These things have been available in industry for a few years now. My wife works as a chemist for a major wood products company. They got this table saw last year.
The replacement parts expense isn't nearly as bad as it's been made out to be, either. They accidentally triggered the 'quick stop' feature the other day -- not with a finger, but sawing some wood that was too wet and therefore coincidentally had the right electrical properties. Replacing the blade turned out to be about sixty bucks.
I think a lot of people are missing the ROI perspective here. Boot Camp doesn't have to save the world for Apple. When you consider how cheap it probably was for Apple to develop and package Boot Camp (which is just a BIOS-spoofing firmware update, a partitioning script, and some peripheral drivers they probably got from their vendors), and how much they've already gained from it:
Some enthusiasts who were already curious about Macs hit the tipping point and will buy one now (and "some" is all it takes to recover development costs for something cheap);
Current Mac owners who had been frustrated about the games situation or need job-related Windows software have their loyalty renewed;
The entire tech world is talking non-stop about Apple. Again.
With so little put into it and so much buzz earned back out of it, I don't see how anyone could view this as anything but a win for Apple.
I agree with your synopsis, except for #7 ("responded in a far more assholish manner") - how so? Custom programming for something other than a trivial request is reasonable, and on a free site it's reasonable to request payment for such services.
I was referring to the tone of the response, not what he wanted. He posted the e-mail exchange, and my own perception is that he responded to huffiness with excessive grandeur. If he didn't want to rub Erik's face in it, George could also have offered to reinstate the keywords (yeah, a moderate pain in the butt) or allowed Erik to reinstate them himself, but left the unreasonable "Leave my URLs out of directory submissions" demand on the table. Instead he went on and on about "MY terms" and Erik's failure to recognize how wonderful he was. When one is speaking as a service provider, even a free service provider, it's pretty assholish to address your users like that. Even when your users are assholes, it's unprofessional to respond in kind.
I'd also dispute the "questionable" attribute for the PodKeyword service. What evidence do you have for it being described in this way?
Simple. I question its utility and value. I'm sure George could lecture me about it for a page or two, but I would argue that blanketing directories with multiple aliased pointers to the same content only dilutes those directories and makes it difficult to get any accurate count of total podcasts or subscribers/click counts for each one. There's already a great place to make keywords searchable: in the channel metadata inside your RSS feed. Every important directory searches descriptions as well as names. This makes PodKeyword unnecessary. My podcast doesn't use it, and I don't know of anyone in the last six months who has. I vaguely remember hearing of it back in the beginning of the year, but until this fracas blew up I didn't even know it was still operating.
Arrrgh. These two people have been going back and forth at each other on on eWeek, the Yahoo! Podcasters list, many different blogs and podcasts, and they just won't shut up. At this point I am convinced they're competing with each other to see how much news coverage they can generate.
If you piece the two stories together, they're actually totally consistent on what happened:
The Vegan guy signed up for the PodKeyword guy's service, to get some exposure for his podcast on searches.
It worked. Search engines picked up PodKeyword's mirror of Vegan guy's feed.
Vegan guy was surprised to find that some of the major podcast directories were listing the PodKeyword mirror feed instead of his, and when people subscribed via those directories, they were subscribing to the mirror feed.
Vegan guy sent PodKeyword guy a request to discontinue the service. PodKeyword guy complied.
Vegan guy lost all the listeners that were subscribed via those directories, and flipped out.
Vegan guy sent PodKeyword guy another e-mail demanding that everything get turned back on but removed from any future search visibility. He was kind of an asshole about it.
PodKeyword guy responded in a far more assholish manner.
Lawyers got invoked, and then both sides launched media blitzkriegs.
That's the chronology, as both sides put it. Who's right? Who's wrong? Who gives a damn? This is not a technical conflict at its core, it's a personality conflict.
I think there's a good case to be made that RSS "feed hijacking" could happen as described: somebody mirrors your content without permission and becomes more popular than your original feed, then extorts you for your own readers/listeners. However, there's no evidence that it's ever actually happened. You'd have to be really failing to pay attention for it to succeed.
It's certainly not what happened here. The Vegan guy deliberately signed on for a questionable service, got pissed off when the service fragmented his audience, and then both sides started hitting each other with their dicks.
That's the whole story. And I do wish they'd shut up.
He'll pick option C, which is to not allow one address to create more than a few TinyURLs in one day, or option D, which is to start validating URLs more carefully.
TinyDisk is an abuse of the system, but it's an intentional one designed to point out that TinyURL could have been implemented with a bit more caution. The fixes to prevent this sort of abuse are easy.
It's not an "uber-expensive" feature; my Toyota Prius has it, and the car only cost $25,000. The RFID key's not a credit card, it's a fob on my keychain, but it's extremely convenient not to have to pull anything out to unlock my car or start it.
I produce a short fiction podcast called Escape Pod. We buy science fiction and fantasy stories from authors, narrate them, and release them on the Web. Our authors receive a real contract for nonexclusive audio rights, and get a real check. Our listeners get free content. We release our MP3 files under a Creative Commons license. (Attribution/non-commercial/no-derivatives.)
In turn we ask for donations. Within three months, we were bringing in more money in donations than we had paid for stories. We're putting that money back into the podcast.
My choice to use a CC license was not based on any sort of idealism or geek philosophy. It was a business decision: I wanted the audio files to be distributed as widely as possible, to grow our audience and our donor base as large as possible. CC is a useful shorthand to encourage that sharing while making it clear that people can't alter the content (our authors still have copyright) and they can't sell it without our involvement.
It's impractical to charge money for a podcast, and I don't intend to try. Giving it away and asking for money, however, has worked out very well for us. Creative Commons doesn't make that possible, but it facilitates it. It makes my life easier by not forcing me to write the necessary legal boilerplate on my own, and by allowing me to communicate our terms in a few phrases that many people understand.
So that's how CC has been useful to me. No "theory of art" or any such fluff: it's just about putting out content that people enjoy, and finding a way to make back what we put into it.
Ignore the haters, Zonk. I liked your review. It's nice to see some variety on/., and some articles with a personal voice.
That was probably the best wrap-up of Shadowrun 4 that I've seen in one paragraph. I'd been following that news somewhat closely; my regular group is just starting up an SR3 game, and I had to debate seriously whether to wait a few weeks for SR4. I finally decided against it, as I'm very familiar with the old Shadowrun and like the system, weirdnesses and all. Plus, it'll take a long time before the core sourcebooks are all updated to the new rules. But it is nice to see the game's still alive and in-demand.
We need a good freely accessible ratings service for podcasts in different categories. help people sort the chaff from the soap.
A lot of directories offer ratings by review score or by popularity. My personal favorite are the Podcast Pickle listings.
And podcasts aren't all just two people chatting at each other; you can find quite a lot of variety if you look. My own podcast narrates short science fiction. Like audiobooks, but shorter.
Re:Podcasting Apps in Linux?
on
Podcasting
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· Score: 1
This page has a list of podcast clients that will (mostly) work in Linux. BashPodder is even written about in Cochrane's book, for which I really should have given him some props.
For what it's worth (and you can decide that for yourself) I'm not writing a book on podcasting. I wish I was, and it seems like half the people I know are, but I came in just a couple of months too late for that.
As for "drama" -- yeah, I've argued with Todd. But there are a fair number of things I respect him for, too. And your order of events is wrong; I submitted this review before the thread you're pointing to happened. (The approval queue for book reviews is slower than the rest of Slashdot.)
The reason everyone pays attention to iTunes is because it's the biggest visibility channel for podcasts that exists right now. The number of listeners grabbing podcasts with iTunes dwarfed the number grabbing them with specialized podcatching clients (iPodder, Dopper, etc.) almost immediately. So if a show's in the iTunes Top 100, you know there are a lot of people subscribed to it. There's no other public yardstick for that right now.
Congratulations. You've just recited a point that comes up in all the podcasting forums at least once a week.
The answer is always the same: it's catchy, it's simple, and the media picked up on it. If you can come up with an appropriate name that's catchier, you're welcome to try to change things. No one's succeeded yet.
Actually, Skepticality has been in the top 5 (usually at #2 or #3) for a couple of weeks now. Not that Derek/.ing himself is likely to hurt, of course...
More sites should put up warnings when the user agent is msie. It's easy to do on php. Page still loads for IE users, but they get nagged (yay.)
Yeah, that's exactly what will keep people coming back to your site. "Hi, thanks for visiting! This has nothing to do with my content, but you're not using the browser I think you should, so YOU'RE A MORON. Now on with the show..."
It's not your job as a Web developer to nag your audience or stuff your own preferences down their throats. It's your job to connect with them, to give them whatever the site offers in the most useful way. Unless your site is about Web browsers, it's outside your authority to lecture them about it, and in the likeliest case you'll simply convince people that Firefox users are pushy assholes and make them more resistant to switching.
(Kicking myself for missing this thread earlier...)
If you're interested in science fiction or fantasy, you should check out Escape Pod. We podcast fun short stories each week, with some flash fiction bonuses and the occasional review, and it's all free.
And it's really worth watching in order. Seriously. Sacrifice a Netflix queue slot. Or better yet, just wait until later in August when Sci-Fi will run the entire series IN ORDER, in the run-up to the movie's premier at the end of September.
This comparison (on the Atom site, natch) misses one very important point, which is the rapid rise of podcasting and videoblogging. All of these "rich media" syndications rely on the <enclosure> tag, which is exclusive to RSS 2.0.
It's funny how this writeup doesn't even mention enclosures, despite the hundreds of thousands of people downloading content this way. The only place it comes up is in the chart at the end, which makes some side reference to <link rel="enclosure"> in Atom, which is a far kludgier (and nonstandard) way to do things.
The history of the name is complicated and fraught with peril. The short answer is that "podcasting" is a catchy buzzword that's easy for USA Today readers to remember, and "mp3casting" sounds like something only a Slashdot reader would love. That's why one caught on and the other didn't.
Roughly half the people in the podcasting world get around to complaining about the name at some point, but when challenged to come up with a better name that's just as catchy, nobody can do it.
If it was news or other information, I could see the usefulness, but podcasting seems like a fancy soapbox for people.
Some of it isnews. Some of it's music. Some of it's audiobooks. And yeah, some of it's just personal life and ranting. But don't limit your perspective to just those. It's basically whatever you want.
My own podcast narrates science fiction short stories. We also do some reviews and commentary, but I've made a solemn promise on it never, ever to simply tell you about my day.
The existence of these books in electronic form does not preclude hardcopy sales. If you can't see the convenience or the romantic value of having a thousand classic books in paper, then sure, you're probably not the target market.
As for me, I just got back from lunch reading the Penguin Classics edition of Les Miserables. It's well-bound and the typography, while dense, is easy on the eyes. Sure, the thing's a cinderblock, but it's still more pleasant to read with a book beside my plate than my Treo. And it's a lot easier to skip ahead to the appendices, or backwards to remind myself what Valjean actually did for the gardender at the convent.
Slashdot Mirror
These things have been available in industry for a few years now. My wife works as a chemist for a major wood products company. They got this table saw last year.
The replacement parts expense isn't nearly as bad as it's been made out to be, either. They accidentally triggered the 'quick stop' feature the other day -- not with a finger, but sawing some wood that was too wet and therefore coincidentally had the right electrical properties. Replacing the blade turned out to be about sixty bucks.
With so little put into it and so much buzz earned back out of it, I don't see how anyone could view this as anything but a win for Apple.
I was referring to the tone of the response, not what he wanted. He posted the e-mail exchange, and my own perception is that he responded to huffiness with excessive grandeur. If he didn't want to rub Erik's face in it, George could also have offered to reinstate the keywords (yeah, a moderate pain in the butt) or allowed Erik to reinstate them himself, but left the unreasonable "Leave my URLs out of directory submissions" demand on the table. Instead he went on and on about "MY terms" and Erik's failure to recognize how wonderful he was. When one is speaking as a service provider, even a free service provider, it's pretty assholish to address your users like that. Even when your users are assholes, it's unprofessional to respond in kind.
I'd also dispute the "questionable" attribute for the PodKeyword service. What evidence do you have for it being described in this way?
Simple. I question its utility and value. I'm sure George could lecture me about it for a page or two, but I would argue that blanketing directories with multiple aliased pointers to the same content only dilutes those directories and makes it difficult to get any accurate count of total podcasts or subscribers/click counts for each one. There's already a great place to make keywords searchable: in the channel metadata inside your RSS feed. Every important directory searches descriptions as well as names. This makes PodKeyword unnecessary. My podcast doesn't use it, and I don't know of anyone in the last six months who has. I vaguely remember hearing of it back in the beginning of the year, but until this fracas blew up I didn't even know it was still operating.
If you piece the two stories together, they're actually totally consistent on what happened:
That's the chronology, as both sides put it. Who's right? Who's wrong? Who gives a damn? This is not a technical conflict at its core, it's a personality conflict.
I think there's a good case to be made that RSS "feed hijacking" could happen as described: somebody mirrors your content without permission and becomes more popular than your original feed, then extorts you for your own readers/listeners. However, there's no evidence that it's ever actually happened. You'd have to be really failing to pay attention for it to succeed.
It's certainly not what happened here. The Vegan guy deliberately signed on for a questionable service, got pissed off when the service fragmented his audience, and then both sides started hitting each other with their dicks.
That's the whole story. And I do wish they'd shut up.
He'll pick option C, which is to not allow one address to create more than a few TinyURLs in one day, or option D, which is to start validating URLs more carefully.
TinyDisk is an abuse of the system, but it's an intentional one designed to point out that TinyURL could have been implemented with a bit more caution. The fixes to prevent this sort of abuse are easy.
It's not an "uber-expensive" feature; my Toyota Prius has it, and the car only cost $25,000. The RFID key's not a credit card, it's a fob on my keychain, but it's extremely convenient not to have to pull anything out to unlock my car or start it.
I produce a short fiction podcast called Escape Pod. We buy science fiction and fantasy stories from authors, narrate them, and release them on the Web. Our authors receive a real contract for nonexclusive audio rights, and get a real check. Our listeners get free content. We release our MP3 files under a Creative Commons license. (Attribution/non-commercial/no-derivatives.)
In turn we ask for donations. Within three months, we were bringing in more money in donations than we had paid for stories. We're putting that money back into the podcast.
My choice to use a CC license was not based on any sort of idealism or geek philosophy. It was a business decision: I wanted the audio files to be distributed as widely as possible, to grow our audience and our donor base as large as possible. CC is a useful shorthand to encourage that sharing while making it clear that people can't alter the content (our authors still have copyright) and they can't sell it without our involvement.
It's impractical to charge money for a podcast, and I don't intend to try. Giving it away and asking for money, however, has worked out very well for us. Creative Commons doesn't make that possible, but it facilitates it. It makes my life easier by not forcing me to write the necessary legal boilerplate on my own, and by allowing me to communicate our terms in a few phrases that many people understand.
So that's how CC has been useful to me. No "theory of art" or any such fluff: it's just about putting out content that people enjoy, and finding a way to make back what we put into it.
That was probably the best wrap-up of Shadowrun 4 that I've seen in one paragraph. I'd been following that news somewhat closely; my regular group is just starting up an SR3 game, and I had to debate seriously whether to wait a few weeks for SR4. I finally decided against it, as I'm very familiar with the old Shadowrun and like the system, weirdnesses and all. Plus, it'll take a long time before the core sourcebooks are all updated to the new rules. But it is nice to see the game's still alive and in-demand.
A lot of directories offer ratings by review score or by popularity. My personal favorite are the Podcast Pickle listings.
And podcasts aren't all just two people chatting at each other; you can find quite a lot of variety if you look. My own podcast narrates short science fiction. Like audiobooks, but shorter.
This page has a list of podcast clients that will (mostly) work in Linux. BashPodder is even written about in Cochrane's book, for which I really should have given him some props.
As for "drama" -- yeah, I've argued with Todd. But there are a fair number of things I respect him for, too. And your order of events is wrong; I submitted this review before the thread you're pointing to happened. (The approval queue for book reviews is slower than the rest of Slashdot.)
Hey! I resemble that remark!
The reason everyone pays attention to iTunes is because it's the biggest visibility channel for podcasts that exists right now. The number of listeners grabbing podcasts with iTunes dwarfed the number grabbing them with specialized podcatching clients (iPodder, Dopper, etc.) almost immediately. So if a show's in the iTunes Top 100, you know there are a lot of people subscribed to it. There's no other public yardstick for that right now.
The answer is always the same: it's catchy, it's simple, and the media picked up on it. If you can come up with an appropriate name that's catchier, you're welcome to try to change things. No one's succeeded yet.
Actually, Skepticality has been in the top 5 (usually at #2 or #3) for a couple of weeks now. Not that Derek /.ing himself is likely to hurt, of course...
Yeah, that's exactly what will keep people coming back to your site. "Hi, thanks for visiting! This has nothing to do with my content, but you're not using the browser I think you should, so YOU'RE A MORON. Now on with the show..."
It's not your job as a Web developer to nag your audience or stuff your own preferences down their throats. It's your job to connect with them, to give them whatever the site offers in the most useful way. Unless your site is about Web browsers, it's outside your authority to lecture them about it, and in the likeliest case you'll simply convince people that Firefox users are pushy assholes and make them more resistant to switching.
If you're interested in science fiction or fantasy, you should check out Escape Pod. We podcast fun short stories each week, with some flash fiction bonuses and the occasional review, and it's all free.
Actually, that begins tomorrow night.
It's funny how this writeup doesn't even mention enclosures, despite the hundreds of thousands of people downloading content this way. The only place it comes up is in the chart at the end, which makes some side reference to <link rel="enclosure"> in Atom, which is a far kludgier (and nonstandard) way to do things.
Roughly half the people in the podcasting world get around to complaining about the name at some point, but when challenged to come up with a better name that's just as catchy, nobody can do it.
Ah, no. Conventional wisdom among those who've tried it is that the "BadApple" plug-in sucks large perspiring underground mammals.
Some of it is news. Some of it's music. Some of it's audiobooks. And yeah, some of it's just personal life and ranting. But don't limit your perspective to just those. It's basically whatever you want.
My own podcast narrates science fiction short stories. We also do some reviews and commentary, but I've made a solemn promise on it never, ever to simply tell you about my day.
As for me, I just got back from lunch reading the Penguin Classics edition of Les Miserables. It's well-bound and the typography, while dense, is easy on the eyes. Sure, the thing's a cinderblock, but it's still more pleasant to read with a book beside my plate than my Treo. And it's a lot easier to skip ahead to the appendices, or backwards to remind myself what Valjean actually did for the gardender at the convent.
Penguin Classics? Hollywood? Yeesh. Pick a rant and stick with it.
Every time I try to listen to music, I find the industry is laden with idiots. They're preventing an obstacle to my listening enjoyment.
Could you please send me an e-mail telling me how to get around them? Thank you.