Isn't that just a long winded way of saying "well, you were right on your claims after all, but I'm still going to hold it against you rather than admit that I was wrong in my rush to judgment."
No, it's a polite way of saying that Apple misused a catchy-sounding buzzword to divert attention away from a more accurate but qualification-laden description of the actual device, and that doing so is childish and dishonest. The same description -- with the same qualifications -- would be true of the average PC monitor if you simply moved six feet away from it. It's a trivial claim puffed up to sound like a significant technological advance.
If you lack logic and mathematics skills and have no real understanding of scientific method, to say nothing of broader and deeper general education than you are likely to get in American schools, all the data in the world won't help you. We are decades past the point when an average person with an average education and no particular motivation to constantly self-educate can understand the world around them, much less make coherent policy decisions.
We have reached the point when we must either commit to much higher educational standards or disenfranchise the under-educated. Or just stand by helplessly while professional rabble rousers manipulate an increasingly ignorant general population and turn democracy into a mockery of itself.
But, yes, anyone who claims that Apple was lying about it being a "retinal" display is simply attempting to pick a needless fight. Ignore them and move on.
Hm, maybe. It's certainly legitimate to object to the ill-chosen, ad hoc terminology that clashes with the existing meaning of the phrase. It's also legitimate to quibble over the enormous amount of wiggle room in the definition. Apple wasn't lying, but they were making claims without a great deal of actual substance. People get fed up with Apple's constant hyperbole, especially when the product in question is, in the end, a PDA with a larger than usual screen.
That said, no one disputes that the iPad will be a great new platform for graphic designers and the advertisers who employ them.
When are we going to stop this sycophantic worship of sociopaths who happen to get rich by screwing over others?
Looking over the preceding ten thousand years of human history, I couldn't tell you for sure, but if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Upgrade... for what?
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
No, seriously. What killer new features does Windows 7 have that are worth the time and expense of an upgrade from XP? The only one I've heard mentioned, that it sucks less than Vista, doesn't apply to XP users.
When it gets down to it, there are two main reasons to upgrade to Windows 7: Eventually, it will become impossible to get new machines running XP. And Microsoft really wants your money. Neither of these benefits the user.
Macs went to EFI over four years ago. Hard to believe it took the windows machines this long to take the leap?
The average user doesn't know and wouldn't give a shit if they did. Ergo, this kind of change in the PC market is driven by the interests of the vendors, as the consumer essentially has none. That said, it's worth noting that some consumer PCs have used EFI since 2003 and Itanium workstations were using EFI back in 2000, and x64 versions of Windows added support for EFI in 2008.
BIOS is the bane of the PC service tech. That's where manufacturers lock up the hardware and prevent you from being able to fix it or work on it.
It's worth noting that one advantage of EFI to vendors is precisely that it better enables them to lock down a system than BIOS does. While it doesn't have to be used that way, you can safely bet that many vendors will use it that way to the detriment of the consumer. It's also not without (in my opinion, valid) criticism for adding additional complexity to the system without actually resolving the problems of BIOS.
The main advantage appears lie in offering a GUI for end users to manipulate system settings that they lack the knowledge or inclination to tinker with. To be fair, it does add some convenience features and better support for large drives, but I haven't seen anything about EFI to get terribly excited about.
It's not even new, and Potter probably knew that as well. The Aztecs and the Maya both made books exactly this way. If you have foldable paper -- which the Mesoamerican cultures had, in contradistinction to the papyrus and parchment using classical western civilizations -- it's either that or unwieldy scrolls. The postclassical codex style of book is actually very complex and labor-intensive to make, at least prior to industrialization and the availability of modern polymer adhesives.
The clear intent of both students was to harass the teachers and cause disruption by undermining their authority. The publication was targeted at an audience (their peers), and the effect was felt inside the school.
This is far too broad. Virtually any action could be construed as having an effect felt inside the school if anyone in the school is aware of it, enabling schools to exert control over almost every aspect of a student's public life. Aside from obviously being undesirable, such a broad approach is entirely unnecessary in this case, as the actions of the students in question were libelous and defamatory and therefore covered under existing law. That said, I don't think it would be out of line for the school to prohibit students from engaging in libelous and defamatory speech -- which is not protected by the First Amendment to begin with -- against the faculty or other students and to punish it accordingly whether it is conducted on campus or off campus.
As far as "undermining the authority" of school officials goes, no such thing happened. The authority of school officials derives from the powers granted to them by the state and by parents to act in loco parentis. If by "authority" you mean "respect", the school officials did that to themselves by overreacting and showing themselves to be extremely sensitive to the things their students say. And in an environment full of teenagers, that's just inviting further attack. If they had been smart about it, they'd have first contacted the parents and insisted on the immediate removal of the offending pages -- which almost certainly would have generated immediate cooperation -- and then punish the students with something like after-school detention that couldn't be used to claim that the students were being deprived of their educational rights. Instead, they waltzed into national media attention and cost the school system a bloody fortune in legal fees.
On what planet? Everywhere I've worked, the process works like this:
1. Non-technical management decides they want something done, though they are unable to define it clearly.
2. The resulting vague "specs" land on the desk of one or more designers, who produce mockups, usually in something like Fireworks (if you're lucky) or PowerPoint (if you're unlucky).
3. Steps 1 and 2 repeat several times as management and the designers both try to avoid making any decisions they can be held accountable for.
4. A bunch of pretty pictures, quite possibly in the form of actual printouts, are delivered to the developers who are asked, based on what was common knowledge in meetings they weren't invited to, to build the program that the pictures would represent if we lived in a parallel universe less ruthlessly ruled by causality and determinism than our own.
5. A three-way feedback loop, now involving management, the designers, and the developers continues to mutate the "spec" while development proceeds in the face of an arbitrary and inflexible deadline chosen by an even higher level of management by reading the cracks in tortoise shells roasted over the sacred fire in the executive restroom.
In this scenario, the designers are not making implementation decisions. Those decisions are made by equally unqualified middle managers based on vacuous trade journal articles like TFA and then imposed without discussion upon the developers.
If you've been watching the content business for a while, you get used to these things. Someone at the content-provider end of the business comes up with something that would be very beneficial to them while offering negligible benefits to the consumer, and then they spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to convince consumers that it's a good idea despite consumers' plainly seeing that it would be a pain in the ass with little or no reward. The:CueCat is, of course, the canonical example, but there are many more links in the chains of the Ghost of Stupid Business Plans Past.
The best thing about this plan is that it's plainly aimed at traditionalists who don't care for the web, but what it offers them is an awkward way to get the web content they don't actually want on a tiny screen they probably don't even have, probably while bombarding them with advertising and collecting data about their reading and browsing habits. What's not to like?
The gist of the referenced FQA seems to be a rant about how managed code is good and unmanaged code is bad, not very cleverly disguised as a expose of well-known problems with C++.
Any time spent on the dead IE6-IE8 browsers is wasted.
Having spent much of the last six months coding to accommodate the largely IE6 and IE7 user base in several major metropolitan school districts, I wish that was true. Unfortunately, in large public institutions and a surprising number of large corporations, IE6 is still the norm.
On other news, RedHat announced it does not use Windows on its web servers and Apple announced that no employees use Windows Mobile phones.
Funny, but also possibly correct for reasons other than the one implied. Google intends to compete directly with Microsoft in the OS space, so the very real security issues with Windows aside, this is probably also an effort to close an, um, advertising hole for Microsoft. Once Google begins pushing Chrome, it certainly won't look good for them to be using Windows internally, and if they were, you can bet Microsoft would pounce on it.
Of course, Google has to keep using Windows internally so they can ensure their web assets' compatibility with IE, and here's where we'll see if they really care about Windows security issues, because if they do, they'll be running it inside a VM.
But remember, she hasn't won anything yet, just filed a suit.
True indeed. And I hope it's rapidly laughed out of the courts before it becomes a prop for opportunistic politicians pursuing tort "reform".
Stuff like this drives me nuts because, out of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of lawsuits filed every year, most involve legitimate grievances (or are quickly dismissed), and most of them are settled out of court for reasonable amounts. A tiny proportion -- the handful we hear about every year -- involve ridiculous claims accompanied by ridiculous awards, usually delivered by a jury of idiots, and then reduced to more reasonable levels on appeal once the journalists have moved on to the next spectacle. The exceptions are generally giant awards that are completely proportionate to the giant misdeeds of enormous corporations, which always leads to lobbyists for those corporations handing large campaign contributions to unscrupulous politicians who conflate the two extremes.
...the problem is software. In the last twenty years, we've gone from machines running at a few MHz to multicore, multi-CPU machines with clock speeds in the GHz, with corresponding increases in memory capacity and other resources. While the hardware has improved by several orders of magnitude, the same has largely not been true of software. With the exception of games and some media software, which actually require and can use all the hardware you can throw at them, end user software that does very little more than it did twenty years ago could not even run on a machine from 1990, much less run usably fast. I'm not talking enterprise database software here, I'm talking about spreadsheets and word processors.
All of the gains we make in hardware are eaten up as fast or faster than they are produced by two main consumers: useless eye-candy for end users, and higher and higher-level programming languages and tools that make it possible for developers to build increasingly inefficient and resource-hungry applications faster than before. And yes, I realize that there are irresistible market forces at work here, but that only applies to commercial software; for the FOSS world, it's a tremendous lost opportunity that appears to have been driven by little more than a desire to emulate corporate software development, which many FOSS developers admire for reasons known only to them and God.
It really doesn't matter how powerful the hardware becomes. For specialist applications, it's still a help. But for the average user, an increase in processor speed and memory simply means that their 25 meg printer drivers will become 100 meg printer drivers and their operating system will demand another gig of RAM and all their new clock cycles. Anything that's left will be spent on menus that fade in and out and buttons that look like quivering drops of water -- perhaps next year, they'll have animated fish living inside them.
I've only moved for a job once, and that had a lot more to do with the recession than anything else, and hopefully, I'll never do it again. I think the real division here is between people for whom their career is their supreme consideration and those for whom it is not. Personally, I don't give a rat's ass about "career" beyond making sure that my needs are met with a little left over for some luxuries. I do pretty well: I've worked as an independent contractor for the last several years, so it varies from year to year, but I usually gross somewhere in the low six digits. My career-driven counterparts tend to make about 20% more than me, which is not enough for me to disrupt the rest of my life, and I'm not sure what would be. If I wasn't putting a kid through college, I'd probably work a lot less.
I used to be career-driven. Over the course of the last twenty years, I discovered that how happy or unhappy I was at any given time had next to nothing to do with how much money I was making -- as long as I was making enough to avoid privation -- and very little to do with what I was doing at work. It's not like it's going to be any great comfort to have my peak earnings and my job references on my epitaph.
It's altering food that's the problem. I sat down last year with a couple of nutrition texts and assembled a list of actual bodily needs and discovered that I could get everything in the form of pills. It turns out to be surprisingly cheap and easy, especially once you realize that you don't actually have to consume protein: you digest proteins into amino acids before they're absorbed in the gut, so you just need to get the necessary amino acids. I've gone as long as two months at a time without consuming any "food", and my weight and general health are both excellent. (I could go longer, but food is involved in social situations where I'd rather not explain what I'm doing.) After a few weeks, the stomach shrinks so you no longer feel hungry. You also don't have to pass waste nearly as often, since you're not consuming all that useless garbage that the body doesn't need. And then there's all the time wasted with meals that I've reclaimed.
My main complaint is that most of the nutrients I'm consuming in pill form still come from natural sources. I'd much rather they were synthesized so I could be assured of their purity instead of relying on haphazard evolved-instead-of-designed natural processes. (There's also the problem that I still have to obtain fats by occasionally eating a handful of nuts.) Instead of playing silly engineering games with plants and animals and whatever random crap they contain, I'd rather bypass the whole atavistic mess and live as if we have actual science now.
Of course, if you're a foodie, none of this will have any appeal, but if you eat mainly because you have to, there are alternatives.
Would you be interested in a magazine (print, app, email, or web-delivered) that was customized specifically to your tastes, aggregated from content across different magazines? Just curious...
If they did a good job of it, yes. If they did a really good job of it, I'd probably be willing to pay a modest subscription fee as well.
The key is that by "good", I mean doing at least as good a job as I do by myself using Google and other search engines. And by "really good", I mean doing a better job than I do myself.
Whether the term "magazine" has any meaning at that point, I don't know, but yes, I'd be interested.
It was always pretty rare for a magazine to be worth reading from cover to cover. Arguably, editors try to avoid that, since a magazine all of whose contents are interesting to its readers is going to have a very small and specialized subscriber base. Instead, editors try to appeal to a wider group, with the end result being that any given reader is only going to care about a fraction of the content. And this model worked pretty well as long as publication was capital-intensive. The web pretty much put an end to that.
Obviously, it depends on what you're interested in, but nowadays you can find some or all of the kind of content that interests you for free, so unless you're after something highly specialized, you don't have to purchase access at all, much less buy a bunch of content that you aren't interested in to get to the small fraction that does interest you. The old magazine model no longer has much relevance. If so many people hadn't been exposed to magazines before the rise of the web, it would probably never occur to anyone to create online "magazines".
In the long run, someone is going to figure out how to aggregate related content, probably with a high degree of personalization, in such a way that both the aggregator and the content creator get to expose readers to ads and thereby make money. This is basically already Google's approach, and they're making money hand over fist, but they're the ultimate generalists. The more specialized territory is still up for grabs, though it appears likely that specialized aggregators are more likely to evolve from blogs and wikis than search engines.
But the magazine? It existed only because of a resource scarcity that no longer exists. Trying to make the magazine work in the age of the Internet is like trying to keep a ferry business alive after the bridge has been built.
Dear God, yes. If they ever do a Hellraiser movie in which one of the cenobites is a graphic designer, he'll drag people to hell using issues of Wired.
Slashdot Mirror
...for an epidemic of medical student's disease.
Isn't that just a long winded way of saying "well, you were right on your claims after all, but I'm still going to hold it against you rather than admit that I was wrong in my rush to judgment."
No, it's a polite way of saying that Apple misused a catchy-sounding buzzword to divert attention away from a more accurate but qualification-laden description of the actual device, and that doing so is childish and dishonest. The same description -- with the same qualifications -- would be true of the average PC monitor if you simply moved six feet away from it. It's a trivial claim puffed up to sound like a significant technological advance.
If you lack logic and mathematics skills and have no real understanding of scientific method, to say nothing of broader and deeper general education than you are likely to get in American schools, all the data in the world won't help you. We are decades past the point when an average person with an average education and no particular motivation to constantly self-educate can understand the world around them, much less make coherent policy decisions.
We have reached the point when we must either commit to much higher educational standards or disenfranchise the under-educated. Or just stand by helplessly while professional rabble rousers manipulate an increasingly ignorant general population and turn democracy into a mockery of itself.
But, yes, anyone who claims that Apple was lying about it being a "retinal" display is simply attempting to pick a needless fight. Ignore them and move on.
Hm, maybe. It's certainly legitimate to object to the ill-chosen, ad hoc terminology that clashes with the existing meaning of the phrase. It's also legitimate to quibble over the enormous amount of wiggle room in the definition. Apple wasn't lying, but they were making claims without a great deal of actual substance. People get fed up with Apple's constant hyperbole, especially when the product in question is, in the end, a PDA with a larger than usual screen.
That said, no one disputes that the iPad will be a great new platform for graphic designers and the advertisers who employ them.
When are we going to stop this sycophantic worship of sociopaths who happen to get rich by screwing over others?
Looking over the preceding ten thousand years of human history, I couldn't tell you for sure, but if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath.
No, seriously. What killer new features does Windows 7 have that are worth the time and expense of an upgrade from XP? The only one I've heard mentioned, that it sucks less than Vista, doesn't apply to XP users.
When it gets down to it, there are two main reasons to upgrade to Windows 7: Eventually, it will become impossible to get new machines running XP. And Microsoft really wants your money. Neither of these benefits the user.
Macs went to EFI over four years ago. Hard to believe it took the windows machines this long to take the leap?
The average user doesn't know and wouldn't give a shit if they did. Ergo, this kind of change in the PC market is driven by the interests of the vendors, as the consumer essentially has none. That said, it's worth noting that some consumer PCs have used EFI since 2003 and Itanium workstations were using EFI back in 2000, and x64 versions of Windows added support for EFI in 2008.
BIOS is the bane of the PC service tech. That's where manufacturers lock up the hardware and prevent you from being able to fix it or work on it.
It's worth noting that one advantage of EFI to vendors is precisely that it better enables them to lock down a system than BIOS does. While it doesn't have to be used that way, you can safely bet that many vendors will use it that way to the detriment of the consumer. It's also not without (in my opinion, valid) criticism for adding additional complexity to the system without actually resolving the problems of BIOS.
The main advantage appears lie in offering a GUI for end users to manipulate system settings that they lack the knowledge or inclination to tinker with. To be fair, it does add some convenience features and better support for large drives, but I haven't seen anything about EFI to get terribly excited about.
It's not even new, and Potter probably knew that as well. The Aztecs and the Maya both made books exactly this way. If you have foldable paper -- which the Mesoamerican cultures had, in contradistinction to the papyrus and parchment using classical western civilizations -- it's either that or unwieldy scrolls. The postclassical codex style of book is actually very complex and labor-intensive to make, at least prior to industrialization and the availability of modern polymer adhesives.
It's a trap designed to let the government perform a high-profile sweep of "perverts".
The clear intent of both students was to harass the teachers and cause disruption by undermining their authority. The publication was targeted at an audience (their peers), and the effect was felt inside the school.
This is far too broad. Virtually any action could be construed as having an effect felt inside the school if anyone in the school is aware of it, enabling schools to exert control over almost every aspect of a student's public life. Aside from obviously being undesirable, such a broad approach is entirely unnecessary in this case, as the actions of the students in question were libelous and defamatory and therefore covered under existing law. That said, I don't think it would be out of line for the school to prohibit students from engaging in libelous and defamatory speech -- which is not protected by the First Amendment to begin with -- against the faculty or other students and to punish it accordingly whether it is conducted on campus or off campus.
As far as "undermining the authority" of school officials goes, no such thing happened. The authority of school officials derives from the powers granted to them by the state and by parents to act in loco parentis. If by "authority" you mean "respect", the school officials did that to themselves by overreacting and showing themselves to be extremely sensitive to the things their students say. And in an environment full of teenagers, that's just inviting further attack. If they had been smart about it, they'd have first contacted the parents and insisted on the immediate removal of the offending pages -- which almost certainly would have generated immediate cooperation -- and then punish the students with something like after-school detention that couldn't be used to claim that the students were being deprived of their educational rights. Instead, they waltzed into national media attention and cost the school system a bloody fortune in legal fees.
The designers will make the final determination.
On what planet? Everywhere I've worked, the process works like this:
1. Non-technical management decides they want something done, though they are unable to define it clearly.
2. The resulting vague "specs" land on the desk of one or more designers, who produce mockups, usually in something like Fireworks (if you're lucky) or PowerPoint (if you're unlucky).
3. Steps 1 and 2 repeat several times as management and the designers both try to avoid making any decisions they can be held accountable for.
4. A bunch of pretty pictures, quite possibly in the form of actual printouts, are delivered to the developers who are asked, based on what was common knowledge in meetings they weren't invited to, to build the program that the pictures would represent if we lived in a parallel universe less ruthlessly ruled by causality and determinism than our own.
5. A three-way feedback loop, now involving management, the designers, and the developers continues to mutate the "spec" while development proceeds in the face of an arbitrary and inflexible deadline chosen by an even higher level of management by reading the cracks in tortoise shells roasted over the sacred fire in the executive restroom.
In this scenario, the designers are not making implementation decisions. Those decisions are made by equally unqualified middle managers based on vacuous trade journal articles like TFA and then imposed without discussion upon the developers.
If you've been watching the content business for a while, you get used to these things. Someone at the content-provider end of the business comes up with something that would be very beneficial to them while offering negligible benefits to the consumer, and then they spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to convince consumers that it's a good idea despite consumers' plainly seeing that it would be a pain in the ass with little or no reward. The :CueCat is, of course, the canonical example, but there are many more links in the chains of the Ghost of Stupid Business Plans Past.
The best thing about this plan is that it's plainly aimed at traditionalists who don't care for the web, but what it offers them is an awkward way to get the web content they don't actually want on a tiny screen they probably don't even have, probably while bombarding them with advertising and collecting data about their reading and browsing habits. What's not to like?
I mean, does this story warrant inclusion on slashdot? There are plenty of other places to go for bad rumors and conspiracy theories.
True, but they're so rarely labeled as such on Slashdot that it's almost a special occasion when one of them is.
The gist of the referenced FQA seems to be a rant about how managed code is good and unmanaged code is bad, not very cleverly disguised as a expose of well-known problems with C++.
Any time spent on the dead IE6-IE8 browsers is wasted.
Having spent much of the last six months coding to accommodate the largely IE6 and IE7 user base in several major metropolitan school districts, I wish that was true. Unfortunately, in large public institutions and a surprising number of large corporations, IE6 is still the norm.
On other news, RedHat announced it does not use Windows on its web servers and Apple announced that no employees use Windows Mobile phones.
Funny, but also possibly correct for reasons other than the one implied. Google intends to compete directly with Microsoft in the OS space, so the very real security issues with Windows aside, this is probably also an effort to close an, um, advertising hole for Microsoft. Once Google begins pushing Chrome, it certainly won't look good for them to be using Windows internally, and if they were, you can bet Microsoft would pounce on it.
Of course, Google has to keep using Windows internally so they can ensure their web assets' compatibility with IE, and here's where we'll see if they really care about Windows security issues, because if they do, they'll be running it inside a VM.
But remember, she hasn't won anything yet, just filed a suit.
True indeed. And I hope it's rapidly laughed out of the courts before it becomes a prop for opportunistic politicians pursuing tort "reform".
Stuff like this drives me nuts because, out of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of lawsuits filed every year, most involve legitimate grievances (or are quickly dismissed), and most of them are settled out of court for reasonable amounts. A tiny proportion -- the handful we hear about every year -- involve ridiculous claims accompanied by ridiculous awards, usually delivered by a jury of idiots, and then reduced to more reasonable levels on appeal once the journalists have moved on to the next spectacle. The exceptions are generally giant awards that are completely proportionate to the giant misdeeds of enormous corporations, which always leads to lobbyists for those corporations handing large campaign contributions to unscrupulous politicians who conflate the two extremes.
...the problem is software. In the last twenty years, we've gone from machines running at a few MHz to multicore, multi-CPU machines with clock speeds in the GHz, with corresponding increases in memory capacity and other resources. While the hardware has improved by several orders of magnitude, the same has largely not been true of software. With the exception of games and some media software, which actually require and can use all the hardware you can throw at them, end user software that does very little more than it did twenty years ago could not even run on a machine from 1990, much less run usably fast. I'm not talking enterprise database software here, I'm talking about spreadsheets and word processors.
All of the gains we make in hardware are eaten up as fast or faster than they are produced by two main consumers: useless eye-candy for end users, and higher and higher-level programming languages and tools that make it possible for developers to build increasingly inefficient and resource-hungry applications faster than before. And yes, I realize that there are irresistible market forces at work here, but that only applies to commercial software; for the FOSS world, it's a tremendous lost opportunity that appears to have been driven by little more than a desire to emulate corporate software development, which many FOSS developers admire for reasons known only to them and God.
It really doesn't matter how powerful the hardware becomes. For specialist applications, it's still a help. But for the average user, an increase in processor speed and memory simply means that their 25 meg printer drivers will become 100 meg printer drivers and their operating system will demand another gig of RAM and all their new clock cycles. Anything that's left will be spent on menus that fade in and out and buttons that look like quivering drops of water -- perhaps next year, they'll have animated fish living inside them.
Obviously, the Imperium has struck a deal with the Darrians to destabilize the Solomani Confederation by striking at the capital system.
Sorry, had to be done.
I've only moved for a job once, and that had a lot more to do with the recession than anything else, and hopefully, I'll never do it again. I think the real division here is between people for whom their career is their supreme consideration and those for whom it is not. Personally, I don't give a rat's ass about "career" beyond making sure that my needs are met with a little left over for some luxuries. I do pretty well: I've worked as an independent contractor for the last several years, so it varies from year to year, but I usually gross somewhere in the low six digits. My career-driven counterparts tend to make about 20% more than me, which is not enough for me to disrupt the rest of my life, and I'm not sure what would be. If I wasn't putting a kid through college, I'd probably work a lot less.
I used to be career-driven. Over the course of the last twenty years, I discovered that how happy or unhappy I was at any given time had next to nothing to do with how much money I was making -- as long as I was making enough to avoid privation -- and very little to do with what I was doing at work. It's not like it's going to be any great comfort to have my peak earnings and my job references on my epitaph.
It's altering food that's the problem. I sat down last year with a couple of nutrition texts and assembled a list of actual bodily needs and discovered that I could get everything in the form of pills. It turns out to be surprisingly cheap and easy, especially once you realize that you don't actually have to consume protein: you digest proteins into amino acids before they're absorbed in the gut, so you just need to get the necessary amino acids. I've gone as long as two months at a time without consuming any "food", and my weight and general health are both excellent. (I could go longer, but food is involved in social situations where I'd rather not explain what I'm doing.) After a few weeks, the stomach shrinks so you no longer feel hungry. You also don't have to pass waste nearly as often, since you're not consuming all that useless garbage that the body doesn't need. And then there's all the time wasted with meals that I've reclaimed.
My main complaint is that most of the nutrients I'm consuming in pill form still come from natural sources. I'd much rather they were synthesized so I could be assured of their purity instead of relying on haphazard evolved-instead-of-designed natural processes. (There's also the problem that I still have to obtain fats by occasionally eating a handful of nuts.) Instead of playing silly engineering games with plants and animals and whatever random crap they contain, I'd rather bypass the whole atavistic mess and live as if we have actual science now.
Of course, if you're a foodie, none of this will have any appeal, but if you eat mainly because you have to, there are alternatives.
Would you be interested in a magazine (print, app, email, or web-delivered) that was customized specifically to your tastes, aggregated from content across different magazines? Just curious...
If they did a good job of it, yes. If they did a really good job of it, I'd probably be willing to pay a modest subscription fee as well.
The key is that by "good", I mean doing at least as good a job as I do by myself using Google and other search engines. And by "really good", I mean doing a better job than I do myself.
Whether the term "magazine" has any meaning at that point, I don't know, but yes, I'd be interested.
It was always pretty rare for a magazine to be worth reading from cover to cover. Arguably, editors try to avoid that, since a magazine all of whose contents are interesting to its readers is going to have a very small and specialized subscriber base. Instead, editors try to appeal to a wider group, with the end result being that any given reader is only going to care about a fraction of the content. And this model worked pretty well as long as publication was capital-intensive. The web pretty much put an end to that.
Obviously, it depends on what you're interested in, but nowadays you can find some or all of the kind of content that interests you for free, so unless you're after something highly specialized, you don't have to purchase access at all, much less buy a bunch of content that you aren't interested in to get to the small fraction that does interest you. The old magazine model no longer has much relevance. If so many people hadn't been exposed to magazines before the rise of the web, it would probably never occur to anyone to create online "magazines".
In the long run, someone is going to figure out how to aggregate related content, probably with a high degree of personalization, in such a way that both the aggregator and the content creator get to expose readers to ads and thereby make money. This is basically already Google's approach, and they're making money hand over fist, but they're the ultimate generalists. The more specialized territory is still up for grabs, though it appears likely that specialized aggregators are more likely to evolve from blogs and wikis than search engines.
But the magazine? It existed only because of a resource scarcity that no longer exists. Trying to make the magazine work in the age of the Internet is like trying to keep a ferry business alive after the bridge has been built.
Dear God, yes. If they ever do a Hellraiser movie in which one of the cenobites is a graphic designer, he'll drag people to hell using issues of Wired.
For the benefit of the non-gamers amongst us, perhaps someone could explain exactly how one goes about converting game accounts into "hard cash".