Is this a marketing version number upgrade, or what?
Well, no. But first of all... Google has widgets?
There's been a lot of widget-developer-friendly changes. See the version history for all of the 3.0 pages. The biggest change has been the introduction of a substantial number of Yahoo! related widgets. More than a few people have basically said Konfabulator/Widget Engine sold out to Yahoo, but to be honest, they're slick, useful widgets if you're the sort that depends on them.
The changes mostly have to do with an increase of speed (built-in XML parser), a better arrangement system involving frames (good things here, as opposed to in HTML) and a little smoother around the edges.
Sheesh. The way music execs get their tights in a wad over $0.99 pricing, you'd think that those extra dollars would be doing something for the bottom line.
Make Apple tie their prices to inflation or something. At least then you'd have a reasonable excuse to raise prices, as opposed to what you have now, which is... nothing.
For starters, enough with the Top 40 stations. I have my pick and there's nothing you can do to change it. You will strangle yourselves into oblivion if you keep on turning every station into a Top 40 station.
I'm willing to sit through commercials if the songs are... decent. I have low standards. Also, my wife doesn't really like John Coltrane.:-)
Radio is especially good for transmitting information. Chicago has WBBM-AM 780, which is a 24 hour news network, and Sunday Bears games. I listen for traffic on the 8's.
Replacing an oldies station with a Top 40 station won't help your ratings. Figure out why people stopped listening to 60's and 70's music and fix it. I'm pretty sure as many people like The Beatles now as they did 10 years ago.
Classical and jazz stations need to accept the fact that commercials are a way of paying the bills. You know your audience; selling to them isn't taking advantage of them, it's a way to stay on the air.
Speaking of these "minor" players... getting your signal on the Internet is a Very Good Idea. These genres aren't quite under the same pressure as pop music is, so take advantage of it and be... innovative.
In short, I don't really want to pay a subscriber fee -- at all -- for something that's free now. It's not something I value that much.
No kidding. You would think that being in a 3-acre 1890 Washington plantation with traditional columns and colonial soffits would speed along the coding process...
...but I would like to hear from users... is there any particular reason to put most of your life online? I haven't used the service at all yet, especially since all the kinks aren't worked out of it.
I can understand people knowing that my car is a 2004 Honda Civic. Maybe Google will try to sell me parts, and maybe they can provide me with an online car maintenance schedule automatically as part of their master plan to dominate all information. But what else do they ask for? What else do they want to know?
Is it basically a volunteering of household and personal financial information, much like MyPoints is (only you earn 'points' there. Not dissing, I worked there.)?
I'm genuinely interested in the benefit to the user, and not just 'because it's a Google service and it's there'.
I'm not sure why I even bother replying, since you're not going to change your mind, or appear to even be open. But whatever.
Yes, there is a reason the two genealogies are more than just one person different -- they're completely different. I don't recall at the moment, so sue me.
I don't know why you seem to think that all four gospels must, word for word, event for event, be parallel with each other. Is it not possible (frankly, expected) that events in the four books thread around each other, occasionally intersecting?
Hence why their parents would go home to Nazareth, and then flee to Egypt after having been told of the dangers.
Likewise, Jesus most likely went into the desert to be tempted before he started his ministry.
Jesus didn't come to abolish the law. He came to fulfill it. Read the two passages you cited in context. In Ephesians, Paul is writing to Gentiles. The law that is "broken" is the one that set aside Gentiles from sharing in the promises that the Jews were offered, and rejected. Specifically, "His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility."
And no, hostility wasn't in the Law. That was something the nation of Israel did, and it wasn't righteous.
Referencing Hebrews is almost always going to a picky issue, but I'll look at it anyways. The writer (who may or not be Paul) is referring to the weak and useless regulation of priesthood. It was only weak and useless because perfection could not be attained through the law -- really, it was a stumbling block. The point of the law was to show God's standard. The effect of the law was to show how far away Israel was. Just because the law did so doesn't mean it needed to be abolished.
Personally, I can't make it sound any easier. It's a hard concept.
The disciples were as they are in Matthew: "first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him." The second reference is missing Thaddaeus and adds Judas son of James. Acts removes Judas Iscariot (he's dead) and he is replaced with Mattias.
Knowing what I know right now, I could probably safely assume that Thaddaeus and Judas son of James might just be the same person. It's already difficult enough having two Jameses. Proof? None, really, but if my name was Jeffrey Dahmer I might consider changing it in later references.
Matthew 27:11 is an abbreviated version of John 18:28-37. He didn't reply to a single charge in either passage. Mostly this is because John was written to show that Jesus was the Son of God.
Matthew doesn't actually have what his last cry was. Actually, none of them really were eyewitnesses, because the disciples had all gone and abandoned Christ at the cross. This is the only argument of yours I would grant as possible hearsay -- the centurion told Luke what he heard, while some other people told Matthew, Mark and John.
There are more than enough questions to fill a two and a half posts, so if you want to continue, let me know.:-)
Can we at least show the central basis of his argument?
There is a structural reason for [video games being inferior to film and literature]: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.
The appropriate question, therefore, is: does the introduction of player choices into a material inherently undermine the authorial control of a work of art, videogame, book or otherwise?
I think the answer is no. But search for "interactive movie" and you can see where the argument comes from.
My official vote would be that three exclamation points should be treated in the same way that three periods are... as continuations of the previous thought. Ellipses, of a sort.
Or just keep using them as the only way to emphasize an exclamation and still having it look decent. Or maybe I just like the concept of having three of a certain character???
This is me and my wife's first Christmas in our new house, so naturally, we're excited. I'm also lazy, so the entire content of our Christmas decorating consists of six strings of all white, not flashing lights. Our neighbor has about 45 lighted penguins out on the lawn, which is both tacky and an awesome way to promote Linux if one chose to do so.
The problem with more lights is that no one ever really takes the time to make lots of lights look good. No, icicle lights don't automatically make everything look better.
Ironically, you have to register for the content, or you get a certain number of page views / day "free" without registering, but it's worth pointing out some things.
"What happened today that didn't happen yesterday. That's what news is. Start typing."
Raymond R. Coffey, Tribune Washington bureau chief, 1983
For a long time, Ray Coffey's definition, crystal clear and well stated as was everything the complete news pro uttered or wrote, served the business well. It was the kind of measure you could take to the bank because it was unerringly correct and dependable.
But the veteran Chicago newsman's definition doesn't work so well anymore. What happened today is generally old news by the time tomorrow arrives. It's what happened a few minutes ago, maybe an hour ago, that is news now.
This has created a lot of problems.
In the glory days, reporters could whittle away for five, six, seven hours at an event, parse it out, look for the contradictions and try to present an accurate, compelling account that would be published the next day.
The electronic world has now seized the turf of news immediacy.
On the Internet, on radio, on cable TV, news is "presented" as it happens, or just after it happens. That period of measurement, consideration, reporting, writing, cautious editing has generally disappeared from the context of the "breaking news" event.
He goes on to say that that's a bad thing.
Generally, opinion, in the form of lots of blogging, will be slathered all over it, like peanut butter so heavily spread you can't see the toast anymore.
If you drop back out, you might well lose the crucial context or be left with a set of "facts" that are, ultimately, not facts at all, but changeable parts of an ongoing story.
I am bringing this up because of a brace of e-mails that flowed from the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. A lot of people apparently have decided the "media" got the story all wrong, starting with reports that there could be 10,000 dead Katrina victims in New Orleans.
Well, first, Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, actually said that. It became instant news, without reflection, without questioning, without much editing, in the world of electronic news reporting. Much, much later, the record was corrected.
Those following things closely understood that. Those who didn't were stuck with a wrong version of events.
When Katrina struck, most meteorologists and wannabe bloggers knew what intensity and ferocity of hurricane was going to strike. I'm sure there are people up and down the Mississippi coast that never knew what was coming, for one reason or another. What sort of information, if any, were they getting? When Katrina was downgraded to a Category 4, did people think, "Oh, it's not going to be so bad?"
This is a rambling post containing mere quotes from the editorial -- I encourage you to read the whole thing -- so I'll leave with what I liked the most.
You are deluding yourself if you think you know what actually happened by dropping in for a few minutes of the latest. It's not enough.
These media are serving very different purposes, and the sooner everyone recognizes that, the stronger the individual components of media will become.
You can grind up a great stewpot of developing events on a Web site. But you are going to be eating it one quick bite at a time, which doesn't lead to a very satisfying meal.
And for anyone who cared, no, the guy isn't a conservative Big Paper shill. Quite the contrary.
I suppose the largest companies could register these in reference to their stock symbol, and put all their financial information on it. See Citicorp (NYSE: C). They could register http://www.c.com./ Other notables are Ford (NYSE: F) and Kellogg (NYSE: K).
Interesting. I had my 3-4 months of initial interest and purchasing, but that was about a year ago. About then I pretty much just stopped purchasing music, though (except for recently when I decided to start listening to jazz).
iTunes makes more sense when you're looking for music. I only knew that at Best Buy, I'd look for something and it would take a minute to find the right section, and then another minute to find the right area where the artist theoretically should be, and then another to determine that no, they don't have the CD.
Stranger still is the fact that some bands STILL refuse to (or their labels prohibit them from) posting all their CDs on iTMS. I'm looking at you, Dave Matthews Band.
What's the deal with that? Do they intentionally want to lower their sales figures? Or do they still operate in the theoretical haze of "profit margins" for sales that don't exist (iTMS) vs. sales that might exist otherwise (Best Buy, Tower)?
To an end user, what is there to tout so that they can be 'more convinced' than when the 1.0 marketing first came around? Automatic updates? A better preference menu? Works more with sites than the last time around? Less bugs?
Don't get me wrong — these are good, useful features for those of us intimately familiar with browsers. But I'm not sure what marketing can say to Joe User that they didn't say the first time in order to get him to switch.
Good question. I was 6 or 7 when the original Legend of Zelda came out, and I didn't do too badly at that game. And 11 when the original Super Mario Kart came out (1992).
I would expect that a 7-8 year old might be able to play this game without being incredibly frustrated due to lack of skill. Of course, proper guidance and probably explanation that it gets easier over time is necessary, before DSs go flying through the room.
So people are mostly whining about services they will never use. Hmm. Big surprise.
Base level phones are pretty good (no idea if that link will work). Just get one of those, let the "dumb" consumers throw away their money on whatever they want, and find some other unfair market to complain about. Maybe in 3 years some Southwest Airlines of the cell industry can come in and kick ass... but where they'll get billions to build their own network, I'll leave for the reader to figure out.
...the CTA is thinking about doing it. Frankly, I hope they don't, but they will if only because they can earn money by making the cell carriers pay to provide cell service underground.
Only about 20% of Chicago's transit system is underground, so it's not a big deal. I just happen to enjoy the sounds of the rails and nothing else.
I suppose there's always the main electrical panel switch in the garage. That would guarantee zero draw.:-) Of course, I have no idea what the effects on the water and gas systems would be...
What does weight have anything to do with the quality of the original Xbox?
Perhaps entertainment centers cringed when they heard about the vast quantities of mass contained within that green X. Rumor has it that on launch day alone, three thousand entertainment centers fell to the height, weight and girth of the X Box...
My wife and I currently own a 1-year old Honda Civic (not hybrid), and carpool to work. Hybrids were out but untested last year, plus this markup that's being spoken of in the article.
When the Civic breaks down, or if either of us finds a job not in the city (projection: 5 years for the latter, and something like 7-8 years for the former because Hondas last forever), then I will consider a hybrid, as it'll be price competitive by then. The only problem is that it seems that the fuel effiency is either misrepresented or not much of an advantage — our Civic currently gets about 30 city / 34 highway. Consumer Reports has tested a Honda Civic Hybrid and gotten about 40 city / 36 highway, which is both far less than the 47 / 46 advertised, and not worth the $3,000.
Replace a 8 city / 10 highway Escalade, though, and now we're talking. I just can't imagine anyone that would do that, because I suspect that about half the people like the big factor of their car, while the other half actually need the space.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, no. But first of all... Google has widgets?
There's been a lot of widget-developer-friendly changes. See the version history for all of the 3.0 pages. The biggest change has been the introduction of a substantial number of Yahoo! related widgets. More than a few people have basically said Konfabulator/Widget Engine sold out to Yahoo, but to be honest, they're slick, useful widgets if you're the sort that depends on them.
The changes mostly have to do with an increase of speed (built-in XML parser), a better arrangement system involving frames (good things here, as opposed to in HTML) and a little smoother around the edges.
Thanks. Now that 'asdasdasd' is in the open, I'm going to have to change my passwords. Probably to the one on my luggage...
Make Apple tie their prices to inflation or something. At least then you'd have a reasonable excuse to raise prices, as opposed to what you have now, which is... nothing.
I'm willing to sit through commercials if the songs are... decent. I have low standards. Also, my wife doesn't really like John Coltrane. :-)
Radio is especially good for transmitting information. Chicago has WBBM-AM 780, which is a 24 hour news network, and Sunday Bears games. I listen for traffic on the 8's.
Replacing an oldies station with a Top 40 station won't help your ratings. Figure out why people stopped listening to 60's and 70's music and fix it. I'm pretty sure as many people like The Beatles now as they did 10 years ago.
Classical and jazz stations need to accept the fact that commercials are a way of paying the bills. You know your audience; selling to them isn't taking advantage of them, it's a way to stay on the air.
Speaking of these "minor" players... getting your signal on the Internet is a Very Good Idea. These genres aren't quite under the same pressure as pop music is, so take advantage of it and be... innovative.
In short, I don't really want to pay a subscriber fee -- at all -- for something that's free now. It's not something I value that much.
No kidding. You would think that being in a 3-acre 1890 Washington plantation with traditional columns and colonial soffits would speed along the coding process...
I can understand people knowing that my car is a 2004 Honda Civic. Maybe Google will try to sell me parts, and maybe they can provide me with an online car maintenance schedule automatically as part of their master plan to dominate all information. But what else do they ask for? What else do they want to know?
Is it basically a volunteering of household and personal financial information, much like MyPoints is (only you earn 'points' there. Not dissing, I worked there.)?
I'm genuinely interested in the benefit to the user, and not just 'because it's a Google service and it's there'.
Yes, there is a reason the two genealogies are more than just one person different -- they're completely different. I don't recall at the moment, so sue me.
I don't know why you seem to think that all four gospels must, word for word, event for event, be parallel with each other. Is it not possible (frankly, expected) that events in the four books thread around each other, occasionally intersecting?
Hence why their parents would go home to Nazareth, and then flee to Egypt after having been told of the dangers.
Likewise, Jesus most likely went into the desert to be tempted before he started his ministry.
Jesus didn't come to abolish the law. He came to fulfill it. Read the two passages you cited in context. In Ephesians, Paul is writing to Gentiles. The law that is "broken" is the one that set aside Gentiles from sharing in the promises that the Jews were offered, and rejected. Specifically, "His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility."
And no, hostility wasn't in the Law. That was something the nation of Israel did, and it wasn't righteous.
Referencing Hebrews is almost always going to a picky issue, but I'll look at it anyways. The writer (who may or not be Paul) is referring to the weak and useless regulation of priesthood. It was only weak and useless because perfection could not be attained through the law -- really, it was a stumbling block. The point of the law was to show God's standard. The effect of the law was to show how far away Israel was. Just because the law did so doesn't mean it needed to be abolished.
Personally, I can't make it sound any easier. It's a hard concept.
The disciples were as they are in Matthew: "first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him." The second reference is missing Thaddaeus and adds Judas son of James. Acts removes Judas Iscariot (he's dead) and he is replaced with Mattias.
Knowing what I know right now, I could probably safely assume that Thaddaeus and Judas son of James might just be the same person. It's already difficult enough having two Jameses. Proof? None, really, but if my name was Jeffrey Dahmer I might consider changing it in later references.
Matthew 27:11 is an abbreviated version of John 18:28-37. He didn't reply to a single charge in either passage. Mostly this is because John was written to show that Jesus was the Son of God.
Matthew doesn't actually have what his last cry was. Actually, none of them really were eyewitnesses, because the disciples had all gone and abandoned Christ at the cross. This is the only argument of yours I would grant as possible hearsay -- the centurion told Luke what he heard, while some other people told Matthew, Mark and John.
There are more than enough questions to fill a two and a half posts, so if you want to continue, let me know. :-)
There is a structural reason for [video games being inferior to film and literature]: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.
The appropriate question, therefore, is: does the introduction of player choices into a material inherently undermine the authorial control of a work of art, videogame, book or otherwise?
I think the answer is no. But search for "interactive movie" and you can see where the argument comes from.
My official vote would be that three exclamation points should be treated in the same way that three periods are... as continuations of the previous thought. Ellipses, of a sort.
Or just keep using them as the only way to emphasize an exclamation and still having it look decent. Or maybe I just like the concept of having three of a certain character???
The problem with more lights is that no one ever really takes the time to make lots of lights look good. No, icicle lights don't automatically make everything look better.
"What happened today that didn't happen yesterday. That's what news is. Start typing."
Raymond R. Coffey, Tribune Washington bureau chief, 1983
For a long time, Ray Coffey's definition, crystal clear and well stated as was everything the complete news pro uttered or wrote, served the business well. It was the kind of measure you could take to the bank because it was unerringly correct and dependable.
But the veteran Chicago newsman's definition doesn't work so well anymore. What happened today is generally old news by the time tomorrow arrives. It's what happened a few minutes ago, maybe an hour ago, that is news now.
This has created a lot of problems.
In the glory days, reporters could whittle away for five, six, seven hours at an event, parse it out, look for the contradictions and try to present an accurate, compelling account that would be published the next day.
The electronic world has now seized the turf of news immediacy.
On the Internet, on radio, on cable TV, news is "presented" as it happens, or just after it happens. That period of measurement, consideration, reporting, writing, cautious editing has generally disappeared from the context of the "breaking news" event.
He goes on to say that that's a bad thing.
Generally, opinion, in the form of lots of blogging, will be slathered all over it, like peanut butter so heavily spread you can't see the toast anymore.
If you drop back out, you might well lose the crucial context or be left with a set of "facts" that are, ultimately, not facts at all, but changeable parts of an ongoing story.
I am bringing this up because of a brace of e-mails that flowed from the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. A lot of people apparently have decided the "media" got the story all wrong, starting with reports that there could be 10,000 dead Katrina victims in New Orleans.
Well, first, Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, actually said that. It became instant news, without reflection, without questioning, without much editing, in the world of electronic news reporting. Much, much later, the record was corrected.
Those following things closely understood that. Those who didn't were stuck with a wrong version of events.
When Katrina struck, most meteorologists and wannabe bloggers knew what intensity and ferocity of hurricane was going to strike. I'm sure there are people up and down the Mississippi coast that never knew what was coming, for one reason or another. What sort of information, if any, were they getting? When Katrina was downgraded to a Category 4, did people think, "Oh, it's not going to be so bad?"
This is a rambling post containing mere quotes from the editorial -- I encourage you to read the whole thing -- so I'll leave with what I liked the most.
You are deluding yourself if you think you know what actually happened by dropping in for a few minutes of the latest. It's not enough.
These media are serving very different purposes, and the sooner everyone recognizes that, the stronger the individual components of media will become.
You can grind up a great stewpot of developing events on a Web site. But you are going to be eating it one quick bite at a time, which doesn't lead to a very satisfying meal.
And for anyone who cared, no, the guy isn't a conservative Big Paper shill. Quite the contrary.
12 months is a looong time to get excited about a console. People got really hyped up about the Cube within this timeframe, too....
But yeah. That's all I could come up with.
iTunes makes more sense when you're looking for music. I only knew that at Best Buy, I'd look for something and it would take a minute to find the right section, and then another minute to find the right area where the artist theoretically should be, and then another to determine that no, they don't have the CD.
Stranger still is the fact that some bands STILL refuse to (or their labels prohibit them from) posting all their CDs on iTMS. I'm looking at you, Dave Matthews Band.
What's the deal with that? Do they intentionally want to lower their sales figures? Or do they still operate in the theoretical haze of "profit margins" for sales that don't exist (iTMS) vs. sales that might exist otherwise (Best Buy, Tower)?
To an end user, what is there to tout so that they can be 'more convinced' than when the 1.0 marketing first came around? Automatic updates? A better preference menu? Works more with sites than the last time around? Less bugs?
Don't get me wrong — these are good, useful features for those of us intimately familiar with browsers. But I'm not sure what marketing can say to Joe User that they didn't say the first time in order to get him to switch.
I was 14 when it was released. I didn't get my first real computer 'til 1995...
Thanks.
from the I-got-ripped-off-at-Great-America-again! dept.
Brand Name Drugs Surprisingly More Expensive Than Generics
from the v1@gr@-isn't-a-generic? dept.
Study Finds Americans Spend Way Too Much Money On Pointless Gadgets
from the look-at-me-I-have-a-clapper dept.
I would expect that a 7-8 year old might be able to play this game without being incredibly frustrated due to lack of skill. Of course, proper guidance and probably explanation that it gets easier over time is necessary, before DSs go flying through the room.
Base level phones are pretty good (no idea if that link will work). Just get one of those, let the "dumb" consumers throw away their money on whatever they want, and find some other unfair market to complain about. Maybe in 3 years some Southwest Airlines of the cell industry can come in and kick ass... but where they'll get billions to build their own network, I'll leave for the reader to figure out.
Only about 20% of Chicago's transit system is underground, so it's not a big deal. I just happen to enjoy the sounds of the rails and nothing else.
I suppose there's always the main electrical panel switch in the garage. That would guarantee zero draw. :-) Of course, I have no idea what the effects on the water and gas systems would be...
Perhaps entertainment centers cringed when they heard about the vast quantities of mass contained within that green X. Rumor has it that on launch day alone, three thousand entertainment centers fell to the height, weight and girth of the X Box...
We've gone a step further and simplified all our standards down to one. I'm pretty sure the one we use now is... Spaghetti.
Mirror of the first page for people who can't access port 8090. Additional pages not guaranteed as Mirrordot doesn't work that way.
When the Civic breaks down, or if either of us finds a job not in the city (projection: 5 years for the latter, and something like 7-8 years for the former because Hondas last forever), then I will consider a hybrid, as it'll be price competitive by then. The only problem is that it seems that the fuel effiency is either misrepresented or not much of an advantage — our Civic currently gets about 30 city / 34 highway. Consumer Reports has tested a Honda Civic Hybrid and gotten about 40 city / 36 highway, which is both far less than the 47 / 46 advertised, and not worth the $3,000.
Replace a 8 city / 10 highway Escalade, though, and now we're talking. I just can't imagine anyone that would do that, because I suspect that about half the people like the big factor of their car, while the other half actually need the space.