His methodology was deeply flawed: his selection of research subjects very biased as he chose subjects he already had experience with and knew their problems so he could skew the control group like he wanted, Some research subjects were selected/tested at a children's birthday party,some without parents consent (serious violation of research ethics). No proper double blinding was done, and even then the results were mismanaged in such a way that they showed a strong correlation (which in fact, even his skewed results did not really show).
Apart from him (Dr.Wakefield) having ties to anti vaccination groups and heading some of them and making a ton of money on his scare tactics (the results of which are little things like an increase in children dying from measles and other such lovely things).
basically, anything which could be done wrong WAS done wrong. I've seen better done research in homeopathy journals, and they're not really known for using science at all.
One reason is that some companies have acquired bad reputations in the tech sector for various reasons. One reason might be privacy issues, another might be technical (recall the old closed nature of the AOL system), yet others could be social in nature (all technophobes seem to be their target group, therefore it gives an image of their users being technologically incompetent). AOL users have an image of technological incompetence, that's the image you project when handing that address out.
Companies spend a lot of money on changing their image, yet it rarely works. A strong image is important, and must be cultivated from the start. So if the person in the story wants to change her image of technological incompetence she must be ready to spend some time on that
Similarly, Mac users have a reputation of smugness and being graphic designers. I use a mac, am rather smug, but I'm a USABILITY designer, world of difference;) Ok, sometimes the stereotypes actually fit..
Yeah, I agree. This is a two way interaction between the creator/seller and the consumer.
Some understand it. In music I would say that Trent Reznor (Nine inch Nails) gets it. What he's been doing is offering his albums for download in good quality with cover artwork and all that stuff for a VERY low fee, or even completely free. Then he offers you very pretty packaging, with really nice extras. Beautiful objects which are in some cases nice even if you have no idea who he is. Also cool concepts, and interesting music ideas (limited edition pressed vinyl of one album, pressed in thicker vinyl, and a hardcover photobook in the same size. Of course also both CDs as well as a bluray with the music in above CD quality and....
you get the picture..
Value added. You pay, he gives you nice things. Both are happy.
I didn't get the superduper limited edition vinyl, because I didn't have the money at the time. So i bought the next nicest set. And that is very nice as well.
Piracy is not something to worry about. One extra value which is often overlooked is the good feeling of supporting the future of the people whose work you love. That is also worth a lot. People want to be honest because it makes them feel good.
The comment by winwar here below/above me is pretty much correct. The bulk of the cost of a book is the publicity, editing and writing, in that order. I can write a big book, but without an experienced editor for feedback and assistance it will never be a great book. Without publicity of some sorts even a great book will never become a known book.
Think about publicity, just book signings by the author mean sending the author across the country. This runs into thousands of dollars in the first few cities. That cost has to be recouped somewhere. That is the price of doing business and getting your face out. Dropping text onto the internet will only get a handful of readers at the best.
Then there's distribution.
You're right. Server space is cheap these days. RELIABLE server space is not. Especially if you need a good e-commerce system as well. If you want to buy your own e-commerce system then you're looking at big bucks, as well as getting the credit card handling all down and that crap.
If you go through a bigger vendor like amazon they probably take between 30 and 50% of the price as a service fee. That means out of $10, you have $7 left to pay for all other expenses. Your publisher will probably take around $3-4, sales tax will take between $1-2 and you have a buck or two left. A regular deal gives authors around 15-20% of the price as their salary. Cut the price of the book and you cut the salary. Of course, an ebook is cheaper to manufacture and transport, but that's just not the big cost, as you see. That's usually 1 or 2 dollars. As there is still SOME cost with an ebook (storage, backup, work on formats etc) let's cut that down to 50 cents.
The ebooks price should then be around $7.50
A lot of publishing expenses are recouped through hardcovers, which can be sold at a higher markup. Ebooks might then be a little more expensive at the start of a books run. Lets say around $10, giving the publisher $1.50 extra per book. Sounds fair to me.
no, I did not. My goal with getting the ebook in the first place was to get in MY preferred format and avoid having a dead tree version which I then have to lug around next time I move. I also try to avoid the environmental cost of book production and shipping, so I'm not going to order a hardcover book and throw it out.
I'm not saying that I did the moral thing, just that I was actually trying to find a way of buying the book in a format which should already be ubiquitous (and is available..in selected areas), but the authors publisher is so scared of piracy that the easiest way of obtaining the book is through piracy... sounds stupid? Sounds that way to me too.
I had taken my credit card up, had tried to purchase the book and was met with a "not available in your area" message..
I HAVE however written the author a letter on the matter. Sadly though, it's probably his publisher who makes these calls.
Not long ago I wanted to buy an ebook (just published. I went to Amazon and they wanted the hardcover price for the ebook. $25 for an ebook, just plain silly. So I went to barnes&noble, they offered the ebook for $10, similar to a paperback. So I tried to buy it.
Aaaanndd.. an error came up saying that I could not buy this book from the area I was in (not USA). I looked around some more and did not find a european distributor for the ebook. Lot's of companies had the hardcover, but no ebook. I checked if I could order it from amazon (I had no intention of completing that !!$25!! transaction) and same thing. I was not allowed to buy the bloody book.
So I went to my friends at thepiratebay and got the book. I needed to do some conversion to get the text to display properly on my device, but it worked. The legal alternatives, which I tried to follow, simply did not work. Maybe there was a way to get the legal options to work properly, but the way to get customers to do the legal thing is to make that EASIER than the illegal way. On iTunes I am guaranteed to get good quality files, on TPB I am not. Simple.
Here in sweden the streaming service Spotify has changed the game. It's just so easy to do the legal thing that illegal downloading went down. Do the same with movies, books, programs.. basically everything else. Make the legal way the best and easiest way, and people will come.
As for Cory Doctorow, I do wish that he gave me some way of giving him money for the digital copies I've gotten from him. I don't want to buy a paper version, and I don't want to donate a paper version. I just want to pay the author (and editor and all those involved) for his/their work.
USA had a decent system which was perverted to a private business. At that point funding for the minimum service that americans would receive was slashed, severely breaking the system. That was done due to lobbying and then sold to the public as an improvement..
And remember, if you need very expensive medical service and your insurers don't like it, they will go through your history with a fine tooth comb. If they find ANYTHING which you didn't disclose they will void your insurance. If you went to a psychologist as a teenager due to depression and did not declare it to the insurer, they may not have to pay for that cancer treatment when you're 50. Same if they discover that you had diabetes for some time even if you you didn't know it.
That can't happen to me, in a public system. I had to take my son to a hospital due to swine flu. No charge. I needed medical service due to a sports injury. Walk in, check, walk out. And we live longer, our children are less likely to die and so on. In a public health system. That goes for all the west european countries which all have public healthcare systems and high tech hospitals. The US scores similar to 3rd world countries when it comes to health, well, except cuba and a few others which perform much better. So enjoy your privatized system.
Do you really think that you are smart enough to play with multiple companies and their lawyer designed contracts?
They have leeways in their contracts because the contracts charge too much and pay too little out. There is a reason the private insurance sector pays investors huge dividends, and it's that they screw you.
Isn't this just an indicator of how broken the US health care system is.
I have a hard time imagining this to be a problem in this way in the countries which have good public health systems. I've never had to think about the cost of healthcare, that's what I pay taxes for. My neighbour doesn't have to worry about the cost of healthcare, that's what I pay taxes for.
We pay damn high taxes. The benefits are pretty big, though and completely worth it.
I decided to go to University after having worked for over ten years. Fees for school? Free (for a good university, well, any university). That's what I've been paying taxes for. The youngsters studying with me. I paid for their tuition too (or took part in that).
More work seems to have been put into the pictures than the text and the text sounds like it was written by fratboys, bot the level of humor and the quality of the text itself.
Listen, here I'm going to write a joke article headline:
Researchers found out today that the Mona Lisa is made of poo!
That was pretty bad, eh? Both because of the joke not really being a joke (too bad to classify as one) as well as the text being poorly written, it sounds like it was written by a 12 year old. Jokes (and joke articles) require more than just writing something non-factual or nonsensical.
CNET. PLEASE oh please, if you are going to have a parody section, hire writers capable of writing parodies. I'm having much more fun criticizing the quality of the article and the writers than from reading the article itself and consider the snarky comments in this thread much more entertaining.
That must be the worst written article I've read this month. Or possibly ever.
Hey, I know, let's next compare a raft made of barrels to the International Space Station and let's have the raft win because it has easier access and is cheaper to make and maintain.
I could stage a few events with Sasha Grey.. they would not be considered sci-fi (unless the props I were to use would be considered sci-fi... plasma powered "toys" anyone?)
It affects all SENSITIVE components (and actually affects everything in the home, not everything will fail though). A light bulb will not fail due to smoke. It may become covered in tar and not put out the full amount of light. A TV can fail, possibly even spectacularly (catch fire etc) as the tar sets on all components and increases dust accumulation, dust can create electrical pathways that should not be, sparks and fire...
Even though you can't see components fail doesn't mean that the tar does not affect them. They may last shorter, work worse etc.
One example (from a larger scale where monitoring cost and such is easier) comes from the airline industry. When smoking was banned they found that the airducts needed much less frequent cleaning, and were easier to clean. This cut costs. What's more, the pressure regulation systems (based on outflow valves) had much less problems as the valves which manage the pressure differential didn't get gummed up with tar anymore. This is considered a big deal in the airline industry.
Those components weren't failing or catching fire because the weren't those kinds of components. They did need much more maintenance and caused expenses.
Your mums smoking affects everything around her negatively. Only some parts will obviously fail. Especially components which are being run at the edge of what they can do and need good cooling and airflow. Like computers.
Smokers computers tend to have AMAZING amounts of dust sticking to the oily tar residue.
Failure prone and disgusting to work on.
Animal hair really messes electronics up as well, and a computer shop is probably not bound by the warranty if a failure occurs due to hair clogging the cooling.
I used to run a computer shop/maintenance. The car repair shops and the car painting shop that we serviced all knew that their equipment would not last the full time. They were also honest about the conditions in which the equipment had to function.
There was no way in hell that a general warranty would be honored. However, we would do all repairs for them and replace anything which failed. If the failure was not due to the extreme environment, then the replacement was free (based on warranty). In a car painting shop, even the office computer would get seriously gunked up even though there were extra filters on the air intakes. CD drives lasted around 6 months.
That's life. That's an extreme environment and is generally not covered by warranties. Good, honest working relationships means that problems do not arise.
It's not really a cut down photo editor in any sense. It's a photo database and photo album with some minor (yet well implemented) fixing tools included. Kind of like a photo album with a small selection of correcting pens included.
It's the best I've tried at what it does, and I do a bit of work in Photoshop as well. Just, different tools for different tasks.
iPhoto keeps track of my family pics (around 10.000 right now) letting me search them through all sorts of different criteria, including the event it was taken, as well as through who is in the picture or where it was taken.
It does depend on what you are going to do. I see Safari as an emergency browser, and only use a part of the iLife suite. Apache and PHP are optional installs on offer as are most of the libraries for software development.
Quicktime works fine on Mac, but who really uses it?
Some of this may be defined as crapware, but if you need any of it then these are properly functioning, real programs. Not like the awful halfbaked demo crapwares on most Win machines (I sold and fixed those for a while, so annoying to use out of the box..)
Pointing out to someone that his door is broken or non-existant, with him then getting angry and insisting that you buy a new door for him as noone (especially thieves) would have noticed his door-lessness if you hadn't pointed it out.
Way to go USA, I'm not going to be the nice neighbour.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, and before kids started dying from diseases which had been wiped out by vaccines some decades ago...
Serious screwup, but thankfully it is now being corrected as much as is possible.
Incidentally, Wakefield was already in some anti vaccination organizations BEFORE the study was done, his research just gave them some credibility.
Sure.
His methodology was deeply flawed:
his selection of research subjects very biased as he chose subjects he already had experience with and knew their problems so he could skew the control group like he wanted,
Some research subjects were selected/tested at a children's birthday party,some without parents consent (serious violation of research ethics).
No proper double blinding was done,
and even then the results were mismanaged in such a way that they showed a strong correlation (which in fact, even his skewed results did not really show).
Apart from him (Dr.Wakefield) having ties to anti vaccination groups and heading some of them and making a ton of money on his scare tactics (the results of which are little things like an increase in children dying from measles and other such lovely things).
basically, anything which could be done wrong WAS done wrong. I've seen better done research in homeopathy journals, and they're not really known for using science at all.
It matters.
One reason is that some companies have acquired bad reputations in the tech sector for various reasons. One reason might be privacy issues, another might be technical (recall the old closed nature of the AOL system), yet others could be social in nature (all technophobes seem to be their target group, therefore it gives an image of their users being technologically incompetent).
AOL users have an image of technological incompetence, that's the image you project when handing that address out.
Companies spend a lot of money on changing their image, yet it rarely works. A strong image is important, and must be cultivated from the start. So if the person in the story wants to change her image of technological incompetence she must be ready to spend some time on that
Similarly, Mac users have a reputation of smugness and being graphic designers. I use a mac, am rather smug, but I'm a USABILITY designer, world of difference ;)
Ok, sometimes the stereotypes actually fit..
I think that "more convenient" is the biggest issue there
Yeah, I agree. This is a two way interaction between the creator/seller and the consumer.
Some understand it. In music I would say that Trent Reznor (Nine inch Nails) gets it. What he's been doing is offering his albums for download in good quality with cover artwork and all that stuff for a VERY low fee, or even completely free. Then he offers you very pretty packaging, with really nice extras. Beautiful objects which are in some cases nice even if you have no idea who he is. Also cool concepts, and interesting music ideas (limited edition pressed vinyl of one album, pressed in thicker vinyl, and a hardcover photobook in the same size. Of course also both CDs as well as a bluray with the music in above CD quality and....
you get the picture..
Value added. You pay, he gives you nice things. Both are happy.
I didn't get the superduper limited edition vinyl, because I didn't have the money at the time. So i bought the next nicest set. And that is very nice as well.
Piracy is not something to worry about. One extra value which is often overlooked is the good feeling of supporting the future of the people whose work you love. That is also worth a lot. People want to be honest because it makes them feel good.
The comment by winwar here below/above me is pretty much correct.
The bulk of the cost of a book is the publicity, editing and writing, in that order.
I can write a big book, but without an experienced editor for feedback and assistance it will never be a great book.
Without publicity of some sorts even a great book will never become a known book.
Think about publicity, just book signings by the author mean sending the author across the country. This runs into thousands of dollars in the first few cities. That cost has to be recouped somewhere. That is the price of doing business and getting your face out.
Dropping text onto the internet will only get a handful of readers at the best.
Then there's distribution.
You're right. Server space is cheap these days.
RELIABLE server space is not. Especially if you need a good e-commerce system as well. If you want to buy your own e-commerce system then you're looking at big bucks, as well as getting the credit card handling all down and that crap.
If you go through a bigger vendor like amazon they probably take between 30 and 50% of the price as a service fee.
That means out of $10, you have $7 left to pay for all other expenses. Your publisher will probably take around $3-4, sales tax will take between $1-2 and you have a buck or two left. A regular deal gives authors around 15-20% of the price as their salary. Cut the price of the book and you cut the salary. Of course, an ebook is cheaper to manufacture and transport, but that's just not the big cost, as you see. That's usually 1 or 2 dollars. As there is still SOME cost with an ebook (storage, backup, work on formats etc) let's cut that down to 50 cents.
The ebooks price should then be around $7.50
A lot of publishing expenses are recouped through hardcovers, which can be sold at a higher markup. Ebooks might then be a little more expensive at the start of a books run. Lets say around $10, giving the publisher $1.50 extra per book.
Sounds fair to me.
well there's an image in my head which I did not want ;)
Nahh, Cory's ok. Respectful to his readers and seems like a nice guy, plus his stories are fun, good imagination and decent technique.
no, I did not. My goal with getting the ebook in the first place was to get in MY preferred format and avoid having a dead tree version which I then have to lug around next time I move. I also try to avoid the environmental cost of book production and shipping, so I'm not going to order a hardcover book and throw it out.
I'm not saying that I did the moral thing, just that I was actually trying to find a way of buying the book in a format which should already be ubiquitous (and is available..in selected areas), but the authors publisher is so scared of piracy that the easiest way of obtaining the book is through piracy... sounds stupid? Sounds that way to me too.
I had taken my credit card up, had tried to purchase the book and was met with a "not available in your area" message..
I HAVE however written the author a letter on the matter. Sadly though, it's probably his publisher who makes these calls.
Not long ago I wanted to buy an ebook (just published. I went to Amazon and they wanted the hardcover price for the ebook. $25 for an ebook, just plain silly. So I went to barnes&noble, they offered the ebook for $10, similar to a paperback. So I tried to buy it.
Aaaanndd.. an error came up saying that I could not buy this book from the area I was in (not USA). I looked around some more and did not find a european distributor for the ebook. Lot's of companies had the hardcover, but no ebook. I checked if I could order it from amazon (I had no intention of completing that !!$25!! transaction) and same thing. I was not allowed to buy the bloody book.
So I went to my friends at thepiratebay and got the book. I needed to do some conversion to get the text to display properly on my device, but it worked. The legal alternatives, which I tried to follow, simply did not work. Maybe there was a way to get the legal options to work properly, but the way to get customers to do the legal thing is to make that EASIER than the illegal way.
On iTunes I am guaranteed to get good quality files, on TPB I am not. Simple.
Here in sweden the streaming service Spotify has changed the game. It's just so easy to do the legal thing that illegal downloading went down. Do the same with movies, books, programs.. basically everything else. Make the legal way the best and easiest way, and people will come.
As for Cory Doctorow, I do wish that he gave me some way of giving him money for the digital copies I've gotten from him. I don't want to buy a paper version, and I don't want to donate a paper version. I just want to pay the author (and editor and all those involved) for his/their work.
They're right, 3mbps IS required for facebook.
I mean, otherwise your torrents might slow to a crawl...
Sorry for not replying sooner.
USA had a decent system which was perverted to a private business. At that point funding for the minimum service that americans would receive was slashed, severely breaking the system.
That was done due to lobbying and then sold to the public as an improvement..
And remember, if you need very expensive medical service and your insurers don't like it, they will go through your history with a fine tooth comb. If they find ANYTHING which you didn't disclose they will void your insurance.
If you went to a psychologist as a teenager due to depression and did not declare it to the insurer, they may not have to pay for that cancer treatment when you're 50. Same if they discover that you had diabetes for some time even if you you didn't know it.
That can't happen to me, in a public system.
I had to take my son to a hospital due to swine flu. No charge. I needed medical service due to a sports injury. Walk in, check, walk out. And we live longer, our children are less likely to die and so on. In a public health system. That goes for all the west european countries which all have public healthcare systems and high tech hospitals. The US scores similar to 3rd world countries when it comes to health, well, except cuba and a few others which perform much better. So enjoy your privatized system.
Do you really think that you are smart enough to play with multiple companies and their lawyer designed contracts?
They have leeways in their contracts because the contracts charge too much and pay too little out. There is a reason the private insurance sector pays investors huge dividends, and it's that they screw you.
Isn't this just an indicator of how broken the US health care system is.
I have a hard time imagining this to be a problem in this way in the countries which have good public health systems. I've never had to think about the cost of healthcare, that's what I pay taxes for. My neighbour doesn't have to worry about the cost of healthcare, that's what I pay taxes for.
We pay damn high taxes. The benefits are pretty big, though and completely worth it.
I decided to go to University after having worked for over ten years.
Fees for school?
Free (for a good university, well, any university).
That's what I've been paying taxes for.
The youngsters studying with me. I paid for their tuition too (or took part in that).
And it pleases me.
...yeah, that should teach us to only use lukewarm grits on Natalie Portman!
But the joke was badly done (idiotic, even).
More work seems to have been put into the pictures than the text and the text sounds like it was written by fratboys, bot the level of humor and the quality of the text itself.
Listen, here I'm going to write a joke article headline:
Researchers found out today that the Mona Lisa is made of poo!
That was pretty bad, eh?
Both because of the joke not really being a joke (too bad to classify as one) as well as the text being poorly written, it sounds like it was written by a 12 year old.
Jokes (and joke articles) require more than just writing something non-factual or nonsensical.
CNET. PLEASE oh please, if you are going to have a parody section, hire writers capable of writing parodies.
I'm having much more fun criticizing the quality of the article and the writers than from reading the article itself and consider the snarky comments in this thread much more entertaining.
Wow... just.... wow
That must be the worst written article I've read this month. Or possibly ever.
Hey, I know, let's next compare a raft made of barrels to the International Space Station and let's have the raft win because it has easier access and is cheaper to make and maintain.
Again. Just... wow
I could stage a few events with Sasha Grey.. they would not be considered sci-fi (unless the props I were to use would be considered sci-fi... plasma powered "toys" anyone?)
It affects all SENSITIVE components (and actually affects everything in the home, not everything will fail though). A light bulb will not fail due to smoke. It may become covered in tar and not put out the full amount of light.
A TV can fail, possibly even spectacularly (catch fire etc) as the tar sets on all components and increases dust accumulation, dust can create electrical pathways that should not be, sparks and fire...
Even though you can't see components fail doesn't mean that the tar does not affect them. They may last shorter, work worse etc.
One example (from a larger scale where monitoring cost and such is easier) comes from the airline industry. When smoking was banned they found that the airducts needed much less frequent cleaning, and were easier to clean. This cut costs.
What's more, the pressure regulation systems (based on outflow valves) had much less problems as the valves which manage the pressure differential didn't get gummed up with tar anymore.
This is considered a big deal in the airline industry.
Those components weren't failing or catching fire because the weren't those kinds of components. They did need much more maintenance and caused expenses.
Your mums smoking affects everything around her negatively. Only some parts will obviously fail. Especially components which are being run at the edge of what they can do and need good cooling and airflow. Like computers.
I've seen both.
Smokers computers tend to have AMAZING amounts of dust sticking to the oily tar residue.
Failure prone and disgusting to work on.
Animal hair really messes electronics up as well, and a computer shop is probably not bound by the warranty if a failure occurs due to hair clogging the cooling.
I used to run a computer shop/maintenance.
The car repair shops and the car painting shop that we serviced all knew that their equipment would not last the full time. They were also honest about the conditions in which the equipment had to function.
There was no way in hell that a general warranty would be honored. However, we would do all repairs for them and replace anything which failed. If the failure was not due to the extreme environment, then the replacement was free (based on warranty).
In a car painting shop, even the office computer would get seriously gunked up even though there were extra filters on the air intakes. CD drives lasted around 6 months.
That's life. That's an extreme environment and is generally not covered by warranties. Good, honest working relationships means that problems do not arise.
I think you miss the point with iPhoto.
It's not really a cut down photo editor in any sense.
It's a photo database and photo album with some minor (yet well implemented) fixing tools included. Kind of like a photo album with a small selection of correcting pens included.
It's the best I've tried at what it does, and I do a bit of work in Photoshop as well. Just, different tools for different tasks.
iPhoto keeps track of my family pics (around 10.000 right now) letting me search them through all sorts of different criteria, including the event it was taken, as well as through who is in the picture or where it was taken.
Agreed. :)
At least partly
It does depend on what you are going to do.
I see Safari as an emergency browser, and only use a part of the iLife suite.
Apache and PHP are optional installs on offer as are most of the libraries for software development.
Quicktime works fine on Mac, but who really uses it?
Some of this may be defined as crapware, but if you need any of it then these are properly functioning, real programs.
Not like the awful halfbaked demo crapwares on most Win machines (I sold and fixed those for a while, so annoying to use out of the box..)
More to the point, isn't he in fact just apologizing for unleashing Slashdot on the world?
Pointing out to someone that his door is broken or non-existant, with him then getting angry and insisting that you buy a new door for him as noone (especially thieves) would have noticed his door-lessness if you hadn't pointed it out.
Way to go USA, I'm not going to be the nice neighbour.
Cool.
The flight looked amazingly stable.
GO Armadillo Aerospace. I'm just impressed and pleased that they made it.