Every time someone does something cool, Microsoft always has to chime in. It's like the annoying little brother who is always following you around; whenever you say anything, he always says "Me too!" and then goes on to explain how what he did is even better. For anyone who didn't have a younger sibling growing up, it's hard to overstate the annoyance factor.
Netscape revolutionizes the Web -- MS creates free Internet Explorer. OSX introduces Expose, the Dock, and Widgets -- four years later Vista "innovates" with duplicate features. Apple rakes in millions with the iPod -- Microsoft creates poo-colored, squirting Zune. Google goes IPO -- MS announces "all-new, improved, better-than-ever" MSN search. Apple announces DRM-free music -- you guessed it: Me too! Me too! Me too!
I don't hate Microsoft (though sometimes it seems like they work awfully hard to make people hate them) but I'm not buying their "We want to eliminate DRM too" PR either. Microsoft's media file format, software, hardware player, and store are all strong arguments that that's a load of monkey excrement.
It depends on your measure of success
on
Is Wikipedia Failing?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If the measure of Wikipedia's success is merely "A lot of people view and edit this site" then Wikipedia is successful on the same level as MySpace. And indeed, there are numerous parallels to be drawn between the two, which I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
However, if the measure of Wikipedia success is "Useful, timely, and relatively correct information" then the project is in danger of failing. Numerous articles are poorly written (I like to say that "This Wikipedia is NOT English), contain outdated information, or have content that is flat-out wrong. The oft-repeated mantra "anyone can edit it" doesn't seem to be the solution to these problems. Indeed, I'd offer that while it cuold help correct them, it is also the source of many of Wikipedia's problems.
There are a number of possible solutions for the problems that Wikipedia has in the areas of utility and accuracy (all encyclopedia's have issues with currency) but I question whether the folks who "run" Wikipedia (the content contributors and editors) woul be willing to enforce the kind of processes necessary to fix them. I tend to be of the mind of an earlier poster who suggested that Wikipedia will eventually evolve into an encyclopedia of current events and entertainment trivia.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there are a lot of people out there who are complete morons and a lot of people out there who are dishonest. In fact, these two groups overlap in a significant way.
Saying that It can't be the piracy thing is ridiculous, because a lot of the morons wouldn't be able to figure out how to download files over P2P. And saying that returns are only because their product is sub-standard is equally foolish, as a lot of dishonest folks out there would be happy to buy a CD, rip it, and then return it for a full refund.
Do you have a solution other than refusing refunds that takes both these classes of people into account?
or the iTunes help file and you would have seen that there's an easy way to de-authorize all the computers on your account and then you're back to having the original five computer authorizations available. It means a small hassle of reauthorizing the machines that you still want to have access, but it's not THAT hard.
Your new "no-DRM ever" stance is based on a misundertanding of something extremely simple.
The B&MGF gives money to schools in such a way that it must be used for MS technology. They are all about "...try[ing] to create MS zombies in schools..." by having good teachers (I like to think I was formerly among the ranks of this group, before I left the politics behind for the computer industry) using MS products that are the only option in the "whatever technology they have" class.
In cases where schools accept this "strings-firmly-attached" financial assistance, the chances are that students will only ever be exposed to MS Windows, MS Office, and the MS way of doing things. Getting people to switch to another OS later in life is difficult--it is far, far harder/more expensive to get a customer in the first place than to keep a customer who is used to your product. This is the lesson that Apple learned and then forgot.
The "excellent" work you tout that the B&MGF is doing is mainly tied to coercing schools into using MS products, encouraging 3rd-world governments not to switch to alternatives, and gaining intellectual property rights to medical advances. Whatever Bill is like on a personal level (and I've met people who know him pretty well and think he's a reasonably nice guy) his "philanthropic" projects seem to have a common thread of increasing the influence of the company. The Foundation is at its heart a PR tool and salve to assuage Bill's guilt over having made an astounding amount of money through practices that were not completely above-board.
As for your last statement, while they're not forcing consumers to use Windows, they've for years forced them to pay for it, whether that was the OS they were going to run or not. There was a time (not so long ago) when it was impossible to buy a computer from a major manufacturer without an OS installed, because of illegal business practices on Microsoft's part. Indeed, it is still very difficult to find this as an option on most sellers' Web sites.
You can't control what people say without having a chilling effect on all kinds of important freedoms. If you don't think this is true, try this: go down to your local airport and see how comfortable you are around the security screeners just thinking about making a bomb joke.
Let's face it, people are going to say things you don't like. Some of them are going to say things that make you "feel bad." The sooner you realize that and learn to deal with it, the more likley you are to have a happy, productive life. If you're taking what some random group of so-called peers think about you that seriously, you need serious psychological help.
At the Santa Clara main branch they are clearing out sections of actual paper books to make way for more audiobooks and DVDs. I wasn't too disturbed to see VHS tapes make it into the library back in the day, but's sad to see Heinlein, Clark, and Dickson being squeezed out by Matt Damon, Paris Hilton and PeeWee Herman.
there's no conspiracy theory needed to explain why electric cars aren't the panacea that various folks would have you believe. Combine the limited range available from any reasonably priced battery technology, the cost/life ratio of said batteries, the limited nubmer charging stations combined with the charging times required and it's easy to see why this "amazing" technolgy isn't quite ready for prime time. Come back when you find a battery that's got even 50% the energy density of gasoline, a charging time of five minutes, and a cost similar to that of the empty steel tank we're currently using.
It's always fun to blame GM for "killing" the EV1, (hey, this is slashdot, where any company with more than three employees or that makes an actual profit is "evil") but when you factor in the limited life of motor brushes and batteries, I don't see that electric cars are all that much less complicated to service. Leaving that aside, you've made the common mistake of confusing dealers with manufacturers. Ford doesn't make a penny when Big John's Ford does a transmission service on your 2002 Tarus. The service profit is just the dealer's gravy. Replacement parts aren't even much of a profit center, since so many are available from 3rd parties.
I'd love to see viable electrics, because I'm a motorcycle rider and I hate breathing exhaust fumes. But we aren't there yet.
Any other vets out there who keep reading these headlines about the MOAB and wondering how Apple's Cupertino campus survived the "mother of all bombs"? I mean, you gotta love those later-day daisy-cutters and once you've seen one of those things falling out of a C-130, the MOAB acronym just doesn't work for anything else.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers back when Google results were essentially free of this type of nonsense. Even a very broad search would generally return useful results. For instance, searching for "toy firetruck" would return links to toy stores and antique toy dealers on the first few pages. Quality search results were the driving factor in switching from some other search engine to Google.
These days, however, results from a broad search usually return five or six pages of aggregators, domain parkers, and other foolishness. It's gotten to the point where I feel like if I don't have four or five search terms, it's not worth the effort of paging through the first six screens of useless results to get sort out the wheat from the chaf.
For the moment, with most web advertising operating on a pay-per-view or pay-per-click basis, people creating aggregators and parking domains are making money. I'm hopeful that as advertisers become more interested in tying views or clicks to actual sales, the incentive for putting this kind of useless fluff on the net will decrease. Of course, we'll still have not-so-net-savvy surfers who might click links on a parked page and then buy something. But if the intermediate pages led to useful information, they wouldn't be so annoying, would they?
Eventually, my bet is that there won't be enough profit in advertising to make domain parking worthwhile. May that day come soon.
race cars where the driver could walk away from a crash after hitting a concrete barrier at 200mph
It's not the cost of the safety equipment. Airbags are a big expense (hundreds of dollars) but they made it into cars. The difference between a racecar and a minivan is convenience.
Call me back when you can convince the average consumer to forego every ammenity that requires a hard surface near the occupant (cup holders, dashboards, radios), then put on a full-face helmet and armored/fireproof shoes, suit and gloves before setting out on a three mile jaunt to the grocery store.
Bonus points if you have kids and can imagine trying to get two of them (simultaneously) into said gear.
I'm in almost exactly the same place. I have a Powerbook for my primary computer and a Mac mini working as a media hub. I have a once-top-of-the-line Windows machine that I bought to play games on about two and a half years ago, which I finally gave up on upgrading. In the end, it was cheaper (and more fum) to get a Wii and just let the Windows PC collect dust.
Apple may be "pushing" DRM, but according to what I've read, it's mainly because they couldn't get the publishers to agree to a DRM-free model. To get access to the music catalogs, they had to be able to say they had a scheme for preventing iTunes from turning into (the old) Napster. The DRM model that they use is pretty much the weakest model you can have and still cal it DRM--you can burn any song or songs to CD and the protection scheme is weak enough that it's been repeatedly broken by people interested in "unprotecting" the files.
I know there are a number of purists (and anti-Apple types) who argue that any and all DRM is bad. But in my opinion, Apple's weak DRM scheme hasn't stopped the imaginary DRM-free world these folks are advocating--it has actually helped by prevented something much more onerous from becoming the de facto standard.
Can you imagine a world where the most successful music download service provides music in Microsoft's WMF and you can't burn a CD or copy the song to more than one PC? My hope is that the success of the weak-DRM'd iTunes store will discourage people from "renting" music or subscribing to some scheme where the DRM is significantly more restrictive.
There are a good number of entries on Wikipedia that were written by the company in question, where the text reads like a corporate press release. The same is true for a number of entries about various products. I actually watch the dust-up over politicians re-writing their biographies with amusement, since corporations have been doing the same thing for far longer and to better effect.
The problem with an "Encyclopedia" that anyone can edit, frankly, is that anyone will. That means every coporate shill and fly-by-night operator has full rights to change things to say what they want it to say, delete unflattering information, etc. So long to the whole concept of NPOV, eh?
And for all the Wiki-philes out there, the "editors will eventually catch it" argument isn't going to fly. In April I edited a minor article to add an innocuous but incorrect fact. That entry is still there. No omniscient Wikipedia editor has deigned to fix it.
One, because the law says to stop at a Stop sign. There are a good number of folks out there who stop because obeying traffic laws is the right thing to do. Let's just skip right over the obligatory/. moral relativism--there are people in the real world who don't feel a juvenile compulsion to break any and every law to prove they are somehow fighting "the violence inherent in the system." There are nonsensical laws, even laws that deserve to be ignored, but generally traffic laws don't fall into that category.
Secondly, they stop because they're aware of their fallibility. Just because it's three o'clock in the morning and they didn't notice any headlights on the cross street while they were approaching the intersection doesn't mean that there's no oncoming traffic.
I've been surprised by supposedly intelligent people I ride with who don't use their signals when changing lanes. The rationale is frequently "I already looked and there's nobody there, so I don't need to signal." My response is invariably the same "Haven't you ever started to change lanes and then seen someone you didn't realize was in your blind spot? That person has no way of knowing you're about to clobber them if you don't signal." The response is usually a non sequitur.
The "innovations" mentioned by the parent comment and the Microsoft guy in TFA are things like "improved error messages." The error messages were already there, so making them more useful isn't "innovation" in the revolutionary change sense. It's more of an evolution.
The same can be said of the vaunted "ribbon menus." So we now have menus that work more like toolbars. This is supposed to be innovation? It might be the next step in the evolution of the Office UI, but it's hardly innovative in the same way that a tabbed browser was when it was introduced.
Not to say that Microsoft has never innovated. Just that the examples given aren't innovative.
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Every time someone does something cool, Microsoft always has to chime in. It's like the annoying little brother who is always following you around; whenever you say anything, he always says "Me too!" and then goes on to explain how what he did is even better. For anyone who didn't have a younger sibling growing up, it's hard to overstate the annoyance factor.
Netscape revolutionizes the Web -- MS creates free Internet Explorer. OSX introduces Expose, the Dock, and Widgets -- four years later Vista "innovates" with duplicate features. Apple rakes in millions with the iPod -- Microsoft creates poo-colored, squirting Zune. Google goes IPO -- MS announces "all-new, improved, better-than-ever" MSN search. Apple announces DRM-free music -- you guessed it: Me too! Me too! Me too!
I don't hate Microsoft (though sometimes it seems like they work awfully hard to make people hate them) but I'm not buying their "We want to eliminate DRM too" PR either. Microsoft's media file format, software, hardware player, and store are all strong arguments that that's a load of monkey excrement.
and all that? :-)
If the measure of Wikipedia's success is merely "A lot of people view and edit this site" then Wikipedia is successful on the same level as MySpace. And indeed, there are numerous parallels to be drawn between the two, which I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
However, if the measure of Wikipedia success is "Useful, timely, and relatively correct information" then the project is in danger of failing. Numerous articles are poorly written (I like to say that "This Wikipedia is NOT English), contain outdated information, or have content that is flat-out wrong. The oft-repeated mantra "anyone can edit it" doesn't seem to be the solution to these problems. Indeed, I'd offer that while it cuold help correct them, it is also the source of many of Wikipedia's problems.
There are a number of possible solutions for the problems that Wikipedia has in the areas of utility and accuracy (all encyclopedia's have issues with currency) but I question whether the folks who "run" Wikipedia (the content contributors and editors) woul be willing to enforce the kind of processes necessary to fix them. I tend to be of the mind of an earlier poster who suggested that Wikipedia will eventually evolve into an encyclopedia of current events and entertainment trivia.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there are a lot of people out there who are complete morons and a lot of people out there who are dishonest. In fact, these two groups overlap in a significant way.
Saying that It can't be the piracy thing is ridiculous, because a lot of the morons wouldn't be able to figure out how to download files over P2P. And saying that returns are only because their product is sub-standard is equally foolish, as a lot of dishonest folks out there would be happy to buy a CD, rip it, and then return it for a full refund.
Do you have a solution other than refusing refunds that takes both these classes of people into account?
or the iTunes help file and you would have seen that there's an easy way to de-authorize all the computers on your account and then you're back to having the original five computer authorizations available. It means a small hassle of reauthorizing the machines that you still want to have access, but it's not THAT hard.
Your new "no-DRM ever" stance is based on a misundertanding of something extremely simple.
The B&MGF gives money to schools in such a way that it must be used for MS technology. They are all about "...try[ing] to create MS zombies in schools..." by having good teachers (I like to think I was formerly among the ranks of this group, before I left the politics behind for the computer industry) using MS products that are the only option in the "whatever technology they have" class.
In cases where schools accept this "strings-firmly-attached" financial assistance, the chances are that students will only ever be exposed to MS Windows, MS Office, and the MS way of doing things. Getting people to switch to another OS later in life is difficult--it is far, far harder/more expensive to get a customer in the first place than to keep a customer who is used to your product. This is the lesson that Apple learned and then forgot.
The "excellent" work you tout that the B&MGF is doing is mainly tied to coercing schools into using MS products, encouraging 3rd-world governments not to switch to alternatives, and gaining intellectual property rights to medical advances. Whatever Bill is like on a personal level (and I've met people who know him pretty well and think he's a reasonably nice guy) his "philanthropic" projects seem to have a common thread of increasing the influence of the company. The Foundation is at its heart a PR tool and salve to assuage Bill's guilt over having made an astounding amount of money through practices that were not completely above-board.
As for your last statement, while they're not forcing consumers to use Windows, they've for years forced them to pay for it, whether that was the OS they were going to run or not. There was a time (not so long ago) when it was impossible to buy a computer from a major manufacturer without an OS installed, because of illegal business practices on Microsoft's part. Indeed, it is still very difficult to find this as an option on most sellers' Web sites.
About ten cents?
Coffee just about came out my nose. That was the funniest thing I've read here in weeks.
Sheesh...
You can't control what people say without having a chilling effect on all kinds of important freedoms. If you don't think this is true, try this: go down to your local airport and see how comfortable you are around the security screeners just thinking about making a bomb joke.
Let's face it, people are going to say things you don't like. Some of them are going to say things that make you "feel bad." The sooner you realize that and learn to deal with it, the more likley you are to have a happy, productive life. If you're taking what some random group of so-called peers think about you that seriously, you need serious psychological help.
At the Santa Clara main branch they are clearing out sections of actual paper books to make way for more audiobooks and DVDs. I wasn't too disturbed to see VHS tapes make it into the library back in the day, but's sad to see Heinlein, Clark, and Dickson being squeezed out by Matt Damon, Paris Hilton and PeeWee Herman.
So what's the big deal?
there's no conspiracy theory needed to explain why electric cars aren't the panacea that various folks would have you believe. Combine the limited range available from any reasonably priced battery technology, the cost/life ratio of said batteries, the limited nubmer charging stations combined with the charging times required and it's easy to see why this "amazing" technolgy isn't quite ready for prime time. Come back when you find a battery that's got even 50% the energy density of gasoline, a charging time of five minutes, and a cost similar to that of the empty steel tank we're currently using.
It's always fun to blame GM for "killing" the EV1, (hey, this is slashdot, where any company with more than three employees or that makes an actual profit is "evil") but when you factor in the limited life of motor brushes and batteries, I don't see that electric cars are all that much less complicated to service. Leaving that aside, you've made the common mistake of confusing dealers with manufacturers. Ford doesn't make a penny when Big John's Ford does a transmission service on your 2002 Tarus. The service profit is just the dealer's gravy. Replacement parts aren't even much of a profit center, since so many are available from 3rd parties.
I'd love to see viable electrics, because I'm a motorcycle rider and I hate breathing exhaust fumes. But we aren't there yet.
Any other vets out there who keep reading these headlines about the MOAB and wondering how Apple's Cupertino campus survived the "mother of all bombs"? I mean, you gotta love those later-day daisy-cutters and once you've seen one of those things falling out of a C-130, the MOAB acronym just doesn't work for anything else.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers back when Google results were essentially free of this type of nonsense. Even a very broad search would generally return useful results. For instance, searching for "toy firetruck" would return links to toy stores and antique toy dealers on the first few pages. Quality search results were the driving factor in switching from some other search engine to Google.
These days, however, results from a broad search usually return five or six pages of aggregators, domain parkers, and other foolishness. It's gotten to the point where I feel like if I don't have four or five search terms, it's not worth the effort of paging through the first six screens of useless results to get sort out the wheat from the chaf.
For the moment, with most web advertising operating on a pay-per-view or pay-per-click basis, people creating aggregators and parking domains are making money. I'm hopeful that as advertisers become more interested in tying views or clicks to actual sales, the incentive for putting this kind of useless fluff on the net will decrease. Of course, we'll still have not-so-net-savvy surfers who might click links on a parked page and then buy something. But if the intermediate pages led to useful information, they wouldn't be so annoying, would they?
Eventually, my bet is that there won't be enough profit in advertising to make domain parking worthwhile. May that day come soon.
it would also filter about 90% of the stupid ones.
Blocking Zonk articles is like a lameness filter for the main page
We've seen this in STTM... V'ger came home and destroyed the sending race in a futile attempt to contact the "creator."
Face it, we're not going to meet aliens, because they've already been destroyed by their own creations.
It's not the cost of the safety equipment. Airbags are a big expense (hundreds of dollars) but they made it into cars. The difference between a racecar and a minivan is convenience.
Call me back when you can convince the average consumer to forego every ammenity that requires a hard surface near the occupant (cup holders, dashboards, radios), then put on a full-face helmet and armored/fireproof shoes, suit and gloves before setting out on a three mile jaunt to the grocery store.
Bonus points if you have kids and can imagine trying to get two of them (simultaneously) into said gear.
I'm in almost exactly the same place. I have a Powerbook for my primary computer and a Mac mini working as a media hub. I have a once-top-of-the-line Windows machine that I bought to play games on about two and a half years ago, which I finally gave up on upgrading. In the end, it was cheaper (and more fum) to get a Wii and just let the Windows PC collect dust.
Anyone who makes more than you is an evil overlord whose moral turpitude threatens the very fabric of our free society.
Apple may be "pushing" DRM, but according to what I've read, it's mainly because they couldn't get the publishers to agree to a DRM-free model. To get access to the music catalogs, they had to be able to say they had a scheme for preventing iTunes from turning into (the old) Napster. The DRM model that they use is pretty much the weakest model you can have and still cal it DRM--you can burn any song or songs to CD and the protection scheme is weak enough that it's been repeatedly broken by people interested in "unprotecting" the files.
I know there are a number of purists (and anti-Apple types) who argue that any and all DRM is bad. But in my opinion, Apple's weak DRM scheme hasn't stopped the imaginary DRM-free world these folks are advocating--it has actually helped by prevented something much more onerous from becoming the de facto standard.
Can you imagine a world where the most successful music download service provides music in Microsoft's WMF and you can't burn a CD or copy the song to more than one PC? My hope is that the success of the weak-DRM'd iTunes store will discourage people from "renting" music or subscribing to some scheme where the DRM is significantly more restrictive.
There are a good number of entries on Wikipedia that were written by the company in question, where the text reads like a corporate press release. The same is true for a number of entries about various products. I actually watch the dust-up over politicians re-writing their biographies with amusement, since corporations have been doing the same thing for far longer and to better effect.
The problem with an "Encyclopedia" that anyone can edit, frankly, is that anyone will. That means every coporate shill and fly-by-night operator has full rights to change things to say what they want it to say, delete unflattering information, etc. So long to the whole concept of NPOV, eh?
And for all the Wiki-philes out there, the "editors will eventually catch it" argument isn't going to fly. In April I edited a minor article to add an innocuous but incorrect fact. That entry is still there. No omniscient Wikipedia editor has deigned to fix it.
for NASA. Who knew you could just Google "alien lifeforms"? All that SETI CPU time was wasted
The day MS markets something that doesn't suck is the day they start selling vacuum cleaners.
One, because the law says to stop at a Stop sign. There are a good number of folks out there who stop because obeying traffic laws is the right thing to do. Let's just skip right over the obligatory /. moral relativism--there are people in the real world who don't feel a juvenile compulsion to break any and every law to prove they are somehow fighting "the violence inherent in the system." There are nonsensical laws, even laws that deserve to be ignored, but generally traffic laws don't fall into that category.
Secondly, they stop because they're aware of their fallibility. Just because it's three o'clock in the morning and they didn't notice any headlights on the cross street while they were approaching the intersection doesn't mean that there's no oncoming traffic.
I've been surprised by supposedly intelligent people I ride with who don't use their signals when changing lanes. The rationale is frequently "I already looked and there's nobody there, so I don't need to signal." My response is invariably the same "Haven't you ever started to change lanes and then seen someone you didn't realize was in your blind spot? That person has no way of knowing you're about to clobber them if you don't signal." The response is usually a non sequitur.
or TFA either, for that matter.
The "innovations" mentioned by the parent comment and the Microsoft guy in TFA are things like "improved error messages." The error messages were already there, so making them more useful isn't "innovation" in the revolutionary change sense. It's more of an evolution.
The same can be said of the vaunted "ribbon menus." So we now have menus that work more like toolbars. This is supposed to be innovation? It might be the next step in the evolution of the Office UI, but it's hardly innovative in the same way that a tabbed browser was when it was introduced.
Not to say that Microsoft has never innovated. Just that the examples given aren't innovative.