well before you get all dismissive with your critics. Taco's not making that effort.
Like I said, it's not any one thing -- it's the weight of all those little "I don't care" slip-ups put together that shoots the site in the foot.
I mean, the guy just wrote a front page story about how much care he takes in posting stories, and it's basically riddled with signs of laziness and indifference. Think he could have bothered to look it over a little?
He wants us to pay to see those goof-ups early, too. That's where I get off the train.
Exactly. Dead fricking on.
Essentially Taco's argument here is that the site started as his blog, and that he wants to continue to regard it as the equivalent (to use your analogy) to a cable access talk show, rather than a polished source of news.
There's a middle ground, but the effort to clean up language would be so very, very beneath him. Apparently he wouldn't care how the picture quality was on his cable access station, and it's so very cool and informal of him not to give a rip, because he's really a content man.
I'm not a paying subscriber. Paying for a service entails certain expectations that Slashdot isn't meeting at the moment. The glaringly apparent laziness of the editors is the biggest mark against the site.
No single minor gaffe makes a story worthless, but the cumulative effect vitiates the site's attempt to show any sort of professional face to the world.
If you're already paring back links and language, how hard would it be to pay a tiny bit of attention to language? You've only got five or six sentences to deal with, having pared things back as you describe, but the stuff on the home page is routinely riddled with phrasing and spelling worthy of middle school. That looks amateurish and degrades the site.
Posts are a different matter, people can be more casual there. The stories ought to be clean.
The "desk lamp" iMac design hasn't been around for a long while now. Yeah, boy, that flat screen sure is novel; nobody sees the advantages of that...
The G5 model has no tray to catch drool in, even. Slot loading drive, on the side.
As a test of the difference between Steve Jobs and Gil Amelio, the MacBook is interesting. We've already had the slight delay -- you know Jobs wanted to announce the MacBook was orderable during his keynote too. The name is lame, in a way that's decidedly not Apple's style.
I don't know. Seems like one to wait on, but I'm tempted. So tempted. RDF... taking... control... must... fight... the power...
What are we come to? Even if you believed wholeheartedly in everything Reagan stood for, there's no way you could make an argument that he was anything like the epochal figure Ben Franklin was for more than one area of our national life.
I guess Reagan was at least known as a minor actor (and the McCarthyist head of the Screen Actor's Guild), so he did at least have one other mark by his name. Next to "First person to map the gulf currents" -- one of Franklin's lesser accomplishments -- how does "Bedtime for Bonzo" stack up, though?
Yeesh.
They then found themselves with a bunch of veteran soldiers coming home having learned from their American comrades the importance of words like 'liberte', 'egalite' and 'fraternite'. Whoops.
To suggest that the French revolution began because of returning soldiers who'd seen it all in America would be a mistake. You want that model, go look at ancient Rome; the collapse of the Republic is punctuated by a succession of returning armies lining the halls of government and agitating for land grants. French events were a heck of a lot more complex than that, and the inheritance from America happened more in the Salons than in any military camps.
The letters back and forth with his various amours aren't explicit, but Ben was no prude, not by a mile, at any point in his life. (You're right that he was, er, active as a young man; he visited "houses of ill repute" in England.)
For that matter he married in a relatively informal way -- Deborah Reid and he sort of moved in together and presented it as a marriage, and so it was accepted as a common law thing. Not that unusual back then.
The result is that his stuff is fun, basically, instead of coming across as prating moralism from a stuffed shirt.
The contrast with today's hypocritical moral scolds -- William Bennett, we do remember your gambling habit -- couldn't be more striking. Franklin could think for himself, and his morality wasn't a matter of social conventions. (When quaker groups were agitating against slavery in 1790, Franklin backed them as one of the last acts of his public life.) Bennett et al, on the other hand, are all about reinforcing norms by buttressing them with "the accepted version" -- meaning the stale, lifeless version -- of various moral parables. Death to read to your kids, just lifeless.
The book spends its preface on Franklin's mid-career appearance for a sort of intellectual pillory in "the cockpit" in London. The sort of public roasting one got from the establishment powers there was accepted to be the dishing of a person's public career. For Franklin that supposed disaster was a turning point; he'd been desperately trying to get the London establishment to understand the point of view of the colonies, and getting spite back for his efforts made him ask what he really was, if not a loyal subject of the King. His answer was that he was an American -- and what did that mean, exactly?
I haven't read the more popular book, but Brands's was excellent, starting with that decision to phrase it around that moment when his identity really changed. It does justice to his intellectual pursuits -- chimneys, electricity, the "harmonium" -- but it's mostly shaped by his public life, in the outlines.
-- which means your point about the methods being "trivial" is far from true. Examples:
Real baseball wonks like to keep track of such stats as how often a player hit a fly ball, a ground ball, a ball to short left, a ball to deep right, a ball with a certain trajectory, and so on. That's for batting. For fielding the game used to maintain a simple percentage representing plays in which someone participating and errors they committed, but the list of fielding stats (still in very active developement) has increased dramatically to include "range factor" at first (how many plays someone makes per game on average) , adjusted range factors that look at the balls hit toward them (compensating for any tendency of a pitcher to encourage or discourage balls hit to third base for example), ratings of throwing arms, and so on...
This is a set of information that, until very recently, baseball didn't have around. And before someone says that fantasy leagues don't use the more esoteric stuff -- they're exactly the people who usually want it. It was a group of hard core fans, rallying around the whole Bill James "baseball abstract" "sabermetrics" way of thinking, that created a demand for the welter of new information, and who initially organized people to gather that info.
The effort that goes into gathering those stats is far, far, far from "trivial." It takes an army of folks scoring and tracking and so on, and lots of technology, to get that data down and to keep it in a usuable form. That Barry Bonds hit 70 home runs is public information, sure. That he pulls fastballs X percentage of the time, or hits a certain percentage from certain areas of the strike zone, or tends to watch pitches at a certain pitch count in his at bats, those are not immediately obvious from the usual box score. With the trajectory of batted balls, even the methods used to control records of that would not be apparent to Joe fan. MLB (or whoever) invests a lot of effort to get that information.
From the MLB perspective, individual teams also invest serious money in trying to develop their own stat models as a competitive advantage.
I'm not sure where the line is, and MLB probably needs to find a way to sell this to its fans better. Alienating fantasy leagues is idiotic. That's their "base." But this ain't as simple as trying to copyright obvious public domain information.
If we have to choose between quiet and cool -- and I'd rather not, but this design has a history -- I'll lean toward the machine that doesn't croak six months after I buy it. Better still, waiting six or nine months on this model in its new incarnation seems wise.
(Or the MacBook instead, but no guarantees there either...)