Well, maybe not this deep in the thread, where people won't see it. And maybe not this week, when I look to be running in circles on a few stories all due at about the same time. But I'd be happy to do some sort of extended Q&A here.
(I'm not cool enough to do an AMA on Reddit, right?:)
I didn't mention that because I don't buy that as a cause. For one thing, if you think the Post is that much of a liberal hangout, try asking around, say, Daily Kos about Post editorials and op-eds--or how the paper covered the prelude and start of the war in Iraq a decade ago.
For another, have you looked at the political demographics of the Washington area? I don't think tilting to the left would lose you that many readers here.
Thanks, man! I was only able to get that address because nobody else was using the twp.com domain for anything--and the alternative was using the Notes system the Post only managed to put down earlier this year.
Says who? If VLC were using any licensed DVD playback code, it wouldn't have the option of ignoring region codes (granted, newer drives make it harder to defeat that) or doing any of the other things that authorized DVD apps can't do. Further, I can assure you that I didn't compile libdvdcss on my Mac to get VLC to play any DVDs.
I don't think it's illegal myself (IANAL, but who in this thread is?), even subject to DMCA logic. It's not “primarily designed or produced” to play DVDs and has more than "limited commercially significant purpose” besides playing DVDs. But I would not be remotely surprised if somebody in the entertainment industry tried to bring a case against it anyway. Like I wrote in the linked article: If a printer manufacturer can try to use the DMCA to put a manufacturer of ink cartridges out of business, why wouldn't a movie studio try to nail VLC as a DVD-cracking tool?
My take was that they were trying to pull an Apple--they invited only a select few people to a splashy launch event in the hope they'd get some advance buzz, but then they forget that Apple product-launch events also generally include prices, ship dates, and the chance to do a hands-on inspection of the product. That did not go over well.
(FWIW, they didn't send me a review unit either, but I was hardly alone in being shut out. I wound up buying one at a Microsoft Store to write my review, then returning it two weeks later.)
To any tech journalists upset that Apple isn't spoon-feeding them product news: Get out. Just leave the business. Please?
Seriously, if you don't know to do your own digging for a story or don't want to, you're in the wrong line of work. And there are plenty of other people who would gladly take your place.
You should know soon enough--although the administration doesn't want the recipients of NSLs getting too specific, the FBI has to cough up a yearly total. It provided a count for 2011 (16,511 NSLs, covering 7,201 people) on April 30 of last year, so if they stick to that timing we should get last year's total in another month or so.
Some smaller newspapers have switched to Facebook-only commenting (here's one example, the Fort Meyers News-Press) because their old systems allowed anonymity without accountability, and they felt it easier to hand the job over to Facebook than develop something better in-house. I think that's a mistake--if you want to outsource your comments system, you could use Disqus or other services that police spam but permit persistent pseudonyms--but it's a real trend, or at least a trendlet.
The original purpose of Facebook, AIUI, was to help Harvard students hook up. Its business model does, indeed, providing a large and defined audience to potential advertisers--but people's names are the least of it. To a marketer, somebody's name is less useful than their address, their household income, the car in the driveway, the phone in the pocket, etc.
As for G+, I think its real purpose at the moment is to peel people away from Facebook.
I spent about 17 years at the Post, not 10. But thanks for spelling my last name right. As for the rest... I've read your comment twice, and I still don't know what point you're trying to make. Maybe those IR classes fogged up my brain too badly.
If you read what the top executives at Facebook say--and if you then spend some time talking on background with some of them--it's clear that this company wants to become the layer of identity or authentication that it apparently feels should have been put into the Internet's original architecture. (I linked to that Vint Cerf interview because it has him explaining, at about 6:40 in, that the Internet needs identifiers but not fixed identities... oh, and because the video features me bantering onstage with Vint Cerf.) Facebook Connect logins and Facebook social plug-ins exist because they extend your Facebook identity across the rest of the Web--and at some sites, your Facebook identity is now the only way to leave a comment.
Hi, I'm the author of the Discovery piece (and yes, I'm posting under my real name). One detail I couldn't get into that post was the credit-card issue--at first, I thought that a Facebook or a Google+ could just query Visa or AmEx or whoever and get a name match. It turns out that it's not so easy. Neither of the two usual card-verification schemes actually confirm a cardholder's name:
* asking for CVV2 numbers just proves that the person has the card in their hand (or has memorized those digits);
* AVS, or address verification system, only checks the numbers in the billing address.
There are other services that claim to verify names nearly instantly--but as gurps_npc notes, the real reason neither Facebook nor G+ bothers is because they don't want to discourage people from signing up.
Even after the Flight Readiness Review officially sets the launch date, the liftoff can get scrubbed at the last minute (or, in the case of STS-134, at the 225th minute). You can schedule your travel to allow for a one- or two-day scrub, but then you might find out that it's been punted back a full week.
If you'll be coming from far off, you might want to see if you can't telecommute from the greater KSC area for a couple of weeks. If, OTOH, you're lucky enough to live somewhere with cheap flights to Orlando, wait until FRR to book--and then either get a no-change-fee or refundable fare or get a one-way ticket, buying the flight home once the shuttle launches.
IOW, it's kind of a pain to see a shuttle launch in person. And (speaking from my experience watching Endeavour lift off Monday from the press site) it's worth every bit of the hassle.
Thanks for the attention. One of NTP's PR folks just e-mailed a copy of the company's complaint against Google. There's a copy embedded after the jump of my post, and you can also read or download the PDF via Scribd. I encourage you all to give that document a careful read, then look through the patents claimed (I've linked to the relevant USPTO pages in the post as well).
I answered a bunch of questions--er, complaints--from readers in my newsletter after that column ran (which was, um, almost a month ago). In case anybody's curious, here's that link.
That's the point I was trying to get across, but you looked a bit farther in the future (and sketched out those Big Picture contours in more detail) than I did. Thanks for making me think...
I should have known from my overflowing inbox that my story had gotten posted on Slashdot...
Well, after reading all 118 e-mails to date and re-reading the column itself, I'd like to address the questions that have come up about it. I'll start by addressing the contention that I am some sort of shill for Microsoft: Please read a few of my recentcolumns and tell me if you think I'm doing any favors to the good people in Redmond.
Second, the "why didn't you cover distribution X, Y and Z?" question. Since there are only so many hours in the day, I decided I'd only look at distros using the 2.6 kernel; I'd also only look at the distributions readers might already recognize--either by seeing them for sale in computer stores, or by seeing books about them in bookstores.
Third, my comment about NTFS disk partitioning. Throw all the rotten tomatoes at me that you want, because I got this wrong; SuSE and Mandrake can resize NTFS partitions, although Fedora and many other distros cannot. (Granted, there are apparently a few bugs in their implentation of this, but still...)
Fourth, the "what's so hard about using the command line?" gripe. Command-line interfaces have gone out of style in consumer operating systems for Very Sound Reasons. They're not remotely "discoverable"--unlike a row of menus or toolbar icons, a blank command-line prompt has no way of telling you what you *can* do. They're unforgiving--one typo in the command and it won't work.
Fifth, my complaints about the problems of installing software in Linux: The results I reported came from my attempts to install software as most Windows refugees might: by downloading fairly well-known applications (for instance, Firefox and AbiWord) and double-clicking them once they had landed on my desktop.
I went on to note that there are automated package-installers, then focused on Fedora's in particular (I did give Cobind's YumGUI a whirl too, but since that's a) in beta and b) not included with Fedora, I can't consider that the answer). I could have discussed Mandrake's rpmDrake instead, in which case I would have criticized the way it's buried four menus deep (will any new user even think to look under the "Packaging" sub-menu?). I also could have used SuSE's YAST2 as an example, in which case I would have had to note how this was smart enough to alert me of dependency issues while installing downloaded SuSE RPMs, but not smart enough to fix them automatically.
If anybody's actually read this far, I'd add that my goal in this column was to try to assess these three releases not as a Linux expert might find them, but as somebody moving from Windows might find them. I.e., the vast bulk of the potential user base.
I personally found all three of these distributions quite usable once set up properly--certainly much more so than the versions of SuSE, Mandrake and Lycoris that I reviewed two years ago, or the Red Hat release I tried out in late 2002--but that doesn't mean that, say, my brother or my mom would put up with the initial setup work. And I'd be lying to readers if I didn't tell them that.
... if anything, I've been surprised by the amount of defective review hardware sent our way.
Three examples off the top of my head: An eMachines desktop's power supply went on the fritz within days; a Samsung smartphone entered a catatonic, buttons-flashing state after a couple of weeks; a Microtel PC sent by Lindows showed up with a detached heat sink.
My own theory is that deadline pressure cuts both ways--PR types want to get review hardware in reviewers' hands as quickly as possible, and sometimes that means grabbing whatever is available off the production line.
But, sure, a company with a little more time on its hands can still try to soup up review hardware. That's why it's also our job to keep up with what regular users are saying about all this stuff as we write each review.
It should have read "less than 1 1/4 inches thick." That was a stupid mistake that nobody noticed before it went to print, but which was then obvious to numerous readers afterwards [smacking self in forehead]
I thought Alex's piece (FYI, Alex is a she) does a good job of recounting the loopy promotional excesses of the video-game industry.
Does the story prove that people write biased reviews? Like I told Alex, I don't think Tom's work is, or I wouldn't run it. Those unnamed, gullible teenage reviewers might not be so independent... but without examples of skewed writeups, it's hard for me to judge.
I think the bigger potential source of bias in game reviews--or, for that matter, any kind of review--is this: Writers who play games *all the time* may not remember that readers don't share their level of interest in gaming and might prefer to leave the computer off for the afternoon.
IOW, a reviewer needs to remember that the reader's default state is not "sit in the front of the computer, hands on keyboard and mouse."
Thanks for the comments on my review (although I really didn't expect it to draw a mention here, as opposed to my piece on the CBDTPA a week ago).
To answer a couple of points people have raised:
* Spell-checking: ThinkFree Office has a spell checker, but it doesn't flag misspellings as you type them, Word-style. You have to invoke the spell-checker "by hand." (My editor was afraid my description here might not have been clear enough. Guess he was right:)
* Importance of word count: Guilty as charged! I write for a living and I *need* this feature to do my job. Since a word count isn't exactly a difficult feature to support (as opposed to, say, revision tracking), I don't think it's out of line to expect it.
* Other Office alternatives: I left out AbiWord because it is a) just a word processor, not a full suite, and b) it's OS X compatibility is only available if you install an X11 server, which is a lot of work to ask of a home user (the target reader for my column).
I am planning on a review StarOffice whenever 6.0 ships, most likely as part of a comparison with OpenOffice.
Any other questions, y'all know where to reach me...
Fascinating discussion here--especially in the way it follows much of the pattern of the postings at Ambrosia's own forum.
I see Matt Slot has been busy replying to various items in context; I will leave the technical points to him (he can attest how many e-mails it took for me to grok how the system works:).
Two comments I'd like to offer:
1) I thought I had emphasized this point enough in the column: Ambrosia's system aims to stop *casual* privacy, not the sort of determined attack that people have sketched out here. But most losses from theft aren't the result of a determind attack--as I've written elsewhere, people are cheap, but they also tend to be lazy.
2) Much of the hostility people seem to display towards Ambrosia's registration system seems to be based on how other companies' copy-protection measures work, or are perceived to work. I hadn't thought before about this sort of collateral damage, but it's something I'll have to consider for the next column on this topic.
I wrote about this CD earlier this month in my column. I didn't test the particular DVD-ROM drive mentioned in the TechTV piece, but I did find several other ways to copy this CD, from the basic ripping utility on a Plextor CD-RW to a Philips standalone CD recorder.
Slashdot Mirror
I could do one of those old-fashioned, non-video, 10-questions /. interviews sometime. How do we go about that?
Well, maybe not this deep in the thread, where people won't see it. And maybe not this week, when I look to be running in circles on a few stories all due at about the same time. But I'd be happy to do some sort of extended Q&A here.
(I'm not cool enough to do an AMA on Reddit, right? :)
I didn't mention that because I don't buy that as a cause. For one thing, if you think the Post is that much of a liberal hangout, try asking around, say, Daily Kos about Post editorials and op-eds--or how the paper covered the prelude and start of the war in Iraq a decade ago.
For another, have you looked at the political demographics of the Washington area? I don't think tilting to the left would lose you that many readers here.
Thanks, man! I was only able to get that address because nobody else was using the twp.com domain for anything--and the alternative was using the Notes system the Post only managed to put down earlier this year.
Says who? If VLC were using any licensed DVD playback code, it wouldn't have the option of ignoring region codes (granted, newer drives make it harder to defeat that) or doing any of the other things that authorized DVD apps can't do. Further, I can assure you that I didn't compile libdvdcss on my Mac to get VLC to play any DVDs.
I don't think it's illegal myself (IANAL, but who in this thread is?), even subject to DMCA logic. It's not “primarily designed or produced” to play DVDs and has more than "limited commercially significant purpose” besides playing DVDs. But I would not be remotely surprised if somebody in the entertainment industry tried to bring a case against it anyway. Like I wrote in the linked article: If a printer manufacturer can try to use the DMCA to put a manufacturer of ink cartridges out of business, why wouldn't a movie studio try to nail VLC as a DVD-cracking tool?
I honestly don't know why nobody has.
My take was that they were trying to pull an Apple--they invited only a select few people to a splashy launch event in the hope they'd get some advance buzz, but then they forget that Apple product-launch events also generally include prices, ship dates, and the chance to do a hands-on inspection of the product. That did not go over well.
(FWIW, they didn't send me a review unit either, but I was hardly alone in being shut out. I wound up buying one at a Microsoft Store to write my review, then returning it two weeks later.)
To any tech journalists upset that Apple isn't spoon-feeding them product news: Get out. Just leave the business. Please?
Seriously, if you don't know to do your own digging for a story or don't want to, you're in the wrong line of work. And there are plenty of other people who would gladly take your place.
You should know soon enough--although the administration doesn't want the recipients of NSLs getting too specific, the FBI has to cough up a yearly total. It provided a count for 2011 (16,511 NSLs, covering 7,201 people) on April 30 of last year, so if they stick to that timing we should get last year's total in another month or so.
Some smaller newspapers have switched to Facebook-only commenting (here's one example, the Fort Meyers News-Press) because their old systems allowed anonymity without accountability, and they felt it easier to hand the job over to Facebook than develop something better in-house. I think that's a mistake--if you want to outsource your comments system, you could use Disqus or other services that police spam but permit persistent pseudonyms--but it's a real trend, or at least a trendlet.
The original purpose of Facebook, AIUI, was to help Harvard students hook up. Its business model does, indeed, providing a large and defined audience to potential advertisers--but people's names are the least of it. To a marketer, somebody's name is less useful than their address, their household income, the car in the driveway, the phone in the pocket, etc.
As for G+, I think its real purpose at the moment is to peel people away from Facebook.
I spent about 17 years at the Post, not 10. But thanks for spelling my last name right. As for the rest... I've read your comment twice, and I still don't know what point you're trying to make. Maybe those IR classes fogged up my brain too badly.
- RP
If you read what the top executives at Facebook say--and if you then spend some time talking on background with some of them--it's clear that this company wants to become the layer of identity or authentication that it apparently feels should have been put into the Internet's original architecture. (I linked to that Vint Cerf interview because it has him explaining, at about 6:40 in, that the Internet needs identifiers but not fixed identities... oh, and because the video features me bantering onstage with Vint Cerf.) Facebook Connect logins and Facebook social plug-ins exist because they extend your Facebook identity across the rest of the Web--and at some sites, your Facebook identity is now the only way to leave a comment.
- RP
Hi, I'm the author of the Discovery piece (and yes, I'm posting under my real name). One detail I couldn't get into that post was the credit-card issue--at first, I thought that a Facebook or a Google+ could just query Visa or AmEx or whoever and get a name match. It turns out that it's not so easy. Neither of the two usual card-verification schemes actually confirm a cardholder's name:
* asking for CVV2 numbers just proves that the person has the card in their hand (or has memorized those digits);
* AVS, or address verification system, only checks the numbers in the billing address.
There are other services that claim to verify names nearly instantly--but as gurps_npc notes, the real reason neither Facebook nor G+ bothers is because they don't want to discourage people from signing up.
- RP
Even after the Flight Readiness Review officially sets the launch date, the liftoff can get scrubbed at the last minute (or, in the case of STS-134, at the 225th minute). You can schedule your travel to allow for a one- or two-day scrub, but then you might find out that it's been punted back a full week.
If you'll be coming from far off, you might want to see if you can't telecommute from the greater KSC area for a couple of weeks. If, OTOH, you're lucky enough to live somewhere with cheap flights to Orlando, wait until FRR to book--and then either get a no-change-fee or refundable fare or get a one-way ticket, buying the flight home once the shuttle launches.
IOW, it's kind of a pain to see a shuttle launch in person. And (speaking from my experience watching Endeavour lift off Monday from the press site) it's worth every bit of the hassle.
Thanks for the attention. One of NTP's PR folks just e-mailed a copy of the company's complaint against Google. There's a copy embedded after the jump of my post, and you can also read or download the PDF via Scribd. I encourage you all to give that document a careful read, then look through the patents claimed (I've linked to the relevant USPTO pages in the post as well).
- RP
I answered a bunch of questions--er, complaints--from readers in my newsletter after that column ran (which was, um, almost a month ago). In case anybody's curious, here's that link.
That's the point I was trying to get across, but you looked a bit farther in the future (and sketched out those Big Picture contours in more detail) than I did. Thanks for making me think...
I should have known from my overflowing inbox that my story had gotten posted on Slashdot...
Well, after reading all 118 e-mails to date and re-reading the column itself, I'd like to address the questions that have come up about it. I'll start by addressing the contention that I am some sort of shill for Microsoft: Please read a few of my recent columns and tell me if you think I'm doing any favors to the good people in Redmond.
Second, the "why didn't you cover distribution X, Y and Z?" question. Since there are only so many hours in the day, I decided I'd only look at distros using the 2.6 kernel; I'd also only look at the distributions readers might already recognize--either by seeing them for sale in computer stores, or by seeing books about them in bookstores.
Third, my comment about NTFS disk partitioning. Throw all the rotten tomatoes at me that you want, because I got this wrong; SuSE and Mandrake can resize NTFS partitions, although Fedora and many other distros cannot. (Granted, there are apparently a few bugs in their implentation of this, but still...)
Fourth, the "what's so hard about using the command line?" gripe. Command-line interfaces have gone out of style in consumer operating systems for Very Sound Reasons. They're not remotely "discoverable"--unlike a row of menus or toolbar icons, a blank command-line prompt has no way of telling you what you *can* do. They're unforgiving--one typo in the command and it won't work.
Fifth, my complaints about the problems of installing software in Linux: The results I reported came from my attempts to install software as most Windows refugees might: by downloading fairly well-known applications (for instance, Firefox and AbiWord) and double-clicking them once they had landed on my desktop.
I went on to note that there are automated package-installers, then focused on Fedora's in particular (I did give Cobind's YumGUI a whirl too, but since that's a) in beta and b) not included with Fedora, I can't consider that the answer). I could have discussed Mandrake's rpmDrake instead, in which case I would have criticized the way it's buried four menus deep (will any new user even think to look under the "Packaging" sub-menu?). I also could have used SuSE's YAST2 as an example, in which case I would have had to note how this was smart enough to alert me of dependency issues while installing downloaded SuSE RPMs, but not smart enough to fix them automatically.
If anybody's actually read this far, I'd add that my goal in this column was to try to assess these three releases not as a Linux expert might find them, but as somebody moving from Windows might find them. I.e., the vast bulk of the potential user base.
I personally found all three of these distributions quite usable once set up properly--certainly much more so than the versions of SuSE, Mandrake and Lycoris that I reviewed two years ago, or the Red Hat release I tried out in late 2002--but that doesn't mean that, say, my brother or my mom would put up with the initial setup work. And I'd be lying to readers if I didn't tell them that.
... if anything, I've been surprised by the amount of defective review hardware sent our way.
Three examples off the top of my head: An eMachines desktop's power supply went on the fritz within days; a Samsung smartphone entered a catatonic, buttons-flashing state after a couple of weeks; a Microtel PC sent by Lindows showed up with a detached heat sink.
My own theory is that deadline pressure cuts both ways--PR types want to get review hardware in reviewers' hands as quickly as possible, and sometimes that means grabbing whatever is available off the production line.
But, sure, a company with a little more time on its hands can still try to soup up review hardware. That's why it's also our job to keep up with what regular users are saying about all this stuff as we write each review.
It should have read "less than 1 1/4 inches thick." That was a stupid mistake that nobody noticed before it went to print, but which was then obvious to numerous readers afterwards [smacking self in forehead]
- R
I thought Alex's piece (FYI, Alex is a she) does a good job of recounting the loopy promotional excesses of the video-game industry.
Does the story prove that people write biased reviews? Like I told Alex, I don't think Tom's work is, or I wouldn't run it. Those unnamed, gullible teenage reviewers might not be so independent... but without examples of skewed writeups, it's hard for me to judge.
I think the bigger potential source of bias in game reviews--or, for that matter, any kind of review--is this: Writers who play games *all the time* may not remember that readers don't share their level of interest in gaming and might prefer to leave the computer off for the afternoon.
IOW, a reviewer needs to remember that the reader's default state is not "sit in the front of the computer, hands on keyboard and mouse."
- R
Thanks for the comments on my review (although I really didn't expect it to draw a mention here, as opposed to my piece on the CBDTPA a week ago).
:)
To answer a couple of points people have raised:
* Spell-checking: ThinkFree Office has a spell checker, but it doesn't flag misspellings as you type them, Word-style. You have to invoke the spell-checker "by hand." (My editor was afraid my description here might not have been clear enough. Guess he was right
* Importance of word count: Guilty as charged! I write for a living and I *need* this feature to do my job. Since a word count isn't exactly a difficult feature to support (as opposed to, say, revision tracking), I don't think it's out of line to expect it.
* Other Office alternatives: I left out AbiWord because it is a) just a word processor, not a full suite, and b) it's OS X compatibility is only available if you install an X11 server, which is a lot of work to ask of a home user (the target reader for my column).
I am planning on a review StarOffice whenever 6.0 ships, most likely as part of a comparison with OpenOffice.
Any other questions, y'all know where to reach me...
- R
Fascinating discussion here--especially in the way it follows much of the pattern of the postings at Ambrosia's own forum.
:).
I see Matt Slot has been busy replying to various items in context; I will leave the technical points to him (he can attest how many e-mails it took for me to grok how the system works
Two comments I'd like to offer:
1) I thought I had emphasized this point enough in the column: Ambrosia's system aims to stop *casual* privacy, not the sort of determined attack that people have sketched out here. But most losses from theft aren't the result of a determind attack--as I've written elsewhere, people are cheap, but they also tend to be lazy.
2) Much of the hostility people seem to display towards Ambrosia's registration system seems to be based on how other companies' copy-protection measures work, or are perceived to work. I hadn't thought before about this sort of collateral damage, but it's something I'll have to consider for the next column on this topic.
- R
I wrote about this CD earlier this month in my column. I didn't test the particular DVD-ROM drive mentioned in the TechTV piece, but I did find several other ways to copy this CD, from the basic ripping utility on a Plextor CD-RW to a Philips standalone CD recorder.