They pick up the paper (from driveway, store, stand or whatever) read and discard. No thought to the medium.
On the contrary, I don't think that there's no thought to the medium. I think part of the reason it was so easy to move music over to MP3 is because people could pay no thought to the medium. Like you say, people were used to portable players (Walkman) and so they were used to listening to music through headphones. The iPod just changed how the music was stored, but it didn't change very much about the experience of listening to it.
The problem with newspapers, if anything, is that people interact with the medium directly and are very aware of changes in the medium. Lots of people like the smell and feel of paper. Newspaper readers have little rituals about how they fold and open the paper, how they skim through the contents, and which articles they read first. You can't do that stuff with an e-ink reader.
The difference between this sort of thing and the Kindle or the iPod is striking. Those were both created to sell downloads, and thus try to cripple you from doing anything other than buy from Amazon or iTunes.
Actually, it's iTunes that's designed to sell you iPods, not so much the other way around. There's nothing crippled about the iPod to prevent you from getting music from other sources, but it's iTunes content that's crippled to prevent you from listening to it on non-iPod players (though that's not the case for music anymore).
That's a pretty good list, especially 1, 4, and 5.
It does seem to me that large newspapers are having trouble on the web because they don't seem to understand the differences of what the "new media" has to offer. I don't got to the NYT website to read my news, I come to Slashdot or Digg, who might possibly link to the NYT. Why is that?
Well, first because they're offering a broader selection of news. Second and more importantly, Slashdot provides a good discussion system for me to talk about the story. It gives a place where people, sometimes with equal or greater expertise than those writing the story, can comment, either supporting the conclusions of the article or picking them apart. There's added depth.
And this is where the biggest value of this "new media" comes in: there aren't real space limitations. You can put up all your content, as much as you have, in any number of combinations, permutations, and sorted in any number of ways, all at the same time. You can have a good discussion system, and people who aren't interested in it can choose not to visit it. If you have a scientific issue and you have two different experts with differing opinions, you can have the dumbed-down synopsis of the debate written by a journalist, but you can also allow each expert to write their own argument and publish them alongside the journalist's story.
The only real expense for these things is in editing or moderating, which I think probably can be done in a cost-effective way.
I agree. There's definitely a part of me that would like to see a reader that could render a full-sized 8.5"x11" page (or European equivalent). That might not be the easiest to carry around or even the most efficient reading size, but it'd be nice to be able to print a document to a normal PDF formatted for normal printing, throw it on my e-book reader, and go.
But ok, maybe that's too big by several measures. Still, I have a larger point: the display sizes for these things shouldn't be based on conforming to screen sizes, but instead based on standard print sizes. 1024x1280? 600x800? I don't really care. Give me a screen that's the size of a normal paperback book page, and have the whole device be not-very-much-bigger.
The cost argument is very good, but I don't want 3-4 eReaders, each that only works on one paper. That's just a hassle.
Right. I would definitely think the business model should be to standardize on a single reader (or better yet, a specification that different manufacturers can meet), and then subsidize the cost of the reader, sort of like cell phones. Buy subscriptions to the WSJ and NYT, get a free e-reader.
Even giving away a $300 device, the publishers will save money in the long term by not having to actually print and deliver things-- given either a long enough timeline or a large enough number of subscriptions per device.
I don't think my $0.50 price is all that outlandish. On iTMS, they generally charge $15 to "buy" a new release movie, and $4 to "rent". Meanwhile they charge $2/episode to "buy" TV shows. 0.53:2::4:15.
Now maybe it's just me, but I generally don't care at all about "buying" TV shows. I want to watch them once, and usually never watch them again. So I really am looking more for the rental model, which at this point, no one is offering.
I can very easily see YouTube transitioning to what is effectively an a la carte cable TV provider...You pay a buck a month to the ESPN channel on YouTube, or whatever. The current configuration becomes effectively a massive public access cable channel, supported by subscription-based premium channels.
That sounds right to me, except I don't feel confident it can happen. The problem is, if you do that, then the cable companies go under. Now you, me, and the rest of Slashdot may revert to a stance of "Who cares? Buggy whips and all." But there's lots of money to be made in controlling content distribution, and that's always been part of the problem with theories about ubiquitous convenient content. They can charge a premium for pay-per-view movies that are new-release because they might not be available elsewhere. Movie channels like HBO pay extra to get exclusive rights to whichever hot new movies. Some of the economics of that start to break apart when you put things online. And do you think Time Warner the content owner will be eager to put their content out in a way that jeopardizes Time Warner the cable company?
To be honest, I'm not sure about all the things I'm saying in this post, but I do know that businesses like this make money in places that you wouldn't necessarily think of, and they're hesitant to go from business models that they know and understand to models where they don't know whether they can find these extra little spaces to make money. I think that hesitance is part of the reason why we aren't already seeing more content online, and why it took so damn long for services like Hulu to show up in the first place.
I think the endgame is to have some kinds of IPTV services that are as convenient as DVR and, when all the charges are added up, no more expensive than paying for cable. I'm not sure if we'll get there anytime soon, though.
I think it depends on exactly how much you're paying for what content. paying for user-generated content? No. Paying for content available for free (ad supported) on Hulu? Probably not.
But if there were a site where I could pay a small fee (either subscription or per-episode) to watch virtually any show I want, then I'm game. The iTunes model works well enough for me, but the prices are too high. I generally don't want to "buy" TV shows for $2/episode, but if it were something closer to maybe $0.50 for a TV episode "rental", I'd be more interested.
But for me, at least, paying for TV shows online has to pretty much get to the point where I can replace my cable TV for cheaper than the price of cable TV, and it's at least as convenient. Of course, I don't expect that the content owners will go for that, because they have lots of profitable arrangements with the cable companies.
Yes, but Google is trying to get the same sort of content that Hulu has, licensed by content owners, and ad-supported. For whatever reason, content owners aren't going for that, either.
However, I don't see it as that big an issue, either; Google is here to stay, so is YouTube, and if it became THE site for non-commercial content, I for one would still use it. I suspect others would, also.
The problem is making money. Yes, Youtube is popular, but is it profitable yet? I don't know. Advertisers won't pay much on ad space until they can place their ads on premium content, and they won't be able to get premium content until they can show that advertisers are willing to pay a premium. It's a catch 22.
So content owners are saying they won't license their content for the Internet because the ad revenue isn't there. The advertisers are saying they won't pay much because the viewers aren't there. The viewers won't watch because content owners are busy pushing their products on broadcast channels while withholding them from the Internet. And around we go.
If things are going to change, someone has to make the leap, and it won't be the advertisers. It might be the content owners, but I'd bet on the viewers. Not so much a leap, but a gradual falling off-- people canceling their cable because they get enough shows on Hulu or iTunes to keep them content, and maybe they supplement those sources with some illegal stuff. So then advertisers and content owners will have to go online to get those viewers.
There are distros like ubuntu that try to make as much as possible accessible from the surface, but when you have to do something not exposed by pretty control panels you need a level of understanding far beyond that of the average user.
That's true of Windows and OSX too. Don't tell me you'd advise normal low-level users to open up the Windows Registry.
So here's the real question: how much of the functionality required by new/unknowledgeable users is not exposed by pretty control panels?
I'm just saying that if you go back to people like Adam Smith (been a long time since I read any of that stuff, but I think I remember the ideas), the idea of wasn't to encourage consolidation of power into companies which would then be completely free from any kind of restraint and allowed to set prices and engage in monopolistic behavior. The idea was much more that individual economic freedom and competition would benefit society as a whole more than strict control by even a truly benevolent power.
So when people start using terms like "free market" and "capitalism" to justify enormous companies bullying their own customers, I can't help but want to say, "I don't think you know what those ideas are really about."
I suppose the problem is that these things are not seen as necessary yet. Cable TV probably isn't, but I'd argue that the internet is, at least to a greater degree than whatever else is going over those lines.
Yes, after lots of arguments and discussions about this, what I've come to realize is that a lot of people see the Internet as an recreational entertainment service. They spend lots of time looking at facebook and downloading TV shows, music, and movies, and so they think, "This is what the Internet is. It replaces cable TV and those BMG/Columbia House CD clubs (remember those?) as the way I get entertainment." So in that context, it's easy to understand why people aren't concerned about letting the "free market" sort it out.
What lots of people fail to recognize is that the Internet is infrastructure over which our communications pass, commercial and consumer products are shipped, and the public is informed. Once you recognize that the Internet is infrastructure that is becoming vital to our culture and economy, the whole debate shifts, and it becomes much more clear how silly it is to give monopoly/duopoly control to loosely-regulated private companies.
Can you define "supposed to"? I've always thought the phrase "supposed to" was kind of weird and hard to say what it meant. Certainly there are people working on Linux on various levels who would like it to be popular, and are even working with the intent of making it popular.
Also, it's not at all strange for them to be strutting their market share. There is probably some market share (though surely above 1%) where Linux will reach a sort of critical mass, in which it will get mass recognition and better support from 3rd parties. Market share counts, and getting above 1% is a sort of milestone. I kind of remember Firefox and Safari each creeping above 1% in web usage statistics, and look at them now.
And just to spell this out a little more: the theory supporting "capitalism" as a useful economic system supposes an actual free market, which is not the same as "a market where a large corporation is free to do as it pleases." Yes, there's a difference.
A free market is one where there is no significant barrier to entry into that market, as well as relatively level footing within that market, thereby allowing for free competition. Of course, this is nothing like the ISP industry that we have today.
And it's not at all clear to me that we can have that kind of competition in the part of the ISP business that includes developing physical infrastructure. You can't just let everyone and anyone dig up whatever land they want in order to lay cable.
brownouts that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace
It sounds like some BS description they'd put into a movie when they forgot to hire a tech consultant. You know, like some dude with spiky hair who describes himself as a 'hacker' would be typing furiously on a keyboard, and then suddenly yell, "Oh no! We're in too many firewalls and cyberspace is almost full! All of our computers are going to crash if I don't do something quick!"
The only thing is, I've had Vista on a testing machine since its first public beta, just so I can track the progress they're making with it. I put the first public beta of Windows 7 on my laptop and used it for a while. Both are... fine.
But then I had a problem with my laptop and so I wiped it out and reinstalled Windows XP. You know what? I didn't have any problems in downgrading. What I mean is, there wasn't anything after downgrading where I said, "Shoot, I wish I could do this, but XP doesn't have that functionality, so I need to upgrade again." At least not so far.
If Microsoft wants me to pay for an upgrade, they're going to have to show me something more than what I've seen so far.
As virtual worlds get more popular and their business models more directly affect real-life finances
I think some people just take it for granted that virtual worlds will become more popular and business will become more and more active in them and even dependent on them. However, I think this remains to be seen.
Anyone seen real numbers on Second Life recently? I always thought the whole thing was a bit silly and poorly thought-out. I know a couple years ago there was a period of months were lots of people were talking about Second Life and it was even in the news, but I don't hear much about it these days. I almost wouldn't be surprised if this lawsuit was being engineered or at least promoted by Linden Lab to try to build up hype and legitimacy.
Can an avatar be held to a contract? Ok, whatever. Prosecute the avatar for fraud and throw him in Second Life prison. Yeah, we're pretending that Second Life is interesting or matters.
Yes, I know people have real money in Second Life. People have real money in online poker, too, but that doesn't make it a valid economy.
Does it support embedding pictures and fonts? How widely is it supported? How many people have DVI readers already installed on their computers?
These are honest questions I don't know the answer to. I don't believe I have anything that will view DVI files installed on any of my computers, but I know for a fact that I have PDF viewers installed on all of my computers, because they even come in the default installation of OSX and Ubuntu.
Images can be embedded in cdata tags. Its not easy or really recommended, but possible.
Yeah, I don't know if this helps, but my original sentence was intended to be read, "Neither HTML nor RTF can really* even (do complex layouts with embedded images) in a single file. [* Disclaimer: by 'really' I mean in any way that is sensible and well-supported.]"
Ok, so I don't know if that's exceptionally clear anyway, but I gave it a shot. The point is, yes, you can do very complex layouts in HTML, but lots of things require extensive HTML/CSS knowledge to do properly and in a cross-platform manner, and maybe even weird and complex hacks. You can't simply take your Word document with a complex layout and do "save as HTML" and get a good HTML file that maintains that layout.
Beyond that, except for dropping the image into the HTML in base64 (which... well... I wouldn't advocate doing that under most circumstances) including images will require separate files which will then have to be passed along with the HTML and kept in the same relative path, or else you'll lose the images. And then there's the issue of fonts, which newer browsers are only beginning to address with web fonts.
So really, if you want to pass along a single file while maintaining complex layout very accurately, and you don't particularly want the file to be easy to edit, then PDF is a good choice for that purpose. I can't think of another format that's anywhere nearly as good for that purpose.
I can't even think of a good example of something you can do with a PDF that you can't do with a properly designed web page or an RTF document.
Set up formatting and layout for your document in a way that should display the same way when you move transfer the file to another computer, and have it also look the same when you print it out. I mean, that's really what PDF is for, and it's very good for that purpose. Neither HTML nor RTF can really even do complex layouts with embedded images in a single file.
PDF is given a bad name by the slow, bloated application that most people view them on (Adobe Reader). It's not really ideal to treat them like web pages, but most of the dread you feel when you have to click on a link to a PDF is really more the fault of the reader than the format. If you have a good PDF viewer, they aren't slow to load and won't crash your browser.
Sorry, I know I'm beating a dead horse and risking karma-whore status, but do we really need a scripting language in PDFs at all? I mean, yes, sorry, I know that there are probably people out there who need that, but I'd wager the gross majority don't.
What most of us need (or at least what I need) PDF for is to have a portable format that's open, widely supported, and can give me pixel-perfect output regardless of the platform or what fonts you have installed. I don't need scripting, flash, embedded movies, or anything else of the sort. Can we just have PDF left alone, to be the static display/print format? If Adobe really wants to do all this other crap, can they please invent a new format, and not try to force me to install the viewer for that app? Because I want to view PDFs, but I have no interest in the associated security risks or bloat from throwing the kitchen sink into PDF functionality.
Well if you want to know what a "push poll" is, you could have googled it and the first thing up would be an article on Wikipedia.
But anyway, the basic idea is that polls should properly be designed to be impartial in themselves. If you're really trying to find out what people think about the President's performance, for example, you might call people and ask, "Do you approve of the President's performance so far?"
If, on the other hand, you aren't interested in what people think, and instead you're hoping to influence opinion, then you might ask something like, "Doesn't it bother you that the President is doing such an obviously awful job?" or "Aren't you bothered by the outrageous amounts of money the President is spending?" That's push-polling.
In the 2000 election, Bush's campaign called around asking something like, "How would you feel if you found out John McCain had an illegitimate black baby after an affair with a black woman?" Now that didn't happen, but the question was defended as "hypothetical" even though many of the people called didn't believe it was hypothetical.
Sometimes when doing a push poll, the idea is to affect the results of the poll so that they can publish them and say, "See, [X]% of the people see thing my way!" But then sometimes, they don't even bother to record the responses because the point is just to try to influence opinion under the guise of a poll.
Slashdot Mirror
They pick up the paper (from driveway, store, stand or whatever) read and discard. No thought to the medium.
On the contrary, I don't think that there's no thought to the medium. I think part of the reason it was so easy to move music over to MP3 is because people could pay no thought to the medium. Like you say, people were used to portable players (Walkman) and so they were used to listening to music through headphones. The iPod just changed how the music was stored, but it didn't change very much about the experience of listening to it.
The problem with newspapers, if anything, is that people interact with the medium directly and are very aware of changes in the medium. Lots of people like the smell and feel of paper. Newspaper readers have little rituals about how they fold and open the paper, how they skim through the contents, and which articles they read first. You can't do that stuff with an e-ink reader.
The difference between this sort of thing and the Kindle or the iPod is striking. Those were both created to sell downloads, and thus try to cripple you from doing anything other than buy from Amazon or iTunes.
Actually, it's iTunes that's designed to sell you iPods, not so much the other way around. There's nothing crippled about the iPod to prevent you from getting music from other sources, but it's iTunes content that's crippled to prevent you from listening to it on non-iPod players (though that's not the case for music anymore).
Ben Goldacre had it right.
That's a pretty good list, especially 1, 4, and 5.
It does seem to me that large newspapers are having trouble on the web because they don't seem to understand the differences of what the "new media" has to offer. I don't got to the NYT website to read my news, I come to Slashdot or Digg, who might possibly link to the NYT. Why is that?
Well, first because they're offering a broader selection of news. Second and more importantly, Slashdot provides a good discussion system for me to talk about the story. It gives a place where people, sometimes with equal or greater expertise than those writing the story, can comment, either supporting the conclusions of the article or picking them apart. There's added depth.
And this is where the biggest value of this "new media" comes in: there aren't real space limitations. You can put up all your content, as much as you have, in any number of combinations, permutations, and sorted in any number of ways, all at the same time. You can have a good discussion system, and people who aren't interested in it can choose not to visit it. If you have a scientific issue and you have two different experts with differing opinions, you can have the dumbed-down synopsis of the debate written by a journalist, but you can also allow each expert to write their own argument and publish them alongside the journalist's story.
The only real expense for these things is in editing or moderating, which I think probably can be done in a cost-effective way.
I agree. There's definitely a part of me that would like to see a reader that could render a full-sized 8.5"x11" page (or European equivalent). That might not be the easiest to carry around or even the most efficient reading size, but it'd be nice to be able to print a document to a normal PDF formatted for normal printing, throw it on my e-book reader, and go.
But ok, maybe that's too big by several measures. Still, I have a larger point: the display sizes for these things shouldn't be based on conforming to screen sizes, but instead based on standard print sizes. 1024x1280? 600x800? I don't really care. Give me a screen that's the size of a normal paperback book page, and have the whole device be not-very-much-bigger.
The cost argument is very good, but I don't want 3-4 eReaders, each that only works on one paper. That's just a hassle.
Right. I would definitely think the business model should be to standardize on a single reader (or better yet, a specification that different manufacturers can meet), and then subsidize the cost of the reader, sort of like cell phones. Buy subscriptions to the WSJ and NYT, get a free e-reader.
Even giving away a $300 device, the publishers will save money in the long term by not having to actually print and deliver things-- given either a long enough timeline or a large enough number of subscriptions per device.
I don't think my $0.50 price is all that outlandish. On iTMS, they generally charge $15 to "buy" a new release movie, and $4 to "rent". Meanwhile they charge $2/episode to "buy" TV shows. 0.53:2::4:15.
Now maybe it's just me, but I generally don't care at all about "buying" TV shows. I want to watch them once, and usually never watch them again. So I really am looking more for the rental model, which at this point, no one is offering.
I can very easily see YouTube transitioning to what is effectively an a la carte cable TV provider...You pay a buck a month to the ESPN channel on YouTube, or whatever. The current configuration becomes effectively a massive public access cable channel, supported by subscription-based premium channels.
That sounds right to me, except I don't feel confident it can happen. The problem is, if you do that, then the cable companies go under. Now you, me, and the rest of Slashdot may revert to a stance of "Who cares? Buggy whips and all." But there's lots of money to be made in controlling content distribution, and that's always been part of the problem with theories about ubiquitous convenient content. They can charge a premium for pay-per-view movies that are new-release because they might not be available elsewhere. Movie channels like HBO pay extra to get exclusive rights to whichever hot new movies. Some of the economics of that start to break apart when you put things online. And do you think Time Warner the content owner will be eager to put their content out in a way that jeopardizes Time Warner the cable company?
To be honest, I'm not sure about all the things I'm saying in this post, but I do know that businesses like this make money in places that you wouldn't necessarily think of, and they're hesitant to go from business models that they know and understand to models where they don't know whether they can find these extra little spaces to make money. I think that hesitance is part of the reason why we aren't already seeing more content online, and why it took so damn long for services like Hulu to show up in the first place.
I think the endgame is to have some kinds of IPTV services that are as convenient as DVR and, when all the charges are added up, no more expensive than paying for cable. I'm not sure if we'll get there anytime soon, though.
I think it depends on exactly how much you're paying for what content. paying for user-generated content? No. Paying for content available for free (ad supported) on Hulu? Probably not.
But if there were a site where I could pay a small fee (either subscription or per-episode) to watch virtually any show I want, then I'm game. The iTunes model works well enough for me, but the prices are too high. I generally don't want to "buy" TV shows for $2/episode, but if it were something closer to maybe $0.50 for a TV episode "rental", I'd be more interested.
But for me, at least, paying for TV shows online has to pretty much get to the point where I can replace my cable TV for cheaper than the price of cable TV, and it's at least as convenient. Of course, I don't expect that the content owners will go for that, because they have lots of profitable arrangements with the cable companies.
Yes, but Google is trying to get the same sort of content that Hulu has, licensed by content owners, and ad-supported. For whatever reason, content owners aren't going for that, either.
Who held the majority in Congress in 1999?
There's plenty of blame to go around.
Of course, you're right there. Somewhere along the line, though, someone will have to make it profitable.
However, I don't see it as that big an issue, either; Google is here to stay, so is YouTube, and if it became THE site for non-commercial content, I for one would still use it. I suspect others would, also.
The problem is making money. Yes, Youtube is popular, but is it profitable yet? I don't know. Advertisers won't pay much on ad space until they can place their ads on premium content, and they won't be able to get premium content until they can show that advertisers are willing to pay a premium. It's a catch 22.
So content owners are saying they won't license their content for the Internet because the ad revenue isn't there. The advertisers are saying they won't pay much because the viewers aren't there. The viewers won't watch because content owners are busy pushing their products on broadcast channels while withholding them from the Internet. And around we go.
If things are going to change, someone has to make the leap, and it won't be the advertisers. It might be the content owners, but I'd bet on the viewers. Not so much a leap, but a gradual falling off-- people canceling their cable because they get enough shows on Hulu or iTunes to keep them content, and maybe they supplement those sources with some illegal stuff. So then advertisers and content owners will have to go online to get those viewers.
There are distros like ubuntu that try to make as much as possible accessible from the surface, but when you have to do something not exposed by pretty control panels you need a level of understanding far beyond that of the average user.
That's true of Windows and OSX too. Don't tell me you'd advise normal low-level users to open up the Windows Registry.
So here's the real question: how much of the functionality required by new/unknowledgeable users is not exposed by pretty control panels?
I'm just saying that if you go back to people like Adam Smith (been a long time since I read any of that stuff, but I think I remember the ideas), the idea of wasn't to encourage consolidation of power into companies which would then be completely free from any kind of restraint and allowed to set prices and engage in monopolistic behavior. The idea was much more that individual economic freedom and competition would benefit society as a whole more than strict control by even a truly benevolent power.
So when people start using terms like "free market" and "capitalism" to justify enormous companies bullying their own customers, I can't help but want to say, "I don't think you know what those ideas are really about."
I suppose the problem is that these things are not seen as necessary yet. Cable TV probably isn't, but I'd argue that the internet is, at least to a greater degree than whatever else is going over those lines.
Yes, after lots of arguments and discussions about this, what I've come to realize is that a lot of people see the Internet as an recreational entertainment service. They spend lots of time looking at facebook and downloading TV shows, music, and movies, and so they think, "This is what the Internet is. It replaces cable TV and those BMG/Columbia House CD clubs (remember those?) as the way I get entertainment." So in that context, it's easy to understand why people aren't concerned about letting the "free market" sort it out.
What lots of people fail to recognize is that the Internet is infrastructure over which our communications pass, commercial and consumer products are shipped, and the public is informed. Once you recognize that the Internet is infrastructure that is becoming vital to our culture and economy, the whole debate shifts, and it becomes much more clear how silly it is to give monopoly/duopoly control to loosely-regulated private companies.
Can you define "supposed to"? I've always thought the phrase "supposed to" was kind of weird and hard to say what it meant. Certainly there are people working on Linux on various levels who would like it to be popular, and are even working with the intent of making it popular.
Also, it's not at all strange for them to be strutting their market share. There is probably some market share (though surely above 1%) where Linux will reach a sort of critical mass, in which it will get mass recognition and better support from 3rd parties. Market share counts, and getting above 1% is a sort of milestone. I kind of remember Firefox and Safari each creeping above 1% in web usage statistics, and look at them now.
And just to spell this out a little more: the theory supporting "capitalism" as a useful economic system supposes an actual free market, which is not the same as "a market where a large corporation is free to do as it pleases." Yes, there's a difference.
A free market is one where there is no significant barrier to entry into that market, as well as relatively level footing within that market, thereby allowing for free competition. Of course, this is nothing like the ISP industry that we have today.
And it's not at all clear to me that we can have that kind of competition in the part of the ISP business that includes developing physical infrastructure. You can't just let everyone and anyone dig up whatever land they want in order to lay cable.
brownouts that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace
It sounds like some BS description they'd put into a movie when they forgot to hire a tech consultant. You know, like some dude with spiky hair who describes himself as a 'hacker' would be typing furiously on a keyboard, and then suddenly yell, "Oh no! We're in too many firewalls and cyberspace is almost full! All of our computers are going to crash if I don't do something quick!"
The only thing is, I've had Vista on a testing machine since its first public beta, just so I can track the progress they're making with it. I put the first public beta of Windows 7 on my laptop and used it for a while. Both are... fine.
But then I had a problem with my laptop and so I wiped it out and reinstalled Windows XP. You know what? I didn't have any problems in downgrading. What I mean is, there wasn't anything after downgrading where I said, "Shoot, I wish I could do this, but XP doesn't have that functionality, so I need to upgrade again." At least not so far.
If Microsoft wants me to pay for an upgrade, they're going to have to show me something more than what I've seen so far.
As virtual worlds get more popular and their business models more directly affect real-life finances
I think some people just take it for granted that virtual worlds will become more popular and business will become more and more active in them and even dependent on them. However, I think this remains to be seen.
Anyone seen real numbers on Second Life recently? I always thought the whole thing was a bit silly and poorly thought-out. I know a couple years ago there was a period of months were lots of people were talking about Second Life and it was even in the news, but I don't hear much about it these days. I almost wouldn't be surprised if this lawsuit was being engineered or at least promoted by Linden Lab to try to build up hype and legitimacy.
Can an avatar be held to a contract? Ok, whatever. Prosecute the avatar for fraud and throw him in Second Life prison. Yeah, we're pretending that Second Life is interesting or matters.
Yes, I know people have real money in Second Life. People have real money in online poker, too, but that doesn't make it a valid economy.
Does it support embedding pictures and fonts? How widely is it supported? How many people have DVI readers already installed on their computers?
These are honest questions I don't know the answer to. I don't believe I have anything that will view DVI files installed on any of my computers, but I know for a fact that I have PDF viewers installed on all of my computers, because they even come in the default installation of OSX and Ubuntu.
Images can be embedded in cdata tags. Its not easy or really recommended, but possible.
Yeah, I don't know if this helps, but my original sentence was intended to be read, "Neither HTML nor RTF can really* even (do complex layouts with embedded images) in a single file. [* Disclaimer: by 'really' I mean in any way that is sensible and well-supported.]"
Ok, so I don't know if that's exceptionally clear anyway, but I gave it a shot. The point is, yes, you can do very complex layouts in HTML, but lots of things require extensive HTML/CSS knowledge to do properly and in a cross-platform manner, and maybe even weird and complex hacks. You can't simply take your Word document with a complex layout and do "save as HTML" and get a good HTML file that maintains that layout.
Beyond that, except for dropping the image into the HTML in base64 (which... well... I wouldn't advocate doing that under most circumstances) including images will require separate files which will then have to be passed along with the HTML and kept in the same relative path, or else you'll lose the images. And then there's the issue of fonts, which newer browsers are only beginning to address with web fonts.
So really, if you want to pass along a single file while maintaining complex layout very accurately, and you don't particularly want the file to be easy to edit, then PDF is a good choice for that purpose. I can't think of another format that's anywhere nearly as good for that purpose.
I can't even think of a good example of something you can do with a PDF that you can't do with a properly designed web page or an RTF document.
Set up formatting and layout for your document in a way that should display the same way when you move transfer the file to another computer, and have it also look the same when you print it out. I mean, that's really what PDF is for, and it's very good for that purpose. Neither HTML nor RTF can really even do complex layouts with embedded images in a single file.
PDF is given a bad name by the slow, bloated application that most people view them on (Adobe Reader). It's not really ideal to treat them like web pages, but most of the dread you feel when you have to click on a link to a PDF is really more the fault of the reader than the format. If you have a good PDF viewer, they aren't slow to load and won't crash your browser.
Sorry, I know I'm beating a dead horse and risking karma-whore status, but do we really need a scripting language in PDFs at all? I mean, yes, sorry, I know that there are probably people out there who need that, but I'd wager the gross majority don't.
What most of us need (or at least what I need) PDF for is to have a portable format that's open, widely supported, and can give me pixel-perfect output regardless of the platform or what fonts you have installed. I don't need scripting, flash, embedded movies, or anything else of the sort. Can we just have PDF left alone, to be the static display/print format? If Adobe really wants to do all this other crap, can they please invent a new format, and not try to force me to install the viewer for that app? Because I want to view PDFs, but I have no interest in the associated security risks or bloat from throwing the kitchen sink into PDF functionality.
Well if you want to know what a "push poll" is, you could have googled it and the first thing up would be an article on Wikipedia.
But anyway, the basic idea is that polls should properly be designed to be impartial in themselves. If you're really trying to find out what people think about the President's performance, for example, you might call people and ask, "Do you approve of the President's performance so far?"
If, on the other hand, you aren't interested in what people think, and instead you're hoping to influence opinion, then you might ask something like, "Doesn't it bother you that the President is doing such an obviously awful job?" or "Aren't you bothered by the outrageous amounts of money the President is spending?" That's push-polling.
In the 2000 election, Bush's campaign called around asking something like, "How would you feel if you found out John McCain had an illegitimate black baby after an affair with a black woman?" Now that didn't happen, but the question was defended as "hypothetical" even though many of the people called didn't believe it was hypothetical.
Sometimes when doing a push poll, the idea is to affect the results of the poll so that they can publish them and say, "See, [X]% of the people see thing my way!" But then sometimes, they don't even bother to record the responses because the point is just to try to influence opinion under the guise of a poll.