What do writers want? Justic! When do they want it? Nowe!
Most people would be surprised at the conditions many writers are forced to labor under. And it isn't a new problem. During the "Golden Age" of TV, many writers came home at night with a hacking cough and blackened hands. On the upside, their forearms were massive.
This comparison is intentionally self-limiting because it looks only at tasks you can perform on Old PC and measures them against performing the same tasks on New PC. It may well be that New PC does not offer measurable gains on those narrowly defined tasks compared to Old PC.
But New PC allows you do to a whole range of New Tasks, which could be performed only with great difficulty, expense, or not at all on Old PC. Examples, some of which have already been echoed here, include web browsing, gigabit networking, voip (realtime compression), and just about every sort of multimedia task you can name. Manipulating 5 megapixel photos? Probably impossible on Old PC; a cakewalk on New PC.
Five years ago an organization I worked with marveled at how we could put together a large reference book with full color, high resolution photography, for a major brand publisher, using just a few run-of-the-mill desktop computers. At the time, most of us could remember when "desktop publishing" meant, at best, laying out a high school newspaper.
Now, invest that same money from five years ago into desktop PC's of today. Instead of desktop publishing, you could probably cut a feature length high-definition film.
Not only can New PC do far more than Old PC ever could, but more people can do more things with New PC. Productivity HAS increased because more people can be more productive in more domains. New technology lowers the cost of entry to productivity, allowing your small business, or even your home user, to accomplish what was available only exclusively and at great expense years prior. New PC democratizes access to productivity. Go look at YouTube. (Also a good example of counter-productivity, but that's another discussion.)
The majority of comments supporting the thesis of TFA are textbook examples of taking the present for granted.
We're running a similar "poll" for the U.S. at yourcandidatesucks.com, where visitors are encouraged to vote against politicians rather than for them. So far, the right is getting out the anti-vote much more strongly than the left. Will run some log reports to see if there are any correlations between browser/platform and voting patterns.
It's not every day I read a Slashdot-linked article only to find my own byline. I must admit, it took some effort to dig through the piles of musty, cobwebbed neurons to recall even writing these predictions.
Glad to see I played it safe. Future prognosticators of the world: always go with the William Jennings Bryant line. He never lets you down.
And, hey, is ISDN awesome or what? 128kbps of pure double channel goodness. I told you!
What happens when Walmart and the U.S. Government combine?
WalmartDotGov: There's a new Uncle Sam at the top. When Congress passes the Sam Walton Federal Savings Act, Walmart is awarded an exclusive contract to supply the U.S. Government with discount body armor, health care, and tube socks. Elected officials available at unbeatable values!
There are plenty of good and juicy anti-competitive practices that are fodder for anti-MS complaints. But this whole issue of bundling common software isn't one of them. Let's forget about the nerd's-eye-view of what an operating system is or is not for a moment. Microsoft sells a software platform. Most people who buy that software platform expect to do certain things with their computer -- playing common media formats is most definitely one of them. And so is surfing the web.
People say that by including these applications they become defaults. There are alternative media players and alternative browsers, but many people don't seek them out. So what? Why is that Microsoft's responsibility? It's not. When you buy a new car, guess what -- it comes with four tires! There are many alternative tires on the market, but most people just drive what comes with the car. Some may argue that, well, the tires are not made by the same manufacturer as the car. But how does this give the buyer any more choice? A single vendor has been selected by the automaker. Buyers aren't asked which vendor's tires they would like.
The argument that an OS doesn't "need" a media player or a browser is a slippery slope that fails the test of people's expectations. Does a car require a radio to move people from A to B? Nearly every new car today comes with one, made and/or selected by the car manufacturer. Again, there are alternatives on the market. Want a different radio? Go buy one, then.
In fact, the claim against bundling IE is weaker today than it's ever been. When the Internet was a peripheral utility, like a spreadsheet, there may have been some case that MS needn't bundle it with the OS. But now usage of the Internet is a primary reason most people buy a computer. Microsoft has every right to provide its customers with what they expect, including the ability to browse the web and play common media files out of the box.
Microsoft's anti-competitive practices have nothing to do with what they bundle. When they put up obstacles to alternative choices, *that* is a good reason to complain. Indeed, Internet Explorer should be easily uninstalled. There is no problem with bundling it, but the user should be able to remove it with ease. When they choose not to support common media formats *in spite of* user expectations, that is a good reason to complain. See, for example, their lack of bundled support for MPEG2/DVD playback (MCE notwithstanding).
For the record, I strongly prefer open source solutions to MS. But what should we make of the fact that the most popular Linux distributions include far more "out of the box" bundles than Windows -- including web, word processing, e-mail, spreadsheets, etc. Why doesn't the argument that users "will just use what came with it and not seek out alternatives" not apply here? Microsoft has every right to provide as much functionality that it believes its customers will want. Criticizing them for that is what is anti-competitive.
Given the variety of truly anti-competitive practices MS has undertaken over the years (OEM restrictions, software obstacles, embrace-and-extend-and-patent tomfoolery) it's sad to see the EU "take a stand" and demand MS stop doing one of the things that is actually entirely within its rights. Nobody is the better off for it, and MS gets to play the martyr and claim persecution.
This whole "dreamweaver is for newbies" argument is willfully simplistic. Speaking from my own extensive web development experience -- Dreamweaver is one tool. It is a very useful and valuable tool. With Dreamweaver I can rapidly prototype sites and knock them into rough shape, much more quickly than I ever could by hand.
But no, Dreamweaver is not a panacea. It doesn't replace a thorough knowledge of web technologies and standards for a professional developer -- html, css, javascript, php, perl, mysql, etc.
Does a carpenter use only one tool to build a house? Of course not.
For the record, I would never use Dreamweaver's templating abilities -- I template server-side. I mix PHP code with Dreamweaver all the time -- just run a local web server to visualize the completed pages. Not that difficult really. That doesn't prevent me from using Dreamweaver regularly or appreciating it for its strengths as part of a large toolbox.
Reply to my own post. I'd also like to add that I'm an idiot who clicked "submit" without "preview" and forgot to change "HTML formatted" to "plain text". So, take my comments in that light.
I really like Firefox. If it were my primary browser I would be happy. But I discovered Opera several months ago when I was searching for a new mail client. Had been using "The Bat" and it was getting very dodgy with a large mail archive. Crashing, using lots of system resources, etc.
I'd used earlier versions of Opera (prior to 7.5) and thought they were interested, but didn't feel compelled to use them.
But then I discovered Opera's new email client, M2. I love the way it treats e-mail as a database. Rather than a bunch of static boxes where you create rules to move your messages, you create "filters" which are basically db queries. Because filters act on the db in realtime, they are much more powerful than static rules. Filters allow for cross-indexing (a message can fall under multiple filters) and very fast multi-dimensional searching. All very valuable when your e-mail archive has tens of thousands of messages spanning many years.
M2 still needs work -- the philosophy is fantastic (and much like Google's Gmail on the server side) -- but the implementation is still maturing.
Using M2, I only have to keep one program running for both web and e-mail. And, don't get me wrong, Opera's web browser *is* very good. If it sucked eggs that would be another story. And as I said, I think Firefox is wonderful also, particularly the web developer extensions. There's no law that says I can't use both, and I do.
For those bothered by the banner ads in the free version of Opera, this is a silly objection, because they can be easily blocked with some of the same tools you might use to block other kinds of ads, if that's your thing.
I'm application agnostic. If someone can point me to another e-mail client that is db-based like M2 I would happily check it out. Until then, I'm sticking with M2.
-Aaron
To be fair ... UltimateTV is (was) pretty good.
on
Microsoft Takes on TiVo
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm far from the first to get excited about an MS product. But at the end of the day, ya gotta be objective.
I've had MS' earlier attempt at a DVR, UltimateTV, integrated with my DirecTV service for awhile now. Truth be told, it's pretty good. MS hasn't updated the now-orphaned software in a long time, so it's a platform with no future. But from all I read in other forums, those DirecTV users who've had to switch to DirecTivo are less than thrilled with the change. The UTV software is quite stable, the guide is fast, and it organizes shows in logical folders. As Apple users like to say, "it just works". You don't hear that often about MS products, but credit where its due.
The one gripe I do have with UTV is that its not hackable. If I had a DirecTivo, I could hack it up to the latest Tivo OS, and pull recorded shows off the unit onto a PC. There is no way to do this (in the digtial domain) with UTV. As far as I know nobody has figured out such a hack yet.
Speaking for myself, I'm very excited about the growing segment of cell-phone based broadband. There are many of us who live 'just outside' of landline broadband's reach. 3/4 mile in my case. Because my street is so rural, Time Warner will never cable it, and the telco CO is over 20K feet away. There are ISP's in town (~12 miles away) offering WiFi but it's line of sight to a tower and it's very hilly around here. Can't see squat from my property.
But I can receive a cell phone signal and we are served by Cingular, Verzion, and Nextel. If I understand these technologies right, it's almost like an NLOS wireless, which is perfect for people like me. Currently I use DirecWay satellite, and it's decent, but is hampered by very slow upstream speeds, brutal latency, and extremely restrictive bandwidth usage rules. I'd gladly pay Verizon's monthly asking price if their cell broadband were available here. Hopefully one day soon it will be.
I was involved in a proposal for a cookbook at one time. As the subject was explained to me by agent and publisher, the ingredient list and the "facts" of the recipe procedure are NOT protected by copyright. The *specific* wording of the procedure as written by an author is protected -- which simply means another author has to rewrite the procedure, but can retain the facts and sequence.
Those very few recipes that are protected as trade secrets have nothing to do with copyright and have everything to do with business practices. Very few businesses revolve around a single 'secret formula' recipe, so this is a small category.
The proposed anti-spam clustering technique is of course a variation on whitelisting. While clever, it fails to address a problem I have not often seen addressed. Many people defend themselves from spam by obscuring their e-mail addresses in public places, and perhaps by using whitelists to prefer known senders. This may be effective for many people.
However, some of us can't avoid having a publically available e-mail address. For example, writers such as myself rely on feedback from readers who are, in nearly all cases, strangers (and sometimes strange, but that's another story...) Avoiding false positives from strangers is very important to me. I want their messages. But, since my e-mail address is published frequently (hence no reason to hide it here), I obviously receive a ton of spam.
For the past few months I have experimented with a plug-in called BayesIt! for the Windows email reader The Bat!. As the name implies, it's a bayesian filter. The nice thing about BayesIt is that I could point it to my already-stuffed spam folder and train it on thousands of messages in one go. So far it has worked out rather well. No false positives, and only about 10-20 false negatives per day (out of approx. 400 spams).
Still, in the long run I support proposals that shift the economics of e-mail in ways that have minimal impact on human beings while making spam unprofitable. Changing the economic model of spam is the only sure solution; relying solely on technology will simply keep us locked in an ongoing arms race.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you do when she behaves erratically? Consult Microsoft Relationship Support.
At least he didn't blame his child for downloading kitty porn.
http://www.livenudecats.com/lnc.php?page=allnude/specialdelivery
Never trust a petophile.
What do writers want? Justic! When do they want it? Nowe! Most people would be surprised at the conditions many writers are forced to labor under. And it isn't a new problem. During the "Golden Age" of TV, many writers came home at night with a hacking cough and blackened hands. On the upside, their forearms were massive.
This comparison is intentionally self-limiting because it looks only at tasks you can perform on Old PC and measures them against performing the same tasks on New PC. It may well be that New PC does not offer measurable gains on those narrowly defined tasks compared to Old PC.
But New PC allows you do to a whole range of New Tasks, which could be performed only with great difficulty, expense, or not at all on Old PC. Examples, some of which have already been echoed here, include web browsing, gigabit networking, voip (realtime compression), and just about every sort of multimedia task you can name. Manipulating 5 megapixel photos? Probably impossible on Old PC; a cakewalk on New PC.
Five years ago an organization I worked with marveled at how we could put together a large reference book with full color, high resolution photography, for a major brand publisher, using just a few run-of-the-mill desktop computers. At the time, most of us could remember when "desktop publishing" meant, at best, laying out a high school newspaper.
Now, invest that same money from five years ago into desktop PC's of today. Instead of desktop publishing, you could probably cut a feature length high-definition film.
Not only can New PC do far more than Old PC ever could, but more people can do more things with New PC. Productivity HAS increased because more people can be more productive in more domains. New technology lowers the cost of entry to productivity, allowing your small business, or even your home user, to accomplish what was available only exclusively and at great expense years prior. New PC democratizes access to productivity. Go look at YouTube. (Also a good example of counter-productivity, but that's another discussion.)
The majority of comments supporting the thesis of TFA are textbook examples of taking the present for granted.
We're running a similar "poll" for the U.S. at yourcandidatesucks.com, where visitors are encouraged to vote against politicians rather than for them. So far, the right is getting out the anti-vote much more strongly than the left. Will run some log reports to see if there are any correlations between browser/platform and voting patterns.
...in the list of predictions.
It's not every day I read a Slashdot-linked article only to find my own byline. I must admit, it took some effort to dig through the piles of musty, cobwebbed neurons to recall even writing these predictions.
Glad to see I played it safe. Future prognosticators of the world: always go with the William Jennings Bryant line. He never lets you down.
And, hey, is ISDN awesome or what? 128kbps of pure double channel goodness. I told you!
What happens when Walmart and the U.S. Government combine?
WalmartDotGov: There's a new Uncle Sam at the top.
When Congress passes the Sam Walton Federal Savings Act, Walmart is awarded an exclusive contract to supply the U.S. Government with discount body armor, health care, and tube socks. Elected officials available at unbeatable values!
Link in Walmart Wikipedia entry still going strong...http://www.walmartdotgov.us/
There are plenty of good and juicy anti-competitive practices that are fodder for anti-MS complaints. But this whole issue of bundling common software isn't one of them. Let's forget about the nerd's-eye-view of what an operating system is or is not for a moment. Microsoft sells a software platform. Most people who buy that software platform expect to do certain things with their computer -- playing common media formats is most definitely one of them. And so is surfing the web.
People say that by including these applications they become defaults. There are alternative media players and alternative browsers, but many people don't seek them out. So what? Why is that Microsoft's responsibility? It's not. When you buy a new car, guess what -- it comes with four tires! There are many alternative tires on the market, but most people just drive what comes with the car. Some may argue that, well, the tires are not made by the same manufacturer as the car. But how does this give the buyer any more choice? A single vendor has been selected by the automaker. Buyers aren't asked which vendor's tires they would like.
The argument that an OS doesn't "need" a media player or a browser is a slippery slope that fails the test of people's expectations. Does a car require a radio to move people from A to B? Nearly every new car today comes with one, made and/or selected by the car manufacturer. Again, there are alternatives on the market. Want a different radio? Go buy one, then.
In fact, the claim against bundling IE is weaker today than it's ever been. When the Internet was a peripheral utility, like a spreadsheet, there may have been some case that MS needn't bundle it with the OS. But now usage of the Internet is a primary reason most people buy a computer. Microsoft has every right to provide its customers with what they expect, including the ability to browse the web and play common media files out of the box.
Microsoft's anti-competitive practices have nothing to do with what they bundle. When they put up obstacles to alternative choices, *that* is a good reason to complain. Indeed, Internet Explorer should be easily uninstalled. There is no problem with bundling it, but the user should be able to remove it with ease. When they choose not to support common media formats *in spite of* user expectations, that is a good reason to complain. See, for example, their lack of bundled support for MPEG2/DVD playback (MCE notwithstanding).
For the record, I strongly prefer open source solutions to MS. But what should we make of the fact that the most popular Linux distributions include far more "out of the box" bundles than Windows -- including web, word processing, e-mail, spreadsheets, etc. Why doesn't the argument that users "will just use what came with it and not seek out alternatives" not apply here? Microsoft has every right to provide as much functionality that it believes its customers will want. Criticizing them for that is what is anti-competitive.
Given the variety of truly anti-competitive practices MS has undertaken over the years (OEM restrictions, software obstacles, embrace-and-extend-and-patent tomfoolery) it's sad to see the EU "take a stand" and demand MS stop doing one of the things that is actually entirely within its rights. Nobody is the better off for it, and MS gets to play the martyr and claim persecution.
-Aaron
This whole "dreamweaver is for newbies" argument is willfully simplistic. Speaking from my own extensive web development experience -- Dreamweaver is one tool. It is a very useful and valuable tool. With Dreamweaver I can rapidly prototype sites and knock them into rough shape, much more quickly than I ever could by hand.
But no, Dreamweaver is not a panacea. It doesn't replace a thorough knowledge of web technologies and standards for a professional developer -- html, css, javascript, php, perl, mysql, etc.
Does a carpenter use only one tool to build a house? Of course not.
For the record, I would never use Dreamweaver's templating abilities -- I template server-side. I mix PHP code with Dreamweaver all the time -- just run a local web server to visualize the completed pages. Not that difficult really. That doesn't prevent me from using Dreamweaver regularly or appreciating it for its strengths as part of a large toolbox.
-Aaron
Reply to my own post. I'd also like to add that I'm an idiot who clicked "submit" without "preview" and forgot to change "HTML formatted" to "plain text". So, take my comments in that light.
D'oh!
-Aaron
I really like Firefox. If it were my primary browser I would be happy. But I discovered Opera several months ago when I was searching for a new mail client. Had been using "The Bat" and it was getting very dodgy with a large mail archive. Crashing, using lots of system resources, etc. I'd used earlier versions of Opera (prior to 7.5) and thought they were interested, but didn't feel compelled to use them. But then I discovered Opera's new email client, M2. I love the way it treats e-mail as a database. Rather than a bunch of static boxes where you create rules to move your messages, you create "filters" which are basically db queries. Because filters act on the db in realtime, they are much more powerful than static rules. Filters allow for cross-indexing (a message can fall under multiple filters) and very fast multi-dimensional searching. All very valuable when your e-mail archive has tens of thousands of messages spanning many years. M2 still needs work -- the philosophy is fantastic (and much like Google's Gmail on the server side) -- but the implementation is still maturing. Using M2, I only have to keep one program running for both web and e-mail. And, don't get me wrong, Opera's web browser *is* very good. If it sucked eggs that would be another story. And as I said, I think Firefox is wonderful also, particularly the web developer extensions. There's no law that says I can't use both, and I do. For those bothered by the banner ads in the free version of Opera, this is a silly objection, because they can be easily blocked with some of the same tools you might use to block other kinds of ads, if that's your thing. I'm application agnostic. If someone can point me to another e-mail client that is db-based like M2 I would happily check it out. Until then, I'm sticking with M2. -Aaron
I'm far from the first to get excited about an MS product. But at the end of the day, ya gotta be objective.
I've had MS' earlier attempt at a DVR, UltimateTV, integrated with my DirecTV service for awhile now. Truth be told, it's pretty good. MS hasn't updated the now-orphaned software in a long time, so it's a platform with no future. But from all I read in other forums, those DirecTV users who've had to switch to DirecTivo are less than thrilled with the change. The UTV software is quite stable, the guide is fast, and it organizes shows in logical folders. As Apple users like to say, "it just works". You don't hear that often about MS products, but credit where its due.
The one gripe I do have with UTV is that its not hackable. If I had a DirecTivo, I could hack it up to the latest Tivo OS, and pull recorded shows off the unit onto a PC. There is no way to do this (in the digtial domain) with UTV. As far as I know nobody has figured out such a hack yet.
Speaking for myself, I'm very excited about the growing segment of cell-phone based broadband. There are many of us who live 'just outside' of landline broadband's reach. 3/4 mile in my case. Because my street is so rural, Time Warner will never cable it, and the telco CO is over 20K feet away. There are ISP's in town (~12 miles away) offering WiFi but it's line of sight to a tower and it's very hilly around here. Can't see squat from my property. But I can receive a cell phone signal and we are served by Cingular, Verzion, and Nextel. If I understand these technologies right, it's almost like an NLOS wireless, which is perfect for people like me. Currently I use DirecWay satellite, and it's decent, but is hampered by very slow upstream speeds, brutal latency, and extremely restrictive bandwidth usage rules. I'd gladly pay Verizon's monthly asking price if their cell broadband were available here. Hopefully one day soon it will be.
I was involved in a proposal for a cookbook at one time. As the subject was explained to me by agent and publisher, the ingredient list and the "facts" of the recipe procedure are NOT protected by copyright. The *specific* wording of the procedure as written by an author is protected -- which simply means another author has to rewrite the procedure, but can retain the facts and sequence. Those very few recipes that are protected as trade secrets have nothing to do with copyright and have everything to do with business practices. Very few businesses revolve around a single 'secret formula' recipe, so this is a small category.
The proposed anti-spam clustering technique is of course a variation on whitelisting. While clever, it fails to address a problem I have not often seen addressed. Many people defend themselves from spam by obscuring their e-mail addresses in public places, and perhaps by using whitelists to prefer known senders. This may be effective for many people.
However, some of us can't avoid having a publically available e-mail address. For example, writers such as myself rely on feedback from readers who are, in nearly all cases, strangers (and sometimes strange, but that's another story...) Avoiding false positives from strangers is very important to me. I want their messages. But, since my e-mail address is published frequently (hence no reason to hide it here), I obviously receive a ton of spam.
For the past few months I have experimented with a plug-in called BayesIt! for the Windows email reader The Bat!. As the name implies, it's a bayesian filter. The nice thing about BayesIt is that I could point it to my already-stuffed spam folder and train it on thousands of messages in one go. So far it has worked out rather well. No false positives, and only about 10-20 false negatives per day (out of approx. 400 spams).
Still, in the long run I support proposals that shift the economics of e-mail in ways that have minimal impact on human beings while making spam unprofitable. Changing the economic model of spam is the only sure solution; relying solely on technology will simply keep us locked in an ongoing arms race.
-Aaron