If someone snatched a Fabergé egg out of someone's hand and threw it, no one would be doubting if it were a felonious act
I don't think I entirely agree. What was the situation? Why did the person snatch the faberge egg? If I snuck into security in a museum showing the egg, and I intentionally destroyed it because I didn't like the person who owned the egg, I would expect to be charged with *something*. If a mentally ill person did it suddenly for no apparent reason, then I might question the need to charge him, and whether some action might make more sense.
If, however, the owner of the egg snuck up on someone and started aggressively jamming the egg in the guy's face, I wouldn't think the person being accosted was guilty of anything if he grabbed the edge and threw it away.
If you're taking someone's property and then immediately throwing it ou t the window, I would wonder if it's correct to think of it as "theft" at all. Certainly it sounds like a crime, but "theft" is generally when you take something from another person in order to keep it for yourself. What we're talking about is destruction of another person's property without permission. In that light, it almost sounds like it should be a civil case, not a criminal case, unless the act of "snatching" should be considered assault.
Of course, the law should not be blind to the circumstances surrounding an event. Getting into a scuffle with a paparazzi and throwing his camera out a window should be treated differently than roaming bands of teenagers destroying property for no reason. And it would be different still if someone followed you around, waited for you to set your phone down, and then smashed it and destroyed it out of spite for a personal dispute.
If you need to use PowerPoint, don't make it text heavy, but just put up the brief points you want them to memorize.
In my experience, PowerPoint helps destroy presentations. One of the problems is that people think "making a presentation" is the same as "writing everything you want to say into a powerpoint slideshow, and then standing in front of people and reading through your slideshow with the audience".
So here's the process you should use instead:
Sit down and think about your audience, and think about the topic you're supposed to cover. Think about what you know about the topic that your audience probably doesn't. Now imagine you're going to sit down with one person in the audience (someone who would be representative of the audience in general), and imagine you're going to explain to him the things that you know, he doesn't know, but he should know. You're not covering the entire topic. If your imagined audience member already knows something, you don't need to cover it again. If there's information that your audience member doesn't need to know, then don't bother.
Now really imagine that you're having a normal conversation with that audience member. What do you explain to him? What questions might your imagined audience member ask, and how would you respond? Got all that written down? Ok, great, now restructure the conversation so that you're explaining all the same things, but this time your imaginary friend is mute, and can't ask questions. You have to explain all the same things, but this time, you're just sitting down and laying it all out for him. Ok, got that?
Now is when Powerpoint comes in. In the process of restructuring the conversation to be a one-sided presentation, did you find anything hard to explain? Would any of those hard-to-explain ideas be made easier by using a visual aid? (e.g. a graph, a diagram, a picture, a map, a list of bullet-points) If you answered yes, then make that visual aid. Now you have to ask yourself, does it make more sense to give your audience the visual aid in the as a slideshow, a hand-out? You can do both, but if the answer is not "a slideshow", then you don't need to make a powerpoint presentation at all.
It's not just about more or less brainpower being used, though. It's different kinds of brainpower. It's harder to code for 12 hours straight than to code for 5 hours, have a meeting for 2 hours, brainstorm different product ideas of 3 hours, and then code for 2 more hours.
However, I can't change the system and now if I do not put a 110% effort and get that promotion, the next guy in the office who does will.
And you both might still lose out to the promotion, because the boss's son needs a job. Or because of some other reason. I'm not saying effort isn't at all worthwhile. Putting in 110% might help you get a promotion, but you might improve your chances by putting in 50% while devoting your other 50% to schmoozing and politics. Or you might just get lucky. It's not clear-cut.
It doesn't matter, you can't spread out the responsibilities so easily. You can have purchasing, HR, security, and other departments, but in the end, if those departments aren't all on the same page, someone needs to make a decision. That person needs a varied skill set in order to make good decisions.
I think you're getting a bit off topic. The discussion is focused on much shorter time frames.
The article is clearly, starting even in the first couple paragraphs, talking about prolonged periods of long work-weeks. The article begins:
If you’re lucky enough to have a job right now, you’re probably doing everything possible to hold onto it. If the boss asks you to work 50 hours, you work 55. If she asks for 60, you give up weeknights and Saturdays, and work 65.
Odds are that you’ve been doing this for months, if not years
Of course people are capable of working 80 hours a week for a week or two and still be relatively productive. The article is more focused on the issue of workers being asked to work 60 hours/week as a matter of course.
Certainly people can do a better or worse job of handling excessive hours...
And then in the next post:
Certainly some people are better at multi-tasking than others...
So yes, some people will do better than others, but they will all have problems if they work long enough hours for a long enough time without enough breaks. As you said, "Some people can last twice as long underwater with the same build/weight/height and the same capacity in their scuba tanks." This is true, but everyone will eventually run out of air and die if they stay under water. Your optimal productivity in a certain job under certain circumstances might be 45 hours per week, and someone else's might be 37 hours per week. Take a different job or change the circumstances, and those numbers will change.
Still, if you think you can go on indefinitely, working 80 hour work weeks, without it taking a toll, then you're fooling yourself. You are not "wired that way". You are, however, "wired" for self-deception. We all are. And while you're working those 80 hours, you might convince yourself that you're a magical human being who can work endlessly.
If the work is engaging and interesting, yes, you can work 80 hour work weeks for a while. It's not because you're special, it's because, if engaged in their work, people can work very hard for a while. After a while, you burn out, and you lose perspective. You start making bad assumptions and making mistakes. You might still think you're doing a great job, but you'll be less productive than if you took a break.
You are not magical and you are not Superman. It feels good to be a hero and think, "I can do things that normal people can't, because I'm 'wired that way'!" It's similar to the way people think they're really great at multitasking because they're "wired that way" and they can do 20 things at once without missing a beat. Certainly some people are better at multi-tasking than others, but if you do too many things at the same time, you simply won't be focused on all of them. You'll miss things, but the irony is that you won't notice that you're missing things because you're not focused enough to see things slipping through the cracks.
*sigh* I wish more people understood this. I'm actually in the process of quitting my job (already gave notice) because the owners of my company absolutely refused to manage their employees. Their attitude was "If people can't figure things out for themselves, then we aren't hiring good enough people. If you can't get everything done that you're supposed to, then you aren't working long enough and hard enough."
I gave a laundry list of problems that were popping up because everyone was overworked and making mistakes. I pointed out how there were a lot of important duties being ignored because they weren't screaming top-priority issues, but sooner or later they would bite us in the ass. I suggested organizational improvements that would increase productivity without hiring more people or spending more money. None of this really seemed to register. The attitude continued to be "Well we'll all just need to buckle down and work harder."
Management is a complicated set of skills, and it's difficult. You have to be a psychologist and economist, a parent and a slave.
Americans are trained to feel like they have to overwork in order to get ahead, we should really strive towards following the European model.
It's tied to one of the great lies of American culture: "If you're smart and you work hard, you will become super-rich."
American culture is all about this. We want to point to people like Bill Gates and Donald Trump and say, "Look at these men! They came from nothing, and through their own intelligence and hard work, they became rich and famous." Of course, they didn't come from poverty, and they didn't achieve success through intelligence and hard work alone.
But people believe these things, and they want to make the world a paradise for the super-rich so that one day, when they become rich, the world of opulence will have been preserved for them. Then they look at their own lives and say, "Whoa whoa whoa! Why am I not rich yet? The only two components to success are intelligence and hard work, and it can't be a lack of intelligence because I'm incredibly brilliant. It must be that I haven't been working hard enough." And it's in this way that we convince ourselves that everyone who is poor is lazy and/or stupid, and our problems would be solved by working more and trying harder. It's hardly ever considered that the answer might be a change in strategy.
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
Not really. Certainly people can do a better or worse job of handling excessive hours, depending on the person and the kind of work, along with other factors. However, no one is simply "wired" to handle excessive amounts of work. Everyone gets tired, burns out, loses concentration, and makes mistakes. Some people push through it, continuing to make mistakes and be less productive as they wear themselves out, and just keep wearing themselves out.
Which seems rather like an inherent flaw in the whole concept of a printed encyclopaedia.
In fairness, at the time when they invented the printed encyclopedia, they didn't have much of an option. Remember, the printing press was once cutting-edge technology.
I had a copy and immediately saw that multimedia versions would eventually kill the paper version.
Yeah, that's the thing-- it wasn't Encarta per se. Encarta was terrible and useless. What really caused the decline in sales was the *idea* that encyclopedias would eventually be digital. What some people may not remember is that Encyclopedias were very expensive, and so they were considered an investment that would pay off over several decades. It was a source of a wide world of information that you otherwise wouldn't be able to access without going to a library. Once people realized that the information might be available in digital form within the next few years, it no longer made sense to invest in something that was supposed to pay off over decades.
So it wasn't that Brittanica lost out to Encarta, though it may be that Encarta helped some people realize that the paper encyclopedia was doomed.
All streaming video is currently recoded or transcoded before being put online.
There's truth to what you're saying, but the point is that you'll be making things more complicated. It's really a logical thing, independent of whether your in favor of H264 or WebM: if web browsers "go their own way" and use a standard that's different from what everyone else is using in other contexts, then you're going to need to do more transcoding. So in a simple example, if I shoot a video in [format x] because that's what my camera or video editing software supports, and web browsers also support [format x], then I can basically just throw the video online. If my set-top box supports [format x] then I can stream that video to my TV without any work. If my mom's desktop OS supports [format x], then I can send it to her somehow and she can read it. I can do all this with the same file.
However, if my camera, video editing software, my mom's desktop OS, and my set-top box all support [format x], but my web browser only supports [format y], then it's kind of dumb. After I'm done recording, editing, and encoding the video, I then need to encode the video again (which if you don't have good source, you may need to transcode and lose quality) for the sole purpose of embedding the video in a web page. If desktop video software doesn't have good support for the [format y], then if you choose to download the video, you may have to transcode back to [format x] to view/edit the video.
Right now, H.264 clearly has more support since it has been around for longer.
Yes, and it may be that WebM is just too late to the party. Even if WebM were to provide slightly better compression/quality than H264 and were supported on all new hardware going forward, you would have to ask whether any necessary hardware/software purchases and production process/workflow changes were worth the improvement. From what I've read, WebM provides arguably worse quality, and meanwhile H264 has already become somewhat entrenched.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not too happy with patent-encumbered standards. I'm just pointing out that this is more complicated than picking your ideal format and programming a browser to decode it.
Yes, unfortunately, Exchange works very well for many businesses, and it's providing something that they need. You may ask, why do you want to combine scheduling and email into the same application and back-end?
The answer is obvious to people who've used Exchange. You send meeting invites through email. When you're sending the invite through email, your email application can also tell you whether the intended recipients are already busy. You can also schedule resources (e.g. a conference room or projector) and view availability while creating your email invitation.
And why include contacts? Well that, I'd hope, is obvious. All email applications keep a contact list anyway, since they need to store email addresses. If you want to create a contact database that includes email addresses, you may as well include that in the email application.
Tasks? Well, for many of us, our task list comes straight out of email. I get an email, and I need to create tasks for what I'm going to do in response. Plus, "tasks" and "calendars" are logically linked together as tools for effective task-management.
This isn't entirely an issue about browsers, though. When browsers are talking about standardizing on a video codec, the discussion must take place in the larger context of video standards in general. Either you have to accept that you'll be transcoding video in the "browser standard" before putting it online, which is a wast of time and resources and results in reduced video quality, or browsers will need to standardize on the same formats/codecs that other devices are using.
So what video codecs are supported in set-top boxes? What hardware support is there in smartphones and tablets, where battery life matters? What video codecs are likely to be supported in the computer that you buy, without installing additional software? What formats are well supported by common programs that handle video editing and encoding?
It's a good metaphor, but I want to add this to the metaphor: they also don't know when the free-money hose will turn itself off, or when one of your neighbors will figure out how to divert the flow elsewhere.
... into an innovative company, and then don't want them to innovate. They want their nice safe already-innovated to profit like a not-quite-so-safe innovator. Paradoxical, yes - but seems the norm.
In other news, people would like a free lunch, want to have their cake and eat it too.
Macs are fine, if you don't care how they work or what's going on. If you want to get into the internals of a computer, you need to use something else.
That hasn't been true for the past several years, since OSX was released. OSX provides no less access into the internals of the computer than Windows. It arguably provides more access, since much of the underlying software is FOSS. Unfortunately, the trend for both OSX and Windows seems to be to go towards greater abstraction, minimizing everything down to what works in a touchscreen interface, and requiring software distribution channels to a walled garden.
But generally? Macs are great for people who aren't interested in the internals, but also great for Unix geeks who want access into the internals. Hopefully Apple isn't moving away from that market.
Side note: if you've read this far, you've already exhibited a mild disposition towards a community as I don't think this post (in its entirety) would be read by anyone on the aforementioned sites. If those sites don't establish anything they are doomed to have specious comments.
Well as other people have brought up, many of these sites don't have threaded discussion systems. They have chronological comment systems. Slashdot is engineered to pay attention to the flow of an argument, and when you comment you can easily see who has responded. Comment systems are designed for people to throw out glib comments and forget them. They aren't built for people to actually speak to each other.
I agree that's part of the problem. Take the fact that he's the guy who founded Gawker. So you post a story on Gawker about how Jon Hamm Hates Kim Kardashian, and you wonder, "Why am I not getting the most elite brilliant comments in response?" Even sites like CNN are full of trash. How can you be surprised that your comments are ignorant flamebait with no dignity when they're in response to stories that are ignorant flamebait with no dignity?
But also, honestly, if there were an interesting story on CNN, I wouldn't want to bother commenting on it on CNN. I'd wait until it got posted someplace like Slashdot, and then I'd comment there. It's a better audience for my comments, and there's a better moderation system.
But there's more to it than just that-- Slashdot is *where I have my discussions*. If I post on a million different web sites, I can't keep track of who I'm talking to and who has responded to my comment. Even if the people on cnn.com were great and their discussion system was great, I wouldn't really want to post comments on Gawker *and* CNN *and* MSNBC *and* wherever else an interesting story pops up. I'd rather wait until the story shows up on an aggregation service I'm used to, and then comment there. The consistency of having one site (or a couple) to engage in discussions is part of what makes it work.
So essentially, I agree that comments may be a waste of time on Gawker and CNN. It's better to assume that there will be news aggregation and discussion sites (like Slashdot) and people can go there for discussion.
More to the point, Apple doesn't need the Apple TV to be revolutionary. What they need is a way to get their content onto your TV. They're selling these iPads and iPhones with all this ability to play media, and they're also selling the media to play on them. If there were no easy way to get that media onto your TV, that would be a gaping hole in their product lineup.
Besides, if there's an upcoming revolutionary change in TV, I don't tank it'll be a new technology or device, but instead a service. If someone can get a new distribution method in place which effectively replaces cable TV providers with an Internet service, providing access to first-run TV shows and sporting events, it has the potential to change the entire industry.
There's a general problem here: we're fixing last-year's problem.
So we had a plane highjacking by people with knives. The hijackers ran the planes into buildings. This is what we're most focused on preventing, but it's not very likely to happen again. First, pilots and passengers are less likely now to allow someone with a knife to take control of a plane. The reason they allowed it before was that it was basically the policy to do so-- they weren't expecting hijackers to use the plane as a missile. We also are more vigilant about keeping an eye on planes in the airspace around population centers, and we'll be more ready to shoot down planes that are too close to downtown NYC and not following their flight plan. 9/11 won't happen again.
And why would they even try? It's much more effective to find some new vector of attack. It increases your chances of success, and it also increases the terror that it causes in the general population. By using various methods, the attacks become unpredictable and encourage the perception that you might get hit anywhere, at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone snatched a Fabergé egg out of someone's hand and threw it, no one would be doubting if it were a felonious act
I don't think I entirely agree. What was the situation? Why did the person snatch the faberge egg? If I snuck into security in a museum showing the egg, and I intentionally destroyed it because I didn't like the person who owned the egg, I would expect to be charged with *something*. If a mentally ill person did it suddenly for no apparent reason, then I might question the need to charge him, and whether some action might make more sense.
If, however, the owner of the egg snuck up on someone and started aggressively jamming the egg in the guy's face, I wouldn't think the person being accosted was guilty of anything if he grabbed the edge and threw it away.
If you're taking someone's property and then immediately throwing it ou t the window, I would wonder if it's correct to think of it as "theft" at all. Certainly it sounds like a crime, but "theft" is generally when you take something from another person in order to keep it for yourself. What we're talking about is destruction of another person's property without permission. In that light, it almost sounds like it should be a civil case, not a criminal case, unless the act of "snatching" should be considered assault.
Of course, the law should not be blind to the circumstances surrounding an event. Getting into a scuffle with a paparazzi and throwing his camera out a window should be treated differently than roaming bands of teenagers destroying property for no reason. And it would be different still if someone followed you around, waited for you to set your phone down, and then smashed it and destroyed it out of spite for a personal dispute.
If you need to use PowerPoint, don't make it text heavy, but just put up the brief points you want them to memorize.
In my experience, PowerPoint helps destroy presentations. One of the problems is that people think "making a presentation" is the same as "writing everything you want to say into a powerpoint slideshow, and then standing in front of people and reading through your slideshow with the audience".
So here's the process you should use instead:
Sit down and think about your audience, and think about the topic you're supposed to cover. Think about what you know about the topic that your audience probably doesn't. Now imagine you're going to sit down with one person in the audience (someone who would be representative of the audience in general), and imagine you're going to explain to him the things that you know, he doesn't know, but he should know. You're not covering the entire topic. If your imagined audience member already knows something, you don't need to cover it again. If there's information that your audience member doesn't need to know, then don't bother.
Now really imagine that you're having a normal conversation with that audience member. What do you explain to him? What questions might your imagined audience member ask, and how would you respond? Got all that written down? Ok, great, now restructure the conversation so that you're explaining all the same things, but this time your imaginary friend is mute, and can't ask questions. You have to explain all the same things, but this time, you're just sitting down and laying it all out for him. Ok, got that?
Now is when Powerpoint comes in. In the process of restructuring the conversation to be a one-sided presentation, did you find anything hard to explain? Would any of those hard-to-explain ideas be made easier by using a visual aid? (e.g. a graph, a diagram, a picture, a map, a list of bullet-points) If you answered yes, then make that visual aid. Now you have to ask yourself, does it make more sense to give your audience the visual aid in the as a slideshow, a hand-out? You can do both, but if the answer is not "a slideshow", then you don't need to make a powerpoint presentation at all.
It's not just about more or less brainpower being used, though. It's different kinds of brainpower. It's harder to code for 12 hours straight than to code for 5 hours, have a meeting for 2 hours, brainstorm different product ideas of 3 hours, and then code for 2 more hours.
However, I can't change the system and now if I do not put a 110% effort and get that promotion, the next guy in the office who does will.
And you both might still lose out to the promotion, because the boss's son needs a job. Or because of some other reason. I'm not saying effort isn't at all worthwhile. Putting in 110% might help you get a promotion, but you might improve your chances by putting in 50% while devoting your other 50% to schmoozing and politics. Or you might just get lucky. It's not clear-cut.
It doesn't matter, you can't spread out the responsibilities so easily. You can have purchasing, HR, security, and other departments, but in the end, if those departments aren't all on the same page, someone needs to make a decision. That person needs a varied skill set in order to make good decisions.
Ok, fine, you're the magical human being who can work endlessly with no ill effects. Sorry for doubting your inherent superiority.
I think you're getting a bit off topic. The discussion is focused on much shorter time frames.
The article is clearly, starting even in the first couple paragraphs, talking about prolonged periods of long work-weeks. The article begins:
If you’re lucky enough to have a job right now, you’re probably doing everything possible to hold onto it. If the boss asks you to work 50 hours, you work 55. If she asks for 60, you give up weeknights and Saturdays, and work 65.
Odds are that you’ve been doing this for months, if not years
Of course people are capable of working 80 hours a week for a week or two and still be relatively productive. The article is more focused on the issue of workers being asked to work 60 hours/week as a matter of course.
I said:
Certainly people can do a better or worse job of handling excessive hours...
And then in the next post:
Certainly some people are better at multi-tasking than others...
So yes, some people will do better than others, but they will all have problems if they work long enough hours for a long enough time without enough breaks. As you said, "Some people can last twice as long underwater with the same build/weight/height and the same capacity in their scuba tanks." This is true, but everyone will eventually run out of air and die if they stay under water. Your optimal productivity in a certain job under certain circumstances might be 45 hours per week, and someone else's might be 37 hours per week. Take a different job or change the circumstances, and those numbers will change.
Still, if you think you can go on indefinitely, working 80 hour work weeks, without it taking a toll, then you're fooling yourself. You are not "wired that way". You are, however, "wired" for self-deception. We all are. And while you're working those 80 hours, you might convince yourself that you're a magical human being who can work endlessly.
If the work is engaging and interesting, yes, you can work 80 hour work weeks for a while. It's not because you're special, it's because, if engaged in their work, people can work very hard for a while. After a while, you burn out, and you lose perspective. You start making bad assumptions and making mistakes. You might still think you're doing a great job, but you'll be less productive than if you took a break.
You are not magical and you are not Superman. It feels good to be a hero and think, "I can do things that normal people can't, because I'm 'wired that way'!" It's similar to the way people think they're really great at multitasking because they're "wired that way" and they can do 20 things at once without missing a beat. Certainly some people are better at multi-tasking than others, but if you do too many things at the same time, you simply won't be focused on all of them. You'll miss things, but the irony is that you won't notice that you're missing things because you're not focused enough to see things slipping through the cracks.
Managament can be a pita at times.
*sigh* I wish more people understood this. I'm actually in the process of quitting my job (already gave notice) because the owners of my company absolutely refused to manage their employees. Their attitude was "If people can't figure things out for themselves, then we aren't hiring good enough people. If you can't get everything done that you're supposed to, then you aren't working long enough and hard enough."
I gave a laundry list of problems that were popping up because everyone was overworked and making mistakes. I pointed out how there were a lot of important duties being ignored because they weren't screaming top-priority issues, but sooner or later they would bite us in the ass. I suggested organizational improvements that would increase productivity without hiring more people or spending more money. None of this really seemed to register. The attitude continued to be "Well we'll all just need to buckle down and work harder."
Management is a complicated set of skills, and it's difficult. You have to be a psychologist and economist, a parent and a slave.
Americans are trained to feel like they have to overwork in order to get ahead, we should really strive towards following the European model.
It's tied to one of the great lies of American culture: "If you're smart and you work hard, you will become super-rich."
American culture is all about this. We want to point to people like Bill Gates and Donald Trump and say, "Look at these men! They came from nothing, and through their own intelligence and hard work, they became rich and famous." Of course, they didn't come from poverty, and they didn't achieve success through intelligence and hard work alone.
But people believe these things, and they want to make the world a paradise for the super-rich so that one day, when they become rich, the world of opulence will have been preserved for them. Then they look at their own lives and say, "Whoa whoa whoa! Why am I not rich yet? The only two components to success are intelligence and hard work, and it can't be a lack of intelligence because I'm incredibly brilliant. It must be that I haven't been working hard enough." And it's in this way that we convince ourselves that everyone who is poor is lazy and/or stupid, and our problems would be solved by working more and trying harder. It's hardly ever considered that the answer might be a change in strategy.
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
Not really. Certainly people can do a better or worse job of handling excessive hours, depending on the person and the kind of work, along with other factors. However, no one is simply "wired" to handle excessive amounts of work. Everyone gets tired, burns out, loses concentration, and makes mistakes. Some people push through it, continuing to make mistakes and be less productive as they wear themselves out, and just keep wearing themselves out.
Which seems rather like an inherent flaw in the whole concept of a printed encyclopaedia.
In fairness, at the time when they invented the printed encyclopedia, they didn't have much of an option. Remember, the printing press was once cutting-edge technology.
I had a copy and immediately saw that multimedia versions would eventually kill the paper version.
Yeah, that's the thing-- it wasn't Encarta per se. Encarta was terrible and useless. What really caused the decline in sales was the *idea* that encyclopedias would eventually be digital. What some people may not remember is that Encyclopedias were very expensive, and so they were considered an investment that would pay off over several decades. It was a source of a wide world of information that you otherwise wouldn't be able to access without going to a library. Once people realized that the information might be available in digital form within the next few years, it no longer made sense to invest in something that was supposed to pay off over decades.
So it wasn't that Brittanica lost out to Encarta, though it may be that Encarta helped some people realize that the paper encyclopedia was doomed.
All streaming video is currently recoded or transcoded before being put online.
There's truth to what you're saying, but the point is that you'll be making things more complicated. It's really a logical thing, independent of whether your in favor of H264 or WebM: if web browsers "go their own way" and use a standard that's different from what everyone else is using in other contexts, then you're going to need to do more transcoding. So in a simple example, if I shoot a video in [format x] because that's what my camera or video editing software supports, and web browsers also support [format x], then I can basically just throw the video online. If my set-top box supports [format x] then I can stream that video to my TV without any work. If my mom's desktop OS supports [format x], then I can send it to her somehow and she can read it. I can do all this with the same file.
However, if my camera, video editing software, my mom's desktop OS, and my set-top box all support [format x], but my web browser only supports [format y], then it's kind of dumb. After I'm done recording, editing, and encoding the video, I then need to encode the video again (which if you don't have good source, you may need to transcode and lose quality) for the sole purpose of embedding the video in a web page. If desktop video software doesn't have good support for the [format y], then if you choose to download the video, you may have to transcode back to [format x] to view/edit the video.
Right now, H.264 clearly has more support since it has been around for longer.
Yes, and it may be that WebM is just too late to the party. Even if WebM were to provide slightly better compression/quality than H264 and were supported on all new hardware going forward, you would have to ask whether any necessary hardware/software purchases and production process/workflow changes were worth the improvement. From what I've read, WebM provides arguably worse quality, and meanwhile H264 has already become somewhat entrenched.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not too happy with patent-encumbered standards. I'm just pointing out that this is more complicated than picking your ideal format and programming a browser to decode it.
Yes, unfortunately, Exchange works very well for many businesses, and it's providing something that they need. You may ask, why do you want to combine scheduling and email into the same application and back-end?
The answer is obvious to people who've used Exchange. You send meeting invites through email. When you're sending the invite through email, your email application can also tell you whether the intended recipients are already busy. You can also schedule resources (e.g. a conference room or projector) and view availability while creating your email invitation.
And why include contacts? Well that, I'd hope, is obvious. All email applications keep a contact list anyway, since they need to store email addresses. If you want to create a contact database that includes email addresses, you may as well include that in the email application.
Tasks? Well, for many of us, our task list comes straight out of email. I get an email, and I need to create tasks for what I'm going to do in response. Plus, "tasks" and "calendars" are logically linked together as tools for effective task-management.
This isn't entirely an issue about browsers, though. When browsers are talking about standardizing on a video codec, the discussion must take place in the larger context of video standards in general. Either you have to accept that you'll be transcoding video in the "browser standard" before putting it online, which is a wast of time and resources and results in reduced video quality, or browsers will need to standardize on the same formats/codecs that other devices are using.
So what video codecs are supported in set-top boxes? What hardware support is there in smartphones and tablets, where battery life matters? What video codecs are likely to be supported in the computer that you buy, without installing additional software? What formats are well supported by common programs that handle video editing and encoding?
It's a good metaphor, but I want to add this to the metaphor: they also don't know when the free-money hose will turn itself off, or when one of your neighbors will figure out how to divert the flow elsewhere.
... into an innovative company, and then don't want them to innovate. They want their nice safe already-innovated to profit like a not-quite-so-safe innovator. Paradoxical, yes - but seems the norm.
In other news, people would like a free lunch, want to have their cake and eat it too.
Macs are fine, if you don't care how they work or what's going on. If you want to get into the internals of a computer, you need to use something else.
That hasn't been true for the past several years, since OSX was released. OSX provides no less access into the internals of the computer than Windows. It arguably provides more access, since much of the underlying software is FOSS. Unfortunately, the trend for both OSX and Windows seems to be to go towards greater abstraction, minimizing everything down to what works in a touchscreen interface, and requiring software distribution channels to a walled garden.
But generally? Macs are great for people who aren't interested in the internals, but also great for Unix geeks who want access into the internals. Hopefully Apple isn't moving away from that market.
Side note: if you've read this far, you've already exhibited a mild disposition towards a community as I don't think this post (in its entirety) would be read by anyone on the aforementioned sites. If those sites don't establish anything they are doomed to have specious comments.
Well as other people have brought up, many of these sites don't have threaded discussion systems. They have chronological comment systems. Slashdot is engineered to pay attention to the flow of an argument, and when you comment you can easily see who has responded. Comment systems are designed for people to throw out glib comments and forget them. They aren't built for people to actually speak to each other.
That has to be part of the problem.
I agree that's part of the problem. Take the fact that he's the guy who founded Gawker. So you post a story on Gawker about how Jon Hamm Hates Kim Kardashian, and you wonder, "Why am I not getting the most elite brilliant comments in response?" Even sites like CNN are full of trash. How can you be surprised that your comments are ignorant flamebait with no dignity when they're in response to stories that are ignorant flamebait with no dignity?
But also, honestly, if there were an interesting story on CNN, I wouldn't want to bother commenting on it on CNN. I'd wait until it got posted someplace like Slashdot, and then I'd comment there. It's a better audience for my comments, and there's a better moderation system.
But there's more to it than just that-- Slashdot is *where I have my discussions*. If I post on a million different web sites, I can't keep track of who I'm talking to and who has responded to my comment. Even if the people on cnn.com were great and their discussion system was great, I wouldn't really want to post comments on Gawker *and* CNN *and* MSNBC *and* wherever else an interesting story pops up. I'd rather wait until the story shows up on an aggregation service I'm used to, and then comment there. The consistency of having one site (or a couple) to engage in discussions is part of what makes it work.
So essentially, I agree that comments may be a waste of time on Gawker and CNN. It's better to assume that there will be news aggregation and discussion sites (like Slashdot) and people can go there for discussion.
More to the point, Apple doesn't need the Apple TV to be revolutionary. What they need is a way to get their content onto your TV. They're selling these iPads and iPhones with all this ability to play media, and they're also selling the media to play on them. If there were no easy way to get that media onto your TV, that would be a gaping hole in their product lineup.
Besides, if there's an upcoming revolutionary change in TV, I don't tank it'll be a new technology or device, but instead a service. If someone can get a new distribution method in place which effectively replaces cable TV providers with an Internet service, providing access to first-run TV shows and sporting events, it has the potential to change the entire industry.
There's a general problem here: we're fixing last-year's problem.
So we had a plane highjacking by people with knives. The hijackers ran the planes into buildings. This is what we're most focused on preventing, but it's not very likely to happen again. First, pilots and passengers are less likely now to allow someone with a knife to take control of a plane. The reason they allowed it before was that it was basically the policy to do so-- they weren't expecting hijackers to use the plane as a missile. We also are more vigilant about keeping an eye on planes in the airspace around population centers, and we'll be more ready to shoot down planes that are too close to downtown NYC and not following their flight plan. 9/11 won't happen again.
And why would they even try? It's much more effective to find some new vector of attack. It increases your chances of success, and it also increases the terror that it causes in the general population. By using various methods, the attacks become unpredictable and encourage the perception that you might get hit anywhere, at any time.