At what point does the advancement of technology become
either irrelevant, unnecessary to the casual user, too expensive,
too complex,
or some combination thereof? This has already happened in audio
-- how many people out there really are vested in SACD? How many
people do you know who even know what SACD is?
How many people are using 7.1, or THX sound? Or, if they have
it, have it set up correctly? Or, if they have it, have any
reasonable collection of media to make use of it?
And now there is evidence of death on the vine with new and
improved video formats -- HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray. Other than mostly
a slashdot type crowd, who really cares about the arguably
incremental improvements for hefty investments?
At what point do consumers shrug their collective shoulders at
any news around HDTV (hint, they're already starting to)? And
when do all of the complexities of the combinitorials to lace all
of this technology together push new consumers away?
It's possible Vista may be entering that twilight zone of
indifferent consumerism. I'm totally technology driven, and have
most of my life been a bleeding edge investor, but lately it's
become less interesting. I can tell the
difference between 1600x1200 resolution and WVGA, but I have to
explain it to everyone else. They don't care, and they're not
willing to spend any extra dollars to get the extra resolution
kick.
All I'm seeing around Vista is toned-down expectations from
their original promise, and ramped up requirements for hardware.
That hardly lights a fire for me, and is a frigging wet towel for
the lay-people considering new computers.
I don't know many in the technology world
knocked out of their socks by the announced features (especially
after all of the un-announced, and I
don't know anyone outside of the technology elite
circles who are interested, or care, and have any
inklings of plans to move to Vista -- and if new rollouts of
computers are significantly more expensive at all because of
Vista, I know lots of people who are proactively not buying.
Maybe the world is reaching a point where people really don't
need mini-Crays to read e-mail, manage photos, and surf the
internet. And maybe the fork in the computing world can finally
focus on useful applications and customer service rather than
eye-candy translucent windowing graphics.
Finally, for all my support nightmares AOL users I know
(and there are many!) that I endured over the years, a misstep that
may offend and bother
them as much as supporting AOL has bothered me for
the last bazillion years. Go away AOL! (But, leave a few of
your coasters at the store counters, those did come in kind of
handy.)
So, all of that aside (the court of public opinion stipulates
AOL as stupid and insensitive), how equally egregious and
offensive is others would propogate and perpetuate this misguided
release of data? Any mirrors still carrying this information
(and they are there) serves few purposes for continuing to
provide access, and none are defensible: either they are happy
and willing to allow potentially embarassing or damaging data to
continue to be distributed, or they are sticking it to AOL when
AOL has already fallen on their own sword -- enough is enough.
It's not okay.
(So, how many wives are either not going to be home tonight,
or are going to fix hubby his very favorite dish?)
At one time I
considered Norton an essential application/utility
because I couldn't explain sufficiently to new computer owners
why Norton (and McAffee, etc.) were unnecessary, evil, and just
wrong for them. So, I'd always get their credit card number,
hold my nose, and ante up their money for
their peace of mind.
But after years of being called back and finding computer
disarray on these "happy" users caused directly or indirectly by
the intrusive "anti-virus" software suites such as Norton, I've
switched tactics and now the very first thing I do when working
on others' computer (with their permission of course) is
uninstall any of the mainstream virus protection programs,
download AVG free version and am done with it.
I've found since taking this approach virtually no call backs
where any problems were created by AVG, with much happier friends
and family who have at the same time saved themselves a couple of
bucks.
Once an essential application Norton? Only in as
much as Norton had been able to (and continues to) convince the world
they are essential, not a hard task in the FUD universe that is
Windows.
This reminds me of other Microsoft installs I've done over
the years, and it smacks of such disdain for the rest of the OS
universe. Nowhere in the article, nor can I find evidence
anywhere else is there an accomodation for an install where XP is
just another OS. I remember my first experience with this, when
I installed a Win98 on a linux box, and not only did Win98 not
offer a dual boot, it (seemingly) gladly removed my linux MBR and
formatted my partition without asking if it was okay, and without
saying it had done so. That was quite a surprise.
Does anyone know if there is a way to do this? (Though,
knowing XP can point to more than one OS to boot, I'm guessing
Microsoft is more gentle if there is a pre-existing Windows OS
there.)
I've googled for dual boot information, it looks to be similar
to what I already know -- it's easier to set up a dual boot
machine on a pre-existing Windows machine.
The trouble is,
Beckerman says, "The judges have no clue. They actually won't let
me talk about it. There was a case in 2004 where an elderly judge
was told by a lawyer in his brief from the RIAA that from the
meta-data and the hash, you could tell that these were illegally
copied files, which was, of course, nonsense. But the judge
actually referred to that in his decision as to why he was
upholding the subpoena." Often, the judges make decisions without
hearing oral arguments at all.
It would be nice to think the courts and the justice system
(the jurists) would apply due diligence but for myriad reasons
they don't or won't. Considering technology, the RIAA, and the
gazillion combinations of playing with digital media it isn't
clear a judge could ever be educated enough to
understand the technical issues. Instead, the deepest pockets
win because they can afford the biggest megaphone -- they've
convinced the legal system via FUD that consumers are evil and
piracy is rampant and must be stopped.
Problem is, customers aren't evil, piracy
is not rampant (yeah, it exists, but it's not
the monster the RIAA claims it is), and it doesn't need
to be stopped.
My biggest fear is the momentum is too strong, the RIAA has
gotten too far along and has won enough battles it's beginning to
look like they may win the war. And, the prediction in the
article:
Peter Brown, executive director of the Free
Software Foundation (FSF) and one of Defective By Design's chief
organizers, wrapped up the call by emphasizing the need to
support the defendants in these cases. What the RIAA is doing
today with music downloads, Brown warns, other organizations may
be doing next year if digital rights management technologies
become commonplace in hardware. He urged call participants to
blog about the call to educate others, and announced that a
recording of the call would be available shortly on the Defective
By Design site.
is likely to be the outcome.
Of course it seems obvious to me the ultimate result of all of
this nonsense is the buying public either is so angry at their
treatment, or confused by all of the rules and regulations, the
promising landscape of new and great electronic gizmos will
suffer its own (and hopefully temporary until all the goons leave
town) recession. To quote the scathing Paul Thurrott's outrage
against Microsoft's false positive to his "piracy", "Ah well".;-)
Like many people who will see these alerts, I don't believe I did anything wrong. I'm sure that's going to be a common refrain in this new era of untrusting software and companies. Ah well.
Ah well?, Ah well? This is the extent of outrage in "this new era"?!? Amazing!
Please explain to me what this really is. I visited the
page, and what it looks to be is the users' ability to download
an unfettered "customized" mp3 from Simpson where (I assume) a
laundry list of common names are inserted into the mp3 (dubbed,
no doubt)... giving the customer the illusion of some connection
with the artist. (So far, it appears a more correct headline
would have been "Yahoo advocates DRM-free music, offers one
DRM-free song from their catalog!)"
Obscene marketing and subterfuge aside, I find nothing in the
general Yahoo Music offerings to suggest the rest of their music
is offered unfettered, free of DRM. Indeed, the FAQ includes the
following info:
Yahoo! Music does not permit copying or transferring
music files to other users. Share function available only for
subscribers to access another subscriber's Yahoo! Music Unlimited
music files.
Using Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription music with a
portable device requires Microsoft Windows XP and is subject to
an extra monthly/annual subscription fee and is not included in
this free trial offer. See details during registration.
Yahoo! Music Unlimited: $59.88 per year, billed annually
(that's just $4.99 per month); or $6.99 per month, billed
monthly. Yahoo! Music Unlimited is available to U.S.-based
subscribers only.
There is also a "requirement for Windows Media
Player 9.0 or higher mentioned on the Yahoo Music home page --
sheeeesh!.
Any information/explanation or evidence to the contrary would
be greatly appreciated, because, other than the free advertising,
I'm not seeing any change in direction from Yahoo on this one.
I hail Microsoft's perceived "softening" as a positive step
albeit driven largely by legal fiat. However, one need only read
this article
on Microsoft and their stance against Google to realize and
recognize Microsoft retains its hubris and aggressive stance.
Consider from the above article:
Turner said the company is also gearing up to take on IBM and
Oracle, among other competitors, with new products slated for
debut in the next few months. But he saved his most acerbic
comments for Google.
"Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off of our
plate, because that is what they are intending to do," he
said.
The hubris is Microsoft's assumption anyone getting business
is taking food off of their plate, or something
they consider rightfully theirs, as opposed to customers who make
choices in a free marketplace. Fortunately the marketplace is
tipped somewhat more towards a level playing field (not all the
way, but better than before).
Not to be overly paranoid, but this is
Microsoft we're discussing, and this is
Slashdot, but what are the "terms" to allow manufacturers to set
any search engine as default? Manufacturers in the past, before
the DOJ decision were allowed to ship computers
with any operating system they chose. It's just that Microsoft
provided strong incentives for them not to.
While I like Microsoft's "allowance", considering past
behavior, I'd rather they stipulate "with no strings attached",
which wasn't stated explicitly. I know this post will bring me
Flame/Troll mods, but fool me once...
Fairness UPDATE:From this Seattle
Times article
are the words that bring the clarity I sought (emphasis mine):
This
includes specifics such as the freedom to add "icons, shortcuts
and the like to the Windows Start menu and other places used to
access software programs"; the ability for manufacturers to set
non-Microsoft programs to be used by default; the ability to
remove Microsoft programs like Explorer and Media Player and
promote non-Microsoft programs exclusively; and business terms
that protect manufacturers who go the non-Microsoft route from
retaliation.
I think for the large part, the world of psychics is snake
oil, predators preying on the gullible.
But, if you're familiar with the double-slit
"interference" experiment, you may get an uneasy sense there
is much for us to learn about interaction of particles, forces,
energies, etc. It's not for me to determine ESP is real but I've
experienced unexplainable phenomena at least to my level to
understand.
One example, a very close friend in college, she was an
identical twin, and talked about the typical entanglements with
her twin, who was back in her hometown 200 miles away. Her twin
came down on her birthday and I was there when they opened their
cards, identical (and not with any "twin" theme... just random
typical birthday cards). Not a HUGE example of unexplained
communication, but at least odd.
There are things we don't know, and we don't even know we
don't know. And, the more we learn, the less we know, at least
that's been my paradox. Things that seemed black and white seem
grayer as I learn more. (Consider this: can you really determine
whether you cross a defined landmark by some predefined time? By
what reference point? Can you really feel objects, considering
no real contact is made and that the actual real occupied space
in atoms is virtually nothing?)
Yeah, there's a lot we don't know about ESP, and may never
learn -- though, you can be pretty sure those who say they know
all about ESP don't.
From the article: It is not known exactly how
the coding system will work, but industry experts tell Think
Secret that the software would likely either limit the number of
playbacks or provide unlimited viewing for a period of time,
after which the movie will be "turned off" and no longer
available.
So now I can pay to spend an ungodly amount of time and energy
to get some 320x240 jittery so-so contrast version of some big
screen movie. And I'll have to watch it in a
certain time period or lose it? Or, they'll restrict the number
of times I can watch it? Somebody pinch me, I must be dreaming.
Could life really be this good?
Somebody stop the Earth, I'd like to get off.
If the consuming public goes for this, it only brings the lie
that is the new generation is "tech savvy", cuz if they were tech
savvy, they'd know they're being sold a bill of goods and what's
being offered is dumbed down, diluted quality, highly compressed
pap.
(An aside, also from the article: "The
subscription business makes sense for everybody. We'll all make
money." WTF? The subscription business makes
sense for everybody? We'll all make money? Wow, I've always
known the whole point of offering services, creating companies,
etc., has been about making money.... It just becomes a little
more obscenely transparent each day. I remember the good old
days when companies at least pretended to want to please the
customer.)
(Also, couple of questions:
How LONG will the movie
stay around?
How MUCH is this going to cost?
What OTHER
viewing options besides the iPod screen?
From the summary: Even though it took three
times as long to cook the egg, Apple should probably be
concerned. Actually McDonalds should be
concerned. Apple is coming out with a previously unannounced,
now leaked, new product, the Egg MacMuffin.
Meanwhile grandma is still taking off her shoes and getting
wanded at the airport. Nice to know yet another debacle is
launched. Here's hoping they're as successful as they have been
with the new Air Traffic Control System.
From the summary: "Few people realize that when
they buy software or music or movies, they are actually buying a
license to use, watch or listen. " Well, duh. Staying
current on ever-shifting rules is virtually impossible.
And, lest any defenders of "paying for license" jump in, the
rules whether they be the actual rules themselves, or how the
providers are choosing to enforce them are
shifting.
If in fact in the past they really did sell
only the license to play, watch, etc., there was
a wink and a nod for those who owned the games should they choose
to sell their games at some point. Now under increasing
pressures to maximize profits every stone is being turned for
ways to eke out more profits.
The electronics industry is seemingly insane with their
obsession to beat down their consumers. Case in point, we just
upgraded all of our cell phones, none of the
really worked that well, and the only real options included cell
phones with camera builtin.
We did have a blast the first day with the
phones, and even found a couple of trick ways to get our own
customized dial tones to the phones without paying for downloads.
But, aha, Verizon was on to those tricks, didn't mention the
surcharge for sending pictures to each other (actually they at
least strongly implied within the "plan" we could send pictures
back and forth free ad nauseum), and we found lots of nasty
little extra charges to the tune of ~$20... all within the one
week pro-rated new-phone period.
This was such an annoying and unexpected treatment, we've all
pretty much retired the cameras for any use at all... Too bad, it
was kind of fun, and I'd have been willing to even look at
pricing plans, had they not sucked me in without any heads up.
Treat the consumers with respect, and honesty. Ninety-nine
percent of them will treat you with money! (The other one
percent you really don't (or shouldn't) give a shit about
anyway.)
"'We've got to get this absolutely right,' Gates
said. 'If the feedback from the beta tests shows it is not ready
for prime time, I'd be glad to delay it.'
Looks like Microsoft has notched the bar a little higher than
usual. Hopefully they really really really mean it this time.
(And Lucy isn't going to yank the football back this time.)
And (emphasis mine):
He said Microsoft was investing $8
billion to $9 billion in developing Vista and the company's next
version of Office, its key cash-generator. He said the company's
software partners, in developing and adapting
their own products
for the two launches, would invest 20 times as much
as
Microsoft."
Once again, Microsoft leaves the heavy lifting to others.
What a crock.
This
raises Google's "no evil" equity significantly. Any mechanism to
sniff out, identify, and hopefully proactively take measure to
protect against the evil that is the web and its sinister
demographic is a good thing.
So, Google takes the "do no evil" a step further and calls
evil out.
There is a quote from the article I don't quite understand,
"While we do not believe that the fact that Google is indexing
binary file contents is a large threat, this is further evidence
of a rise in Web sites being used as an method of storing and
distributing malicious code," Websense said in a research note
announcing the experiment.
Is there some potential badness that Google is indexing binary
file content? What might that be?
Why are computer file names and conventions and protocols
so messed up? It's bizarre -- and Microsoft has been one of the
worst offenders with one of the most powerful positions and
opportunities to make it a better filename-naming world.
I had worked in the DOS world long ago, and
I'd always been frustrated with not only the restriction of the
8.3 naming convention, but the added imposition of:
the requirement the ".3" portion be satisfied, i.e., if
you didn't give a ".3" extension, it wasn't valid.
the semantic mapping of the extension to filetype, WTF?
the implied (don't remember if it was canonical) semantic
that no ".3" extension meant the file was a directory
the case insensitive nature of file names
etc. (or should I say,.etc)
Many years later, I had opportunity to consult in the
Windows/DOS world after having worked in the Unix world for over
a decade -- figured Microsoft had had enough time and money to
work out the kinks in what had obviously been an early-technology
constraint for the brain dead old DOS naming restrictions. Not.
Sigh.
And then the transition was a nightmare, whoever conjured up
the VFAT naming format and the "tilde" mapping backwards
compatibility to FAT names should have been shot. A golden
opportunity lost.
And then everything swings completely the other direction
where anything goes. This may curry favor with users, but wreaks
havoc on billions of lines of code which all of a sudden choke on
what had been simple parsing routines -- fixable, but at great
expense. I still think this was a paradigm shift that somehow
could have accommodated the user space/community but still
allowed some sanity in the machine world.
But layered on, or dovetailed into that quagmire is the
Microsoft insistence they "know better than thou"... and the
condescending insistence of dragging the ".3" extension nightmare
into the new rules for file naming. Would have been okay to
"allow" ".3" naming, but to impose the bizarre rules and
behaviors Microsoft has? (How many of you have files named
picture.jpg.jpg.jpg out there?)
Options to show extension, defaults to hide extensions, and
continued reliance and semantics applied to extensions continue
to make the filenaming world a landmine field.
And, Microsoft dares to allow mixed case naming, but does case
insensitive handling of file names... don't even get me started
about some of the bizarre results and buggy behavior I've traced
to that. I only wish I'd had a chargeback code for all of the
time I've spent fixing and debugging systems that all come back
to the file naming. Sigh, again.
All of this isn't to let Unix and Unix style file naming
skate. I've had problems, though fewer, there. But, at least
it's seemingly (to me) more consistent and predictable, though
there has been what I call "Windows" creep in that there have
appeared some apps that somehow think managing and imposing
"transparently" the extension to "file type" mapping is a good
thing (it's not).
(One of the funniest Unix debacles I experienced was debugging
a groups application -- they were moving files around and losing
all but one each processing cycle... turned out they were remote
copying from one Unix that had 14 (or more, can't remember) char
limit on file names to an old SunOS system that allowed only 11.
The remote copy that moved files from one system to the other for
subsequent processing did so without complaint, the receiving
side silently truncated the incoming files -- which were
identical in name through 11 chars... essentially copying the
incoming files over and over again on top of the same file...
Sigh and sheesh!)
Phew! I thought there'd be no solution to the format wars.
Oh wait, there's still:
cable wars (HDMI, component)
DRM wars (broadcast flag and more)
HD wars (DLP, LCD, Plasma, i vs p, etc.)
provider wars (comcast, DISH, DirectTV)
DVR wars (comcast (ick), DISH (ick), DirectTV (ick), TIVO
(yea!))
did I mention DRM wars? (it's worth mentioning more than
once)
compression wars (have you looked closely at the quality of a
comcast HD broadcast?, and/or their OnDemand?)
price wars. (players, recorders (if you get permission to
record), media (if you get permission to play))
But, at least now we've gotten that pesky dual-compatible
use-a-single-object-lens issue out of the way. Now I can tell
all my friends and family the hurdle has been cleared and to let
the floodgates of new consumers open.
From the article, "Bifrost [6], a plug-in originally
conceived at Lotus Research, that takes this approach. The idea
here is that the people are the main indicators of whether an
email is important. After installing Bifrost, you're asked to
sort your contacts into five groups: Your own email addresses,
"VIP Platinum" (extremely important people, e.g. your manager),
"VIP Gold" (important people: friends and family), as well as
small and large distribution mailing lists."
First, I get a little chill when I hear Lotus, a pretty
amazing suite of software but one of the most proprietary and
obtuse universes at the same time. It's not the first thing I
think of when considering "fixing" a broken e-mail metaphor.
And is the e-mail metaphor that broken?
Kudos to the author for yet another e-mail idea but people's
ineffective management of correspondence is their own failing. A
straightforward and simple e-mail (gmail is a fair example, not
perfect, but pretty darned good) offers the best opportunity for
effective communication, not some highly evolved and complex
e-mail system.
One system described in the article requires you define and
categorize your contacts seemingly unaware this is the old
"Object-Oriented" conundrum -- people, like Objects, don't
categorize neatly and across bright lines. Strike one.
The author does point out any new or other e-mail system
should be easy to use. These systems don't look like that (not
saying it isn't easy, but anything with lots of features and
abstractions and any kind of learning curve (Lotus!) faces an
uphill battle to adoption. Strike two.
The ultimate end point seems obvious, from the article: "It
seems like the ideal email organization tool would be like your
personal, smart secretary: It knows what's important or
interesting, and deals with stuff you don't want to be bothered
with. That would be perfect. " Yeah, I'd like that. I
haven't seen anything that comes close though and I'm a long way
from trusting any software to make those kinds of decisions for
me. I still check every single
spam entry to ensure I'm not missing an important real e-mail,
and still occasionally find a stray missive in the spam folder.
Computers have notoriously failed to solve many human problems
(how many of you work in the paperless
office?) and probably appropriately so -- our management
problems are too human to be completely solved by software. Give
me a good clean simple and stable interface to manage my e-mails
any day (gmail, Thunderbird, elm, PINE) and I'll take
responsibility for the intelligence to manage it.
(As an aside, one of the features I like most about gmail that
has nudged me to adopt it almost exclusively is the great google
indexing builtin... it's amazing how powerful the "free
association" metaphor is in any information context whereby you
need only remember snippets and keywords to instantly retrieve
deeply "buried" e-mails -- something not easy to do with a stack
of real paper mail. Ironically that power is obtained by
permitting maximum entropy from the users' perspective.)
Instead, it uses bone-conduction technology
to convert the vibrations from your jaw into sound, making it
perfect for ballgames, concerts and any other noisy public place
you like to hold your private
conversations.
Perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek?, tongue-in-cheekbone? I
don't know what I am going to find more irritating... the fact
that cell phone users can now more easily and efficiently annoy
everyone else in loud environments, or the fact that they paid
$200 for that privelege. At least Wired got it
right and got their little dig in in the process of informing. Sigh.
(Also interesting from the Wired article, the
picture of this gadget has nothing to offer up scale, how
frigging big is this thing? Looking at the picture, I can scale
it a few different sizes and come up with some pretty interesting
ideas about how it is worn and how comfortable it might or might
no be.)
From the article, an opinion by the ABC tool Shaw:
Shaw also threw cold water on the idea that
neutering the fast-forward option would result in a consumer
backlash. He suggested that consumers prefer DVRs for their
ability to facilitate on-demand viewing and not ad-zapping--and
consumers might warm to the idea that anytime viewing brings with
it a tradeoff in the form of unavoidable commercial
viewing.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong wrong! Mr. Shaw!
What a tool you've turned out to be. People are not grateful for
the timeshifting of their shows... they're grateful for
being in control of their watching preferences.
Some will watch commercials and will do so whether or not they
can skip the ads. Others don't ever watch ads, don't ever want
to, but happen to inadvertantly bump into ads every once in a
while -- that's the best you're going to get with them.
You want to piss off the customers? Disable the fast forward
during commercials... Plain and simple... there
will be a backlash.
This copy protection quagmire (we need to come up with a
withdrawal plan)... it creates problems in other ways on other
fronts.
Consider the long discussed issues in general with DRM and
DRM's interference with easy adoption of new (and really
potentially very cool) technology for consumers. This has been
discussed to death on slashdot as well as other forums -- and
remains one of the foremost threats to the success of HD in any
What may be less obvious is what starts to happen when these
tiny holes appear in the digital dike, and the industry discovers
they're gaping holes, and the patching begins, to the detriment
of other accepted technology.
In the case of this described "hole", a screen print? This
becomes the DRM's worst nightmare? If they succeed in lobbying
the PC industry and others and get this hole blocked, all of a
sudden a long-accepted practice, i.e., screen printing, becomes
suspect and may even be taken away as an option because it
is potentially used for pirating.
Don't discount the possibility this could happen. A few years
ago all may have pooh-poohed the idea as preposterous because
computers just plain old didn't have the horse power and storage
to pull this kind of feat off. Today they do. And if someone
does start pirating DVDs this way it would be predictable the
MPAA could go after that technique, maybe successfully.
Unintended consequences. I would find it highly objectionable
to see the capabilities of my computers to expand and my ability
(or permission) to use those capabilities
diminished.
Whether or not this solves the problem (I don't think it
does), I get real nervous when source code starts being perceived
as a document that lends itself to proportional fonts. Maybe I
haven't been in the latest and greatest IDEs lately and am
missing something here, but source code seems to scream for
canonical form, and proportional font is not that.
I think vim has a reasonable approach (do the research:
shiftwidth, tabstops, softtabstop,
etc.), I assume there are other approaches in emacs.
Start talking about proportional font source code documents,
and now everyone's going to want to have styles, and all the
confusing garbage that is word processing. As difficult as
source code and programming is, it doesn't need to be more
nuanced in word processing.
Slashdot Mirror
At what point does the advancement of technology become either irrelevant, unnecessary to the casual user, too expensive, too complex, or some combination thereof? This has already happened in audio -- how many people out there really are vested in SACD? How many people do you know who even know what SACD is?
How many people are using 7.1, or THX sound? Or, if they have it, have it set up correctly? Or, if they have it, have any reasonable collection of media to make use of it?
And now there is evidence of death on the vine with new and improved video formats -- HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray. Other than mostly a slashdot type crowd, who really cares about the arguably incremental improvements for hefty investments?
At what point do consumers shrug their collective shoulders at any news around HDTV (hint, they're already starting to)? And when do all of the complexities of the combinitorials to lace all of this technology together push new consumers away?
It's possible Vista may be entering that twilight zone of indifferent consumerism. I'm totally technology driven, and have most of my life been a bleeding edge investor, but lately it's become less interesting. I can tell the difference between 1600x1200 resolution and WVGA, but I have to explain it to everyone else. They don't care, and they're not willing to spend any extra dollars to get the extra resolution kick.
All I'm seeing around Vista is toned-down expectations from their original promise, and ramped up requirements for hardware. That hardly lights a fire for me, and is a frigging wet towel for the lay-people considering new computers.
I don't know many in the technology world knocked out of their socks by the announced features (especially after all of the un-announced, and I don't know anyone outside of the technology elite circles who are interested, or care, and have any inklings of plans to move to Vista -- and if new rollouts of computers are significantly more expensive at all because of Vista, I know lots of people who are proactively not buying.
Maybe the world is reaching a point where people really don't need mini-Crays to read e-mail, manage photos, and surf the internet. And maybe the fork in the computing world can finally focus on useful applications and customer service rather than eye-candy translucent windowing graphics.
Finally, for all my support nightmares AOL users I know (and there are many!) that I endured over the years, a misstep that may offend and bother them as much as supporting AOL has bothered me for the last bazillion years. Go away AOL! (But, leave a few of your coasters at the store counters, those did come in kind of handy.)
So, all of that aside (the court of public opinion stipulates AOL as stupid and insensitive), how equally egregious and offensive is others would propogate and perpetuate this misguided release of data? Any mirrors still carrying this information (and they are there) serves few purposes for continuing to provide access, and none are defensible: either they are happy and willing to allow potentially embarassing or damaging data to continue to be distributed, or they are sticking it to AOL when AOL has already fallen on their own sword -- enough is enough. It's not okay.
(So, how many wives are either not going to be home tonight, or are going to fix hubby his very favorite dish?)
An anecdotal Norton lifetime experience:
At one time I considered Norton an essential application/utility because I couldn't explain sufficiently to new computer owners why Norton (and McAffee, etc.) were unnecessary, evil, and just wrong for them. So, I'd always get their credit card number, hold my nose, and ante up their money for their peace of mind.
But after years of being called back and finding computer disarray on these "happy" users caused directly or indirectly by the intrusive "anti-virus" software suites such as Norton, I've switched tactics and now the very first thing I do when working on others' computer (with their permission of course) is uninstall any of the mainstream virus protection programs, download AVG free version and am done with it.
I've found since taking this approach virtually no call backs where any problems were created by AVG, with much happier friends and family who have at the same time saved themselves a couple of bucks.
Once an essential application Norton? Only in as much as Norton had been able to (and continues to) convince the world they are essential, not a hard task in the FUD universe that is Windows.
This reminds me of other Microsoft installs I've done over the years, and it smacks of such disdain for the rest of the OS universe. Nowhere in the article, nor can I find evidence anywhere else is there an accomodation for an install where XP is just another OS. I remember my first experience with this, when I installed a Win98 on a linux box, and not only did Win98 not offer a dual boot, it (seemingly) gladly removed my linux MBR and formatted my partition without asking if it was okay, and without saying it had done so. That was quite a surprise.
Does anyone know if there is a way to do this? (Though, knowing XP can point to more than one OS to boot, I'm guessing Microsoft is more gentle if there is a pre-existing Windows OS there.)
I've googled for dual boot information, it looks to be similar to what I already know -- it's easier to set up a dual boot machine on a pre-existing Windows machine.
Case in point from the article:
It would be nice to think the courts and the justice system (the jurists) would apply due diligence but for myriad reasons they don't or won't. Considering technology, the RIAA, and the gazillion combinations of playing with digital media it isn't clear a judge could ever be educated enough to understand the technical issues. Instead, the deepest pockets win because they can afford the biggest megaphone -- they've convinced the legal system via FUD that consumers are evil and piracy is rampant and must be stopped.
Problem is, customers aren't evil, piracy is not rampant (yeah, it exists, but it's not the monster the RIAA claims it is), and it doesn't need to be stopped.
My biggest fear is the momentum is too strong, the RIAA has gotten too far along and has won enough battles it's beginning to look like they may win the war. And, the prediction in the article:
is likely to be the outcome.Of course it seems obvious to me the ultimate result of all of this nonsense is the buying public either is so angry at their treatment, or confused by all of the rules and regulations, the promising landscape of new and great electronic gizmos will suffer its own (and hopefully temporary until all the goons leave town) recession. To quote the scathing Paul Thurrott's outrage against Microsoft's false positive to his "piracy", "Ah well". ;-)
Ah well?, Ah well? This is the extent of outrage in "this new era"?!? Amazing!
Please explain to me what this really is. I visited the page, and what it looks to be is the users' ability to download an unfettered "customized" mp3 from Simpson where (I assume) a laundry list of common names are inserted into the mp3 (dubbed, no doubt)... giving the customer the illusion of some connection with the artist. (So far, it appears a more correct headline would have been "Yahoo advocates DRM-free music, offers one DRM-free song from their catalog!)"
Obscene marketing and subterfuge aside, I find nothing in the general Yahoo Music offerings to suggest the rest of their music is offered unfettered, free of DRM. Indeed, the FAQ includes the following info:
Any information/explanation or evidence to the contrary would be greatly appreciated, because, other than the free advertising, I'm not seeing any change in direction from Yahoo on this one.
I hail Microsoft's perceived "softening" as a positive step albeit driven largely by legal fiat. However, one need only read this article on Microsoft and their stance against Google to realize and recognize Microsoft retains its hubris and aggressive stance.
Consider from the above article:
The hubris is Microsoft's assumption anyone getting business is taking food off of their plate, or something they consider rightfully theirs, as opposed to customers who make choices in a free marketplace. Fortunately the marketplace is tipped somewhat more towards a level playing field (not all the way, but better than before).
Not to be overly paranoid, but this is Microsoft we're discussing, and this is Slashdot, but what are the "terms" to allow manufacturers to set any search engine as default? Manufacturers in the past, before the DOJ decision were allowed to ship computers with any operating system they chose. It's just that Microsoft provided strong incentives for them not to.
While I like Microsoft's "allowance", considering past behavior, I'd rather they stipulate "with no strings attached", which wasn't stated explicitly. I know this post will bring me Flame/Troll mods, but fool me once...
Fairness UPDATE: From this Seattle Times article are the words that bring the clarity I sought (emphasis mine):
This is good news!
I think for the large part, the world of psychics is snake oil, predators preying on the gullible.
But, if you're familiar with the double-slit "interference" experiment, you may get an uneasy sense there is much for us to learn about interaction of particles, forces, energies, etc. It's not for me to determine ESP is real but I've experienced unexplainable phenomena at least to my level to understand.
One example, a very close friend in college, she was an identical twin, and talked about the typical entanglements with her twin, who was back in her hometown 200 miles away. Her twin came down on her birthday and I was there when they opened their cards, identical (and not with any "twin" theme... just random typical birthday cards). Not a HUGE example of unexplained communication, but at least odd.
There are things we don't know, and we don't even know we don't know. And, the more we learn, the less we know, at least that's been my paradox. Things that seemed black and white seem grayer as I learn more. (Consider this: can you really determine whether you cross a defined landmark by some predefined time? By what reference point? Can you really feel objects, considering no real contact is made and that the actual real occupied space in atoms is virtually nothing?)
Yeah, there's a lot we don't know about ESP, and may never learn -- though, you can be pretty sure those who say they know all about ESP don't.
From the article: It is not known exactly how the coding system will work, but industry experts tell Think Secret that the software would likely either limit the number of playbacks or provide unlimited viewing for a period of time, after which the movie will be "turned off" and no longer available.
So now I can pay to spend an ungodly amount of time and energy to get some 320x240 jittery so-so contrast version of some big screen movie. And I'll have to watch it in a certain time period or lose it? Or, they'll restrict the number of times I can watch it? Somebody pinch me, I must be dreaming. Could life really be this good?
Somebody stop the Earth, I'd like to get off.
If the consuming public goes for this, it only brings the lie that is the new generation is "tech savvy", cuz if they were tech savvy, they'd know they're being sold a bill of goods and what's being offered is dumbed down, diluted quality, highly compressed pap.
(An aside, also from the article: " The subscription business makes sense for everybody. We'll all make money. " WTF? The subscription business makes sense for everybody? We'll all make money? Wow, I've always known the whole point of offering services, creating companies, etc., has been about making money.... It just becomes a little more obscenely transparent each day. I remember the good old days when companies at least pretended to want to please the customer.)
(Also, couple of questions:
- How LONG will the movie
stay around?
- How MUCH is this going to cost?
- What OTHER
viewing options besides the iPod screen?
- How MANY viewings
before expiration?
)From the summary: Even though it took three times as long to cook the egg, Apple should probably be concerned. Actually McDonalds should be concerned. Apple is coming out with a previously unannounced, now leaked, new product, the Egg MacMuffin.
Meanwhile grandma is still taking off her shoes and getting wanded at the airport. Nice to know yet another debacle is launched. Here's hoping they're as successful as they have been with the new Air Traffic Control System.
From the summary: "Few people realize that when they buy software or music or movies, they are actually buying a license to use, watch or listen. " Well, duh. Staying current on ever-shifting rules is virtually impossible.
And, lest any defenders of "paying for license" jump in, the rules whether they be the actual rules themselves, or how the providers are choosing to enforce them are shifting.
If in fact in the past they really did sell only the license to play, watch, etc., there was a wink and a nod for those who owned the games should they choose to sell their games at some point. Now under increasing pressures to maximize profits every stone is being turned for ways to eke out more profits.
The electronics industry is seemingly insane with their obsession to beat down their consumers. Case in point, we just upgraded all of our cell phones, none of the really worked that well, and the only real options included cell phones with camera builtin.
We did have a blast the first day with the phones, and even found a couple of trick ways to get our own customized dial tones to the phones without paying for downloads. But, aha, Verizon was on to those tricks, didn't mention the surcharge for sending pictures to each other (actually they at least strongly implied within the "plan" we could send pictures back and forth free ad nauseum), and we found lots of nasty little extra charges to the tune of ~$20 ... all within the one
week pro-rated new-phone period.
This was such an annoying and unexpected treatment, we've all pretty much retired the cameras for any use at all... Too bad, it was kind of fun, and I'd have been willing to even look at pricing plans, had they not sucked me in without any heads up.
Treat the consumers with respect, and honesty. Ninety-nine percent of them will treat you with money! (The other one percent you really don't (or shouldn't) give a shit about anyway.)
From the article and summary :
Looks like Microsoft has notched the bar a little higher than usual. Hopefully they really really really mean it this time. (And Lucy isn't going to yank the football back this time.)
And (emphasis mine):
Once again, Microsoft leaves the heavy lifting to others. What a crock.
This raises Google's "no evil" equity significantly. Any mechanism to sniff out, identify, and hopefully proactively take measure to protect against the evil that is the web and its sinister demographic is a good thing.
So, Google takes the "do no evil" a step further and calls evil out.
There is a quote from the article I don't quite understand,
Is there some potential badness that Google is indexing binary file content? What might that be?
Why are computer file names and conventions and protocols so messed up? It's bizarre -- and Microsoft has been one of the worst offenders with one of the most powerful positions and opportunities to make it a better filename-naming world.
I had worked in the DOS world long ago, and I'd always been frustrated with not only the restriction of the 8.3 naming convention, but the added imposition of:
Many years later, I had opportunity to consult in the Windows/DOS world after having worked in the Unix world for over a decade -- figured Microsoft had had enough time and money to work out the kinks in what had obviously been an early-technology constraint for the brain dead old DOS naming restrictions. Not. Sigh.
And then the transition was a nightmare, whoever conjured up the VFAT naming format and the "tilde" mapping backwards compatibility to FAT names should have been shot. A golden opportunity lost.
And then everything swings completely the other direction where anything goes. This may curry favor with users, but wreaks havoc on billions of lines of code which all of a sudden choke on what had been simple parsing routines -- fixable, but at great expense. I still think this was a paradigm shift that somehow could have accommodated the user space/community but still allowed some sanity in the machine world.
But layered on, or dovetailed into that quagmire is the Microsoft insistence they "know better than thou"... and the condescending insistence of dragging the ".3" extension nightmare into the new rules for file naming. Would have been okay to "allow" ".3" naming, but to impose the bizarre rules and behaviors Microsoft has? (How many of you have files named picture.jpg.jpg.jpg out there?)
Options to show extension, defaults to hide extensions, and continued reliance and semantics applied to extensions continue to make the filenaming world a landmine field.
And, Microsoft dares to allow mixed case naming, but does case insensitive handling of file names... don't even get me started about some of the bizarre results and buggy behavior I've traced to that. I only wish I'd had a chargeback code for all of the time I've spent fixing and debugging systems that all come back to the file naming. Sigh, again.
All of this isn't to let Unix and Unix style file naming skate. I've had problems, though fewer, there. But, at least it's seemingly (to me) more consistent and predictable, though there has been what I call "Windows" creep in that there have appeared some apps that somehow think managing and imposing "transparently" the extension to "file type" mapping is a good thing (it's not).
(One of the funniest Unix debacles I experienced was debugging a groups application -- they were moving files around and losing all but one each processing cycle... turned out they were remote copying from one Unix that had 14 (or more, can't remember) char limit on file names to an old SunOS system that allowed only 11. The remote copy that moved files from one system to the other for subsequent processing did so without complaint, the receiving side silently truncated the incoming files -- which were identical in name through 11 chars... essentially copying the incoming files over and over again on top of the same file... Sigh and sheesh!)
Phew! I thought there'd be no solution to the format wars.
Oh wait, there's still:
But, at least now we've gotten that pesky dual-compatible use-a-single-object-lens issue out of the way. Now I can tell all my friends and family the hurdle has been cleared and to let the floodgates of new consumers open.
Not.
I'm going out for a bicycle ride.
From the article, "Bifrost [6], a plug-in originally conceived at Lotus Research, that takes this approach. The idea here is that the people are the main indicators of whether an email is important. After installing Bifrost, you're asked to sort your contacts into five groups: Your own email addresses, "VIP Platinum" (extremely important people, e.g. your manager), "VIP Gold" (important people: friends and family), as well as small and large distribution mailing lists."
First, I get a little chill when I hear Lotus, a pretty amazing suite of software but one of the most proprietary and obtuse universes at the same time. It's not the first thing I think of when considering "fixing" a broken e-mail metaphor.
And is the e-mail metaphor that broken? Kudos to the author for yet another e-mail idea but people's ineffective management of correspondence is their own failing. A straightforward and simple e-mail (gmail is a fair example, not perfect, but pretty darned good) offers the best opportunity for effective communication, not some highly evolved and complex e-mail system.
One system described in the article requires you define and categorize your contacts seemingly unaware this is the old "Object-Oriented" conundrum -- people, like Objects, don't categorize neatly and across bright lines. Strike one.
The author does point out any new or other e-mail system should be easy to use. These systems don't look like that (not saying it isn't easy, but anything with lots of features and abstractions and any kind of learning curve (Lotus!) faces an uphill battle to adoption. Strike two.
The ultimate end point seems obvious, from the article: "It seems like the ideal email organization tool would be like your personal, smart secretary: It knows what's important or interesting, and deals with stuff you don't want to be bothered with. That would be perfect. " Yeah, I'd like that. I haven't seen anything that comes close though and I'm a long way from trusting any software to make those kinds of decisions for me. I still check every single spam entry to ensure I'm not missing an important real e-mail, and still occasionally find a stray missive in the spam folder.
Computers have notoriously failed to solve many human problems (how many of you work in the paperless office?) and probably appropriately so -- our management problems are too human to be completely solved by software. Give me a good clean simple and stable interface to manage my e-mails any day (gmail, Thunderbird, elm, PINE) and I'll take responsibility for the intelligence to manage it.
(As an aside, one of the features I like most about gmail that has nudged me to adopt it almost exclusively is the great google indexing builtin... it's amazing how powerful the "free association" metaphor is in any information context whereby you need only remember snippets and keywords to instantly retrieve deeply "buried" e-mails -- something not easy to do with a stack of real paper mail. Ironically that power is obtained by permitting maximum entropy from the users' perspective.)
I love this! From the article:
Perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek?, tongue-in-cheekbone? I don't know what I am going to find more irritating... the fact that cell phone users can now more easily and efficiently annoy everyone else in loud environments, or the fact that they paid $200 for that privelege. At least Wired got it right and got their little dig in in the process of informing. Sigh.
(Also interesting from the Wired article, the picture of this gadget has nothing to offer up scale, how frigging big is this thing? Looking at the picture, I can scale it a few different sizes and come up with some pretty interesting ideas about how it is worn and how comfortable it might or might no be.)
From the article, an opinion by the ABC tool Shaw:
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong wrong! Mr. Shaw! What a tool you've turned out to be. People are not grateful for the timeshifting of their shows... they're grateful for being in control of their watching preferences. Some will watch commercials and will do so whether or not they can skip the ads. Others don't ever watch ads, don't ever want to, but happen to inadvertantly bump into ads every once in a while -- that's the best you're going to get with them.
You want to piss off the customers? Disable the fast forward during commercials... Plain and simple... there will be a backlash.
This copy protection quagmire (we need to come up with a withdrawal plan)... it creates problems in other ways on other fronts.
Consider the long discussed issues in general with DRM and DRM's interference with easy adoption of new (and really potentially very cool) technology for consumers. This has been discussed to death on slashdot as well as other forums -- and remains one of the foremost threats to the success of HD in any
What may be less obvious is what starts to happen when these tiny holes appear in the digital dike, and the industry discovers they're gaping holes, and the patching begins, to the detriment of other accepted technology.
In the case of this described "hole", a screen print? This becomes the DRM's worst nightmare? If they succeed in lobbying the PC industry and others and get this hole blocked, all of a sudden a long-accepted practice, i.e., screen printing, becomes suspect and may even be taken away as an option because it is potentially used for pirating.
Don't discount the possibility this could happen. A few years ago all may have pooh-poohed the idea as preposterous because computers just plain old didn't have the horse power and storage to pull this kind of feat off. Today they do. And if someone does start pirating DVDs this way it would be predictable the MPAA could go after that technique, maybe successfully.
Unintended consequences. I would find it highly objectionable to see the capabilities of my computers to expand and my ability (or permission) to use those capabilities diminished.
If you're looking these up in the new spelling dicshunaire referenced in this previous slashdot article (over 1000 posts!):
This was a real support call I once did:
Whether or not this solves the problem (I don't think it does), I get real nervous when source code starts being perceived as a document that lends itself to proportional fonts. Maybe I haven't been in the latest and greatest IDEs lately and am missing something here, but source code seems to scream for canonical form, and proportional font is not that.
I think vim has a reasonable approach (do the research: shiftwidth, tabstops, softtabstop, etc.), I assume there are other approaches in emacs.
Start talking about proportional font source code documents, and now everyone's going to want to have styles, and all the confusing garbage that is word processing. As difficult as source code and programming is, it doesn't need to be more nuanced in word processing.