as long as rss doesn't require you to at least include blank versions of standardized tags we will have the same problems that html has. lots of people out there writing bad code that don't work well for the diversity of readers.
The 'doubtful and uncertain' definition is oversimplified. Ambiguity suggests that the doubt or uncertainty is due to a contrary positioning. We have plenty of words which mean uncertain, why destroy the specific meaning of a word like ambiguous?
I agree that the article is about the lack of clarity of Google's process and future, but it is not due to an internal conflict of values or other such ambiguous situation.
Ambiguity is being internally contradictory or open to multiple different interpretations. This article doesn't seem to be pointing to Google being possibly good and evil at the same time (like Ben & Jerry's). Instead it is saying that Google is highly secretive and no clear picture can be made, much less contradictory ones.
I think it is all wrong though, because it doesn't address the fundamental problems in our education system, particularly for the majority of students who will not achieve a four year degree.
1: Set aside everything we think we know about what children need to learn in school and create learning goals and paths to those goals. Create learning plans for students so they can excell in something. Right now schools are places where you are lectured about things which in all honesty are often not useful, but also not connected to any post school goal.
2: We need to integrate high school with post secondary education, particularly technical and two year institutions. Many many students are lost their senior years because school doesn't transition well into the next stage of school. Most students and most jobs require technical training, not liberal arts degrees. While we will need to continue to have a place for students pursuing liberal arts degrees, we need to realize that a high school diploma is no longer acceptable for many many students who need the kind of training available at Community Colleges.
These changes would go a long way toward giving students purpose in school who don't have any right now. On top of this curriculum should be altered to give people real life skills and knowledge about how to work in society. This still leaves a lot of room for exactly how to do it, but we need to refocus on what our goals are.
It would be tempting to say: Nothing to see here people... please move along..., but amongst all the squatters is one new allocation, a single class A net allocated this year for the entire African continent. It works too, I've already had two 419s from it;-)
What you got against Africa? Just because they can't use them now doesn't mean they won't need them in the future. If we took away these squatting rights then it would just make giving access to some of the most underdeveloped regions of the world even more difficult.
While GPL definitely has its problems, one of its advantages (and disadvantages) is that it keeps the project open source. The review talks about how GPL harnessed a community in the past, but doesn't buy the argument that perhaps the GPL is keeping the community today.
On top of that the interviewer totally blew the second question. This guy is fully concentrated on how to sell open source to private industry and his response shows this bias. He read this question as asking about if building on Linux increases the branding of the product because it has "Linux Inside!". He completly misunderstands that the draw isn't for consumers or private business, but from free range devs who see a product with lots of momentum.
GPL is also a social movement because it forces for-profit users of the information to raise the blinds and let the people see what they are doing. Business doesn't want to let us see in there because they are afraid we will tear apart their code either through reviews or attacking security vulnerabilities. For anti-business types, strong GPL projects that are tempting to business and with lots of buzz and knowledge in the dev community becomes a mighty crowbar to pry open the shell of secrecy that they fear. Without some of the features of the GPL that this interviewee suggests aren't needed anymore this important feature and draw of the Linux community would die.
Nod, but the argument of the/. post is that these games are somehow fundamentally new and they aren't. I think what really is breaking tradition here is that more of these sorts of games are showing up on Playstation where in the last round of consoles it is Nintendo that has been in front for trying out different game concepts. Wild Earth, featured in the article as really new and different because it doesn't have a gun. I know I played Pokemon Snap which would definately be in the same category, though more gamey than this offering.
Ok, I'm pretty damn distrustful of private business interests, but correcting poor planning decisions in the past is definitely within the category of 'public good' in my book. Civic planning has been completely mis-managed for a great majority of localities for as long as history has been recorded. To fix these problems local governments need the ability to re-structure the locations of various civic functions. Our decentralized market approach to offering goods and services to the population means that private interests get to own things like gyms and office space. If the city were taking this land in order to place a community center there would be no question of its legality, but try to allow private interests to provide these services and it suddenly becomes a big deal.
Now I will admit, the way that eminent domain laws are handled is often incorrect and often abusive of the original owners, but it is definitely a legitimate concern that the geographic placement of private services can greatly affect the public good. This should be taken as a lesson to participate in local government to make sure that your civic leaders have your interests in mind.
First, you forget marketing and branding, which are both things that independant game stores don't have the cash or the customer base to do very effectively.
Second, you imply that these 'fundamentals' are inevitable. It is no surprise that large corporations can use their buying power to leverage prices and lower costs below that of independant sellers, but as stewards of our economic model is this what we really want? Do we want a handful of large retail stores with similar strategies to each other to be the gatekeepers of what stuff we see and what stuff we don't? Do we want retailers with huge purchasing power to force producers to adopt lowest cost production techniques? Or perhaps there are factors which are important to people that don't get expressed well in the marketplace. Perhaps different ways of conducting business need to be given advantages and disadvantages based on long term economic health and not just the aggregate narrow-focus decisions of many people.
One of the big problems in this debate is too many people see a single iconic 'path of video games'. When the new consoles come out we judge the companies based on how well their offerings compare to each of our Visions.
What I think too many posters here will miss is that this article is trying to show that N is aware of this and they are focusing on making games that are simply fun. They probably aren't deeply moving or mind provoking, but they emphasize the game over the story.
I still to this day suggest say that if you want games with engrossing story lines and lots of unique gameplay, go for PS or X-Box, if you want a game that you can play with your gf, get a Gamecube.
Try reading the linked article before just replying with your uninformed opinion.
I even put in Katamari Damacy because I thought it would be easy enough to pick up and play, plus it is one of my favorite games from last year, but she quickly lost interest because she had problems learning the dual analogue control scheme.
This is such a rediculous defense of the ISS. The important technologies that will allow extra-terrestrial settlement aren't part of the station's mission. The most important thing that we need to do is reduce the cost of escaping Earth's gravity. Virtually every other technology that we would need for this can be done with an unmanned space program. The medium-term phisiological effect of zero-g is now very well understood and we really don't need to do that much testing until the technologies that support it are dramatically changed. We would be better off sending monkeys into space again.
The differences between water recycling and surface water purification are not insignificant. You have a very limited set of substances and organisms to clean from the water and a space system is very concerned about size, weight, and ability to function in a zero-g environment, all things that are inapplicable to a municipal water purification system (unless there are poverty stricken populations drinking polluted river water in orbit of which I am not aware, in which case forgive me).
We all saw the contribution NASA gave to the engineering of ink pens. All those people who couldn't write upside down are very grateful.
It should be cut loose because the value of the missions that are performed on the space station are some of the lowest value for the money spent on them.
The space station was never about the stuff that actually happened onboard, but about building scientific bridges with Russia. I think that at this point, after they let our guys re-write their economy that getting astrophysicists and exotic engineers to communicate isn't as valuable as it once was.
Right now its best shot at life is as a rescue vehicle in case of damage to a vessle which prevents reentry and it can already do that job pretty well if not as it is, with a couple more service trips.
The space program in general might be an interesting R&D venture, but I'd rather see my tax dollars going to research to find cheaper, more efficient water purifying techniques, or treatments to stop the spread of AIDS, or perscription drugs, or (ad. nauseum). The space shuttle is just more on the extreme end of wasteful space missions.
When a lot of people think PvP balance they think the ability for one person of any class to have a reasonably fair fight against one person of any opposing class. The result of such balance is either classes which are very much alike or an impossible task where you are constantly fiddling with a variable here or a variable there and throw everything else out of balance.
In a PvP situation you must do one of two things to fix this. Either you make everyone more or less equal in the areas of rate of damage delivered and amount of damage that can be taken before death, or you throw out the idea of one-on-one class balance and structure the game to be RvR then balance that.
DAoC tried to do this, but they didn't do a very good job of preventing the one-on-one encounters and they had three realms to balance against each other. They also suffered from the problem that this article brings up that something in testing simply didn't work and they missed all these glaring holes which later had to be patched up with buffs and nerfs.
Class balance is only getting worse. The casual gamer is making solo play more and more the norm in these games, and to sell the game for a longer period of time, class differentiation is key, which causes classes to be very different in their approaches to the PvE environment.
Can there be balance in an MMORPG? Yes, but it will be very tough. I don't think it is desierable though. Casual gamers want a lot of variety that they just don't get from the big social game. Hardcore PvP gamers want the ability to ruin somebody's day and it doesn't work if they might get their day ruined a third of the time.
I think that after this wave of casual-friendly games has run its course that we will see a new type of unbalanced game, but maybe... just maybe they will do it right.
There are a lot of problems with this technology in the classroom despite its proposed benefits.
1: It utilizes projection technology which is expensive to impliment and higher TCO over the old chalk+board tech.
2: Projector contrast tends to be poor, particularly in ambient light situations. This means that students spend more time writing in low light situations and have to strain harder to view the image.
3: There is a LOT of controversy about how stimulating school should be. While some feel that more stimulation keeps kids interested, others feel that too much multi-media causes over-stimulation resulting in more difficulty paying attention to 'boring' things.
4: This would speed the use of presentation software (e.g. powerpoint) which has a good chance of hurting the thinking skills of students.
While I think that this is a promising tech, I don't think it is matured enough to be a net benefit in the classroom. Perhaps after electronic paper has come to age then I personally might re-evaluate this tech.
This is just because laptops have always been a bit behind on the upgrade cycle. People aren't replacing their desktops as fast as they used to as they can pretty much handle everything most people want to do. Also many people simply upgrade componants in their computers instead of replacing it.
This just isn't true for laptops. As long as laptops suck because they are underpowered, have a short battery life, have bad screens, and those things can't be easily upgraded, people will keep buying new laptops more often than they replace their desktops. Add to this wi-fi tech in places like college campuses, the portability of laptops is actually useful where it just wasn't before (how many people do you know that used to leave their laptops on the desk over 99% of the time).
I think we are going to see laptops continue to ramp up for a bit as they become useful for a larger number of people, but once the bugs get ironed out people will slow down their upgrade cycle much like what is going on with desktops now.
As an aside they have totally destroyed the in-game economies of most of these games, which is generally why the sale of in-game currency is in violation of the Terms of Service.
What about the legal issues involved with gambling? Facilitating illegal games of chance for value is an expensive crime in many jurisdictions. If you take away the official cash value of items via a EULA you create a legal defense.
But doesn't that make game reviews just part of the problem?
Here is the reasoning.
-The biggest thing that sells a game is Hype.
-One very important way Hype is generated by reviews that say this game is better than that game.
-If the reviews can't judge games very well based on gameplay, they review them based on graphics.
-Hype then is generated for the shiniest games out there and others fall by the wayside.
-Game makers realize this situation and start making graphical shows with gameplay tacked on the side.
I don't think I speak for an insignificant population when I say that too few games have compelling original gameplay, and the ones that do tend to be indie games without the graphics or the E3 booths to grab the attention of the mainstream gamer. This is just more of the same argument about games being more and more like movies where they try to sell the big budget flashy productions with no real substance and the resulting fear of taking risks with actually making an innovative engaging product.
As far as I can tell, the first M in MMORPG is disappearing from the scene in most of these titles. Instancing and a focus on the casual gamer whittling away at the big group experience which kept people playing games like Everquest well past the time they figured out it wasn't a fun game. Instead companies are going for faster action games like FPS style fighting.
Maybe that is where the market is today, but I think they are missing out a lot on a lot of the more long-term type players in favor of the fast buck.
Also, just by reading that article I get the impression that Mr. Woodcock is simply an eye-candy nut. In both of his top two choices he described the graphics as much as the gameplay. C'mon, graphics are nice, but I'll take 8-bit sprites if the game is compelling.
It's the OSS folks that complain about companies / governments/ individuals not adopting OSs that miss the point - people do care about how well the can get stuff done, and poor UI's or msiisng features that intefere with that makes them look elswhere.
Exactly. I'll admit, lots of OSS is just by techies for techies and it serves its job with varying degrees of success.
When the local high school considered adopting a Linux distro over Windows they sat down and crunched the numbers. They were impressed that once they got it set up Linux was just as functional as Windows for everything they wanted to do, but they figured in the TCO of Linux and ran away miffed.
The final lesson of the entire experience for them was while they wouldn't buy a car with the hood sealed shut, they didn't want to have to install a completely seperate electrical system for the dashboard, the radio, and the lamps then worry about servicing the entire thing when it broke down.
That may have been the case at one point, but the wonderful folks in London point the artificial camera from the south so that the south of the island appears much larger in perspective than the north. Yet another case of egocentrism for the Brits.
There are lots of very capable coders out there who make excelent code for other techies, but for this very reason the UI often sucks. The individualism and "if you don't like it, fix the code yourself" attitude of many open source projects means that people who aren't code junkies, but are excelent at understanding what a user might want get excluded from the process far too often.
I personally love that I can rely on other people to digitally record television shows from the HDTV signal for me as I simply can't afford to purchase all the equipment myself and VHS offers such terrible quality for time delaying broadcasts that I hate using it. Having to set my entire day's schedule around a television broadcast is just not something I'm prepared to do.
The problem is that the broadcast television business model is under real attack on multipule fronts.
Firstly, and most importantly, cable television is fracturing the market and stealing share that the big (3,4,5) broadcasters have become reliant on for so long.
Second, people are just watching proportionally less tv than they used to as lives become busier and computers and video game consoles compete for the audience.
Thirdly, advertizers are becoming used to much better data on market size and demographic than television has ever been able to produce. Sweeps is a painful expensive joke in the industry and Nielson has had a rediculous amount of contravercy in their attempt at 'improving' their data.
Fourth, PVRs and in particular TiVO which allow for skipping ads.
Fifth, online availability of television shows online and without commercials. This is particularly troublesome because of the studios' new reliance on overpriced DVD sales to hardcore show fans.
The upshot of all of this (and other factors) is that broadcasters are being pressured to ensure that as many eyes as possible see the ads inserted between show breaks. This all means that broadcasters will now start insisting on ads inserted into the content of television shows even more than today. People aren't going to be able to get up and go to the bathroom when that Pepsi spot shows up right in the middle of a tense moment in your favorite police drama. It also means that broadcasters will want bigger audience, less expensive shows to produce. This means that we are likely to see another wave of gameshow mania running around on the tv whether we like it or not. Also, reality tv is here to stay because people don't watch enough ads so if you can turn a bunch of hungry, somewhat dirty people (with perfect hair) into Dorito eating maniacs for less than it would cost to hire a team of writers and actors, you just doubled your money.
This is a guy who talks in extremes, and it is somewhat understandible given the nature of press to go after the sensational. You can't merely say the pan is smoking, the house needs to be on fire too.
That said, with very important exceptions much of the open source world while, not being truly uninovative, seem slow to innovate. Open source excells at ironing out demonstrated tech, particularly when the nature of the software is both technical and has high dev support. However, outliers omitted, the really big moves in design tend to at least start out and often stay in closed code.
Slashdot Mirror
as long as rss doesn't require you to at least include blank versions of standardized tags we will have the same problems that html has. lots of people out there writing bad code that don't work well for the diversity of readers.
The 'doubtful and uncertain' definition is oversimplified. Ambiguity suggests that the doubt or uncertainty is due to a contrary positioning. We have plenty of words which mean uncertain, why destroy the specific meaning of a word like ambiguous? I agree that the article is about the lack of clarity of Google's process and future, but it is not due to an internal conflict of values or other such ambiguous situation.
Ambiguity is being internally contradictory or open to multiple different interpretations. This article doesn't seem to be pointing to Google being possibly good and evil at the same time (like Ben & Jerry's). Instead it is saying that Google is highly secretive and no clear picture can be made, much less contradictory ones.
Yay back to basics approach to education. *blech*
I think it is all wrong though, because it doesn't address the fundamental problems in our education system, particularly for the majority of students who will not achieve a four year degree.
1: Set aside everything we think we know about what children need to learn in school and create learning goals and paths to those goals. Create learning plans for students so they can excell in something. Right now schools are places where you are lectured about things which in all honesty are often not useful, but also not connected to any post school goal.
2: We need to integrate high school with post secondary education, particularly technical and two year institutions. Many many students are lost their senior years because school doesn't transition well into the next stage of school. Most students and most jobs require technical training, not liberal arts degrees. While we will need to continue to have a place for students pursuing liberal arts degrees, we need to realize that a high school diploma is no longer acceptable for many many students who need the kind of training available at Community Colleges.
These changes would go a long way toward giving students purpose in school who don't have any right now. On top of this curriculum should be altered to give people real life skills and knowledge about how to work in society. This still leaves a lot of room for exactly how to do it, but we need to refocus on what our goals are.
What you got against Africa? Just because they can't use them now doesn't mean they won't need them in the future. If we took away these squatting rights then it would just make giving access to some of the most underdeveloped regions of the world even more difficult.
On top of that the interviewer totally blew the second question. This guy is fully concentrated on how to sell open source to private industry and his response shows this bias. He read this question as asking about if building on Linux increases the branding of the product because it has "Linux Inside!". He completly misunderstands that the draw isn't for consumers or private business, but from free range devs who see a product with lots of momentum.
GPL is also a social movement because it forces for-profit users of the information to raise the blinds and let the people see what they are doing. Business doesn't want to let us see in there because they are afraid we will tear apart their code either through reviews or attacking security vulnerabilities. For anti-business types, strong GPL projects that are tempting to business and with lots of buzz and knowledge in the dev community becomes a mighty crowbar to pry open the shell of secrecy that they fear. Without some of the features of the GPL that this interviewee suggests aren't needed anymore this important feature and draw of the Linux community would die.
Nod, but the argument of the /. post is that these games are somehow fundamentally new and they aren't. I think what really is breaking tradition here is that more of these sorts of games are showing up on Playstation where in the last round of consoles it is Nintendo that has been in front for trying out different game concepts. Wild Earth, featured in the article as really new and different because it doesn't have a gun. I know I played Pokemon Snap which would definately be in the same category, though more gamey than this offering.
Now I will admit, the way that eminent domain laws are handled is often incorrect and often abusive of the original owners, but it is definitely a legitimate concern that the geographic placement of private services can greatly affect the public good. This should be taken as a lesson to participate in local government to make sure that your civic leaders have your interests in mind.
Second, you imply that these 'fundamentals' are inevitable. It is no surprise that large corporations can use their buying power to leverage prices and lower costs below that of independant sellers, but as stewards of our economic model is this what we really want? Do we want a handful of large retail stores with similar strategies to each other to be the gatekeepers of what stuff we see and what stuff we don't? Do we want retailers with huge purchasing power to force producers to adopt lowest cost production techniques? Or perhaps there are factors which are important to people that don't get expressed well in the marketplace. Perhaps different ways of conducting business need to be given advantages and disadvantages based on long term economic health and not just the aggregate narrow-focus decisions of many people.
What I think too many posters here will miss is that this article is trying to show that N is aware of this and they are focusing on making games that are simply fun. They probably aren't deeply moving or mind provoking, but they emphasize the game over the story.
I still to this day suggest say that if you want games with engrossing story lines and lots of unique gameplay, go for PS or X-Box, if you want a game that you can play with your gf, get a Gamecube.
This is such a rediculous defense of the ISS. The important technologies that will allow extra-terrestrial settlement aren't part of the station's mission. The most important thing that we need to do is reduce the cost of escaping Earth's gravity. Virtually every other technology that we would need for this can be done with an unmanned space program. The medium-term phisiological effect of zero-g is now very well understood and we really don't need to do that much testing until the technologies that support it are dramatically changed. We would be better off sending monkeys into space again.
We all saw the contribution NASA gave to the engineering of ink pens. All those people who couldn't write upside down are very grateful.
The space station was never about the stuff that actually happened onboard, but about building scientific bridges with Russia. I think that at this point, after they let our guys re-write their economy that getting astrophysicists and exotic engineers to communicate isn't as valuable as it once was.
Right now its best shot at life is as a rescue vehicle in case of damage to a vessle which prevents reentry and it can already do that job pretty well if not as it is, with a couple more service trips.
The space program in general might be an interesting R&D venture, but I'd rather see my tax dollars going to research to find cheaper, more efficient water purifying techniques, or treatments to stop the spread of AIDS, or perscription drugs, or (ad. nauseum). The space shuttle is just more on the extreme end of wasteful space missions.
In a PvP situation you must do one of two things to fix this. Either you make everyone more or less equal in the areas of rate of damage delivered and amount of damage that can be taken before death, or you throw out the idea of one-on-one class balance and structure the game to be RvR then balance that.
DAoC tried to do this, but they didn't do a very good job of preventing the one-on-one encounters and they had three realms to balance against each other. They also suffered from the problem that this article brings up that something in testing simply didn't work and they missed all these glaring holes which later had to be patched up with buffs and nerfs.
Class balance is only getting worse. The casual gamer is making solo play more and more the norm in these games, and to sell the game for a longer period of time, class differentiation is key, which causes classes to be very different in their approaches to the PvE environment.
Can there be balance in an MMORPG? Yes, but it will be very tough. I don't think it is desierable though. Casual gamers want a lot of variety that they just don't get from the big social game. Hardcore PvP gamers want the ability to ruin somebody's day and it doesn't work if they might get their day ruined a third of the time.
I think that after this wave of casual-friendly games has run its course that we will see a new type of unbalanced game, but maybe... just maybe they will do it right.
1: It utilizes projection technology which is expensive to impliment and higher TCO over the old chalk+board tech.
2: Projector contrast tends to be poor, particularly in ambient light situations. This means that students spend more time writing in low light situations and have to strain harder to view the image.
3: There is a LOT of controversy about how stimulating school should be. While some feel that more stimulation keeps kids interested, others feel that too much multi-media causes over-stimulation resulting in more difficulty paying attention to 'boring' things.
4: This would speed the use of presentation software (e.g. powerpoint) which has a good chance of hurting the thinking skills of students.
While I think that this is a promising tech, I don't think it is matured enough to be a net benefit in the classroom. Perhaps after electronic paper has come to age then I personally might re-evaluate this tech.
This just isn't true for laptops. As long as laptops suck because they are underpowered, have a short battery life, have bad screens, and those things can't be easily upgraded, people will keep buying new laptops more often than they replace their desktops. Add to this wi-fi tech in places like college campuses, the portability of laptops is actually useful where it just wasn't before (how many people do you know that used to leave their laptops on the desk over 99% of the time).
I think we are going to see laptops continue to ramp up for a bit as they become useful for a larger number of people, but once the bugs get ironed out people will slow down their upgrade cycle much like what is going on with desktops now.
What about the legal issues involved with gambling? Facilitating illegal games of chance for value is an expensive crime in many jurisdictions. If you take away the official cash value of items via a EULA you create a legal defense.
Here is the reasoning.
-The biggest thing that sells a game is Hype.
-One very important way Hype is generated by reviews that say this game is better than that game.
-If the reviews can't judge games very well based on gameplay, they review them based on graphics.
-Hype then is generated for the shiniest games out there and others fall by the wayside.
-Game makers realize this situation and start making graphical shows with gameplay tacked on the side.
I don't think I speak for an insignificant population when I say that too few games have compelling original gameplay, and the ones that do tend to be indie games without the graphics or the E3 booths to grab the attention of the mainstream gamer. This is just more of the same argument about games being more and more like movies where they try to sell the big budget flashy productions with no real substance and the resulting fear of taking risks with actually making an innovative engaging product.
Maybe that is where the market is today, but I think they are missing out a lot on a lot of the more long-term type players in favor of the fast buck.
Also, just by reading that article I get the impression that Mr. Woodcock is simply an eye-candy nut. In both of his top two choices he described the graphics as much as the gameplay. C'mon, graphics are nice, but I'll take 8-bit sprites if the game is compelling.
Exactly. I'll admit, lots of OSS is just by techies for techies and it serves its job with varying degrees of success.
When the local high school considered adopting a Linux distro over Windows they sat down and crunched the numbers. They were impressed that once they got it set up Linux was just as functional as Windows for everything they wanted to do, but they figured in the TCO of Linux and ran away miffed.
The final lesson of the entire experience for them was while they wouldn't buy a car with the hood sealed shut, they didn't want to have to install a completely seperate electrical system for the dashboard, the radio, and the lamps then worry about servicing the entire thing when it broke down.
That may have been the case at one point, but the wonderful folks in London point the artificial camera from the south so that the south of the island appears much larger in perspective than the north. Yet another case of egocentrism for the Brits.
There are lots of very capable coders out there who make excelent code for other techies, but for this very reason the UI often sucks. The individualism and "if you don't like it, fix the code yourself" attitude of many open source projects means that people who aren't code junkies, but are excelent at understanding what a user might want get excluded from the process far too often.
The problem is that the broadcast television business model is under real attack on multipule fronts.
Firstly, and most importantly, cable television is fracturing the market and stealing share that the big (3,4,5) broadcasters have become reliant on for so long.
Second, people are just watching proportionally less tv than they used to as lives become busier and computers and video game consoles compete for the audience.
Thirdly, advertizers are becoming used to much better data on market size and demographic than television has ever been able to produce. Sweeps is a painful expensive joke in the industry and Nielson has had a rediculous amount of contravercy in their attempt at 'improving' their data.
Fourth, PVRs and in particular TiVO which allow for skipping ads.
Fifth, online availability of television shows online and without commercials. This is particularly troublesome because of the studios' new reliance on overpriced DVD sales to hardcore show fans.
The upshot of all of this (and other factors) is that broadcasters are being pressured to ensure that as many eyes as possible see the ads inserted between show breaks. This all means that broadcasters will now start insisting on ads inserted into the content of television shows even more than today. People aren't going to be able to get up and go to the bathroom when that Pepsi spot shows up right in the middle of a tense moment in your favorite police drama. It also means that broadcasters will want bigger audience, less expensive shows to produce. This means that we are likely to see another wave of gameshow mania running around on the tv whether we like it or not. Also, reality tv is here to stay because people don't watch enough ads so if you can turn a bunch of hungry, somewhat dirty people (with perfect hair) into Dorito eating maniacs for less than it would cost to hire a team of writers and actors, you just doubled your money.
That said, with very important exceptions much of the open source world while, not being truly uninovative, seem slow to innovate. Open source excells at ironing out demonstrated tech, particularly when the nature of the software is both technical and has high dev support. However, outliers omitted, the really big moves in design tend to at least start out and often stay in closed code.