: ) that's what I meant as well. It's the sensationalism the public should question - or rather that they should look beyond - but nowadays one must be careful of most everything one hears offhand. It sometimes takes years for a reader to consider a source of info "reliable".
You put an elctronic device through a washing machine - nothing dangerous happens but it won't work anymore - then someone with no technical knowledge attacks it with a screwdriver. It's a famous "contrevertial" piece of hardware...
Result: a story tailored for readers to retain "if it gets wet it explodes!"
Do you smell a rat? No, it's just the buzzmaker journalist burning... someone peed on his microphone.
...if I may add: While I was on that thought I did a search for stories about Intel-touting computers shipping with windows already installed and came up with... next to nothing. Yet this has been going on since almost twenty years now. So taken for granted it's... unthinkable?
I've always thought that the ONLY reason MS has its success is that they "got them young" - young meaning "first-time computer users". Since 1987, what was the first thing almost every PC buyer saw when he took his first spankin' new newfangled computer gadget home and turned it on? Ta-Da! Mr. Gate's crea... er... appropriation. Now how the heck do we use this thing? Better get learning... (Two years later) Oh, I need the next version of Windows to use that application that I need to stay competitive? (cash register sounds). "Yeah, I am tired of all the problems MS has but I don't know how to use anything else" (or "but I don't want to buy all the software again" or "everyone else is using it and I need my files that won't work with any other system to be compatible"). Indoctrination and coercion, kids.
But the game's not the same anymore. Information is widespread, and first-time computer buyers are better informed. Cross-platform habits are becoming the norm (even QuickTime reads.wmv now). In short, today the cross-platform barriers aren't there anymore - or at least they're low enough to skip over. This makes almost moot any monopoly, and frees a computer-buyer to choose the platform/hardware that works best for him. With added stress on the "works".
With the market the way it is today, Microsoft is going to have to innovate or die just like everybody else - and it's exactly in the innovation department where they're lacking. I'll start the popcorn - who brought the beer?
Isn't this "page update frequency" hullaballoo a bit premature? If Google wants relevant results I can only see update frequency being but a minor factor in any page rank determination algorithms. For example: Informations sites (historical information, dictionaries, encyclopedias, collections, etc...) are often at once the most relevant (if info is what you're looking for) and the least updated sites. I can't really imagine the Oxford Faculty meeting every week to decide new words for their dictionary to retain their www.oed.com pagerank. Just imagine what it would do to the English language : )
Seriously, this little article is going to get Webmasters thinking a little more but I don't see anything to panic about. Not yet, anyways.
I can only too readily imagine MS implementing an error screen that would, Men In Black -style, blank from your memory the fact that an error ever happened.
Of course, if after rebooting Windows cannot resolve its system problem and errors-out again... and again...
(cue post-apocalypse cityscape scene with apartment windows intermittently fillled with flashes of light)
("Scotty welsh" accent) "Ay seem te recall ma grea-grea-grea-grandaddy mentionnin' somethin' about mixin' horsehair wid 'is mortar. T'was when I was but a wee laddie, 'bout the twel'th century or so."
I agree with you on the Trustrank possibilities of this, but don't forget that only a certain "chunk" of the population will be using this feature at first - those less worried about privacy issues, or the "home user" department - so I would tend to doubt that any info gathered there would be a "real" reflection of web use. At least in its first years.
Just a personal thought, but if they ever would care to publish their proxy statistics I would be VERY interested - here's an occasion to see first-hand statistics of what people are really looking at. Hell, they could even start a sort of virtual "top of the pops" page...
I think much of this discussion about the tax levy, as well as the tax itself, is besides the point.
This is far from the first time we've heard the record industry's "Eeek they're pirating us!" screech - remember when cassettes came out? Ask your grandad what the record industry had to say about the hullaballoo when radio started airing music. And ask you're great-grandad what operetta owners had to say about the invention of the gramaphone. Each "old technology" thought that the new would be the death of it. The marked did indeed change, but this was never so.
What makes the game different this time around is not only the government's "trying to help" in a very undemocratic way (and "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", my grandaddy always loved to say), but also the state of the music industry. it is a wreck.
As far as I'm concerned all this whining and grubbing is for the sake of stockholders only. Music sales are indeed going down the tubes but it's not only for the piracy. Granted many young'uns have been brought up with the "if it's online it's free" mentality, but we all seem to be forgetting one major major detail - sound quality.
When I was a kid I was happy with the sound of a tape recorded from a friends LP - or from the radio - but could I stand that flat muffled quality on my hi-fi today? Methinks not for more than ten minutes, and that's leaving lots of room for the nostalgia factor.
If they really, really wanted to crack down on "piracy" as they say, they would make it illegal to swap music online above a certain bitrate. This would not only draw the line between "sampling" and piracy, but as I suggested with my first adverb, it would most probably even help the sale of "real" music. Think to the "hearing it on the radio" days: Many of those who did and like the song would go to their Dr. Disc and shell out for the album. Mp3's are exactly this for me today.
If the music companies really wanted to get their [expletive]s out of the hole they'd go back to letting people make music instead of trying to mold the entire industry, from creation to sales, to what they think their increasingly younger lemming-audience are most likely to buy.
As for the tax bit: In any democracy, any charge taken from one party can only be justified by the costs it makes for another. This tax law is none of that, as it takes from an indistiguished everyone to deliver to a pre-prescribed... cause. Whether it be for the government's "anti piracy squad" or to the record labels themselves, any such law will but thievery to more than a few - rightful owners of music, for example, who like the handiness of an mp3 player - and thievery it is. I'm not sure who started this ball rolling, but as far as this law is concerned, I see it as one government copying another's (they did it first and no-one complained so it must be OK!) legislation.
Really, to be honest, I haven't the slightest how things should be set straight again. Toss it all and start from scratch, perhaps. I've still got my Fender and a wild hair-do - anyone good on the drums?
If you think an iPod tax is outrageous, since three years now France has levied a tax of around $1.50 on every blank CD sold. This money goes a the "copyright protection" organisation as well. I can see a music tax being levied where the music is, as most probably 99% of iPod users use their players for music - but CD's? Are there any other abusive laws like this in any other countries?
This tax is still in effect here, but as usual, after an inital bout of protest, it's faded mumble-grumble from our minds...
Yes, but that's the whole point of the CSS invalidation validator. If it calls invalid when the invalid is actually valid, then the valid would be invalidated invalid, wouldn't it?
I think I would have a problem buying a PC that doesn't have Windows already installed. It's an integral part of the computer from the first-time computer buyer's point of view. Yet after he's been trained to run in the Windows wheel and he wants new applications... or it comes time to upgrade... (cash register sounds).
MS made the market standards by training it to use its product - by giving it out for "free".
"The worst thing would be "It's free" for about two years - and then when the market is almost totally switched to this new format it becomes pay."...you've just described MS's success in one sentence, my friend.
...it's something like those "one pack free" promotions you always see on coffee cans: "send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to some obscure address (to a super-long postbox address), but first be sure to read our three pages of legalese, all orders subject to the following conditions if we haven't changed them since..."
Au contraire, mon cher. PDF's are starting to rule the printing industry. I especially like the comment [from memory] "Metro will provide for next-generation RIP" - but even using rip nowadays is so... last-generation.
I'm pretty well convinced (and soon will see) that Tiger and Longhorm will end up looking much like each other, and I'm pretty damn sure that MS's 'pending intentions' for longhorn will indeed become reality (when they stop "keeping up to" the rest of the market to put out a version they can call "final"), but in reality what interests me most is what's under the hood. I'm really curious to try out Tiger's re-distribution (passing much more off to the graphics card than before). But what I'm sure of, user of BOTH pc and mac, is that mac's OS will be, as it has been in the past, an effort to "naturalize" the desktop working process, and that windows, with its very similar functions but extra little 'quirks', will be its usual effort to make itself an unseperable part of any working process.
Will this validate? I'm all for w3 standards too.
In fact I've spent a lot of time trying to find 'non-hack' ways around IE's display and css roadblocks - namely "background-borders" instead of using "real" css borders. Something tells me that it would be safe to leave things the way they are for now...
Slashdot Mirror
...and hey, who can forget him *cough* singing "Rocketman".
BTW, the Cannes festival just kicked off this week: Any chance of my catching it there? : )
Hey, can someone tape that for me here in France? We haven't even seen the first of the "New" Gerneration series yet...
(cough) er, I think season #2 is on a cable station somewhere... it soitenly never made it to the main airwaves. Vive... euh...
Vive "Le Balade des Etoiles" !
: ) that's what I meant as well. It's the sensationalism the public should question - or rather that they should look beyond - but nowadays one must be careful of most everything one hears offhand. It sometimes takes years for a reader to consider a source of info "reliable".
Christ I made a lot of spelling mistakes...
Questionable by who?
You put an elctronic device through a washing machine - nothing dangerous happens but it won't work anymore - then someone with no technical knowledge attacks it with a screwdriver. It's a famous "contrevertial" piece of hardware... Result: a story tailored for readers to retain "if it gets wet it explodes!" Do you smell a rat? No, it's just the buzzmaker journalist burning... someone peed on his microphone.
...if I may add: While I was on that thought I did a search for stories about Intel-touting computers shipping with windows already installed and came up with... next to nothing. Yet this has been going on since almost twenty years now. So taken for granted it's... unthinkable?
I've always thought that the ONLY reason MS has its success is that they "got them young" - young meaning "first-time computer users". Since 1987, what was the first thing almost every PC buyer saw when he took his first spankin' new newfangled computer gadget home and turned it on? Ta-Da! Mr. Gate's crea... er... appropriation. Now how the heck do we use this thing? Better get learning... (Two years later) Oh, I need the next version of Windows to use that application that I need to stay competitive? (cash register sounds). "Yeah, I am tired of all the problems MS has but I don't know how to use anything else" (or "but I don't want to buy all the software again" or "everyone else is using it and I need my files that won't work with any other system to be compatible"). Indoctrination and coercion, kids.
.wmv now). In short, today the cross-platform barriers aren't there anymore - or at least they're low enough to skip over. This makes almost moot any monopoly, and frees a computer-buyer to choose the platform/hardware that works best for him. With added stress on the "works".
But the game's not the same anymore. Information is widespread, and first-time computer buyers are better informed. Cross-platform habits are becoming the norm (even QuickTime reads
With the market the way it is today, Microsoft is going to have to innovate or die just like everybody else - and it's exactly in the innovation department where they're lacking. I'll start the popcorn - who brought the beer?
Isn't this "page update frequency" hullaballoo a bit premature? If Google wants relevant results I can only see update frequency being but a minor factor in any page rank determination algorithms. For example: Informations sites (historical information, dictionaries, encyclopedias, collections, etc...) are often at once the most relevant (if info is what you're looking for) and the least updated sites. I can't really imagine the Oxford Faculty meeting every week to decide new words for their dictionary to retain their www.oed.com pagerank. Just imagine what it would do to the English language : )
Seriously, this little article is going to get Webmasters thinking a little more but I don't see anything to panic about. Not yet, anyways.
Um... yeah. Exactly that. Thanks for the heads-up : )
I can only too readily imagine MS implementing an error screen that would, Men In Black -style, blank from your memory the fact that an error ever happened. Of course, if after rebooting Windows cannot resolve its system problem and errors-out again... and again... (cue post-apocalypse cityscape scene with apartment windows intermittently fillled with flashes of light)
I'm so tired of these blasé error colours - if you're going to have an error page, you might as well design it all the way.
Since the user is going to be seeing it a lot anyways, why not provide a "desktop picture" custom error page?
Viva the "Paisley Screen of Death" !
Have a look at some of the google ads that appear around the article : ) "Life-prolonging magnets" "Immortality device".... : )
("Scotty welsh" accent) "Ay seem te recall ma grea-grea-grea-grandaddy mentionnin' somethin' about mixin' horsehair wid 'is mortar. T'was when I was but a wee laddie, 'bout the twel'th century or so."
I agree with you on the Trustrank possibilities of this, but don't forget that only a certain "chunk" of the population will be using this feature at first - those less worried about privacy issues, or the "home user" department - so I would tend to doubt that any info gathered there would be a "real" reflection of web use. At least in its first years.
Just a personal thought, but if they ever would care to publish their proxy statistics I would be VERY interested - here's an occasion to see first-hand statistics of what people are really looking at. Hell, they could even start a sort of virtual "top of the pops" page...
Sergey with the goo-goo-google-y eyes? : )
I think much of this discussion about the tax levy, as well as the tax itself, is besides the point.
This is far from the first time we've heard the record industry's "Eeek they're pirating us!" screech - remember when cassettes came out? Ask your grandad what the record industry had to say about the hullaballoo when radio started airing music. And ask you're great-grandad what operetta owners had to say about the invention of the gramaphone. Each "old technology" thought that the new would be the death of it. The marked did indeed change, but this was never so.
What makes the game different this time around is not only the government's "trying to help" in a very undemocratic way (and "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", my grandaddy always loved to say), but also the state of the music industry. it is a wreck.
As far as I'm concerned all this whining and grubbing is for the sake of stockholders only. Music sales are indeed going down the tubes but it's not only for the piracy. Granted many young'uns have been brought up with the "if it's online it's free" mentality, but we all seem to be forgetting one major major detail - sound quality.
When I was a kid I was happy with the sound of a tape recorded from a friends LP - or from the radio - but could I stand that flat muffled quality on my hi-fi today? Methinks not for more than ten minutes, and that's leaving lots of room for the nostalgia factor.
If they really, really wanted to crack down on "piracy" as they say, they would make it illegal to swap music online above a certain bitrate. This would not only draw the line between "sampling" and piracy, but as I suggested with my first adverb, it would most probably even help the sale of "real" music. Think to the "hearing it on the radio" days: Many of those who did and like the song would go to their Dr. Disc and shell out for the album. Mp3's are exactly this for me today.
If the music companies really wanted to get their [expletive]s out of the hole they'd go back to letting people make music instead of trying to mold the entire industry, from creation to sales, to what they think their increasingly younger lemming-audience are most likely to buy.
As for the tax bit: In any democracy, any charge taken from one party can only be justified by the costs it makes for another. This tax law is none of that, as it takes from an indistiguished everyone to deliver to a pre-prescribed... cause. Whether it be for the government's "anti piracy squad" or to the record labels themselves, any such law will but thievery to more than a few - rightful owners of music, for example, who like the handiness of an mp3 player - and thievery it is. I'm not sure who started this ball rolling, but as far as this law is concerned, I see it as one government copying another's (they did it first and no-one complained so it must be OK!) legislation.
Really, to be honest, I haven't the slightest how things should be set straight again. Toss it all and start from scratch, perhaps. I've still got my Fender and a wild hair-do - anyone good on the drums?
If you think an iPod tax is outrageous, since three years now France has levied a tax of around $1.50 on every blank CD sold. This money goes a the "copyright protection" organisation as well. I can see a music tax being levied where the music is, as most probably 99% of iPod users use their players for music - but CD's? Are there any other abusive laws like this in any other countries? This tax is still in effect here, but as usual, after an inital bout of protest, it's faded mumble-grumble from our minds...
Yes, but that's the whole point of the CSS invalidation validator. If it calls invalid when the invalid is actually valid, then the valid would be invalidated invalid, wouldn't it?
I think I would have a problem buying a PC that doesn't have Windows already installed. It's an integral part of the computer from the first-time computer buyer's point of view. Yet after he's been trained to run in the Windows wheel and he wants new applications... or it comes time to upgrade... (cash register sounds). MS made the market standards by training it to use its product - by giving it out for "free".
"The worst thing would be "It's free" for about two years - and then when the market is almost totally switched to this new format it becomes pay." ...you've just described MS's success in one sentence, my friend.
...it's something like those "one pack free" promotions you always see on coffee cans: "send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to some obscure address (to a super-long postbox address), but first be sure to read our three pages of legalese, all orders subject to the following conditions if we haven't changed them since..."
Au contraire, mon cher. PDF's are starting to rule the printing industry. I especially like the comment [from memory] "Metro will provide for next-generation RIP" - but even using rip nowadays is so... last-generation.
I'm pretty well convinced (and soon will see) that Tiger and Longhorm will end up looking much like each other, and I'm pretty damn sure that MS's 'pending intentions' for longhorn will indeed become reality (when they stop "keeping up to" the rest of the market to put out a version they can call "final"), but in reality what interests me most is what's under the hood. I'm really curious to try out Tiger's re-distribution (passing much more off to the graphics card than before). But what I'm sure of, user of BOTH pc and mac, is that mac's OS will be, as it has been in the past, an effort to "naturalize" the desktop working process, and that windows, with its very similar functions but extra little 'quirks', will be its usual effort to make itself an unseperable part of any working process.
Will this validate? I'm all for w3 standards too. In fact I've spent a lot of time trying to find 'non-hack' ways around IE's display and css roadblocks - namely "background-borders" instead of using "real" css borders. Something tells me that it would be safe to leave things the way they are for now...