The other thing that's astonishing to me is that someone who writes a market research report could be so piss-poor at reading a graph.
To me, it seems far more likely that the author wants to present a particular narrative, rather than that he's honestly reporting misunderstood statistics. Keep in mind that all journalism is the work of humans, who inevitably bring their biases into play, no matter how hard they try to be objective and neutral.
It's entirely possible that they misunderstood the statistics, or it's possible that they know that this article will stir shit up and get them more pageviews (and ad revenue) than it might otherwise.
All the talk in the world about HTML 5 doesn't change the fact that many, many web sites use Flash, or that there's no HTML 5 equivalent of the Flash developer tools. Until either the iPad changes or the web changes, the iPad will be cut off from a big part of the web.
True, but it's a part that Apple is okay with their users being cut off from. When I think about what Flash is used for, mostly I think of games; and the iPad already has, by virtue of the app store, thousands of games available. iPad owners aren't going to miss it much. Besides games, the other big app for Flash is video. I honestly don't know where the iPad stands with respect to video, so I can't comment on it, but I'm under the impression that most of the big-name places on the web that provide video also provide H.263 or H.264 streams that iPhone OS can play natively? Or something like that?
Comparable screen, lower price tag, actual keyboard, and uncrippled OS.
Dude, most people don't care. Maybe it would be better if everyone had the same concerns about OS openness that we do, but they don't, and that's unlikely to ever change. The underlying OS and internals of tech are not interesting to the overwhelming majority of people, no matter how interesting they are to you and me.
For the record, I despise the walled garden that is Apple and have never once given them any money. Their products are not for me, and I don't like their corporate behavior. But to act like they don't know what they're doing is ludicrous.
I wonder how they hope to stop situations like this.
As I understand it, certain Unicode characters are not allowed in IDNS (Internationalized DNS) names. If there's nine versions of the letter 'e' then the only one that's allowed is U+0065; any other version of that character will get normalized into an 'e'.
There's more to it than that, of course, but there has been plenty written about this; here's a starting place.
I have a solid brass key ring, like this. I've had it for about 20 years. It's got a series of four thick rings attached to it, on which are about 14 keys and my SecurID fob for work. I hook the clip around the belt loop above my right front pocket, and the keys themselves hang down into the pocket. I've been wearing my keys this way since high school, and it's never failed me. (I wear jeans 99% of the time, which helps; on the rare occasions I have to wear slacks, usually I attach the clip to the upper corner of the pocket itself, and the keys still hang down inside it.)
I don't keep my pocketknife on my key ring; it's too big.
I'd just like to point out to whatever dipshit marked that "troll" that it was an attempt (apparently failed) to make a joke about offshoring jobs/offshore wind farms. Durp.
Hey, government. Yeah, that's right, I'm talking to you, the guys that I voted for or against. That's right, I'm a U.S. citizen, and you're representing me to the world when you say things like this.
Come closer, I have something to tell you. Closer. There you go. It's real simple.
Copyright should last for 15-20 years, renewable once. It's a civil matter if someone violates copyright; the author can go after them for damages in court.
That's it. That's all you need to ensure a great deal of creative effort on the part of "authors" whose interests you claim to represent. This 95 years, or lifetime plus 70 years stuff, it's horseshit. With these ridiculous laws that you have let corporations buy from you, nothing created since I was born will enter the public domain before my sons have both grown old and died. There is plenty of impetus to innovate and create without locking up ideas for centuries. You do realize that the end result is that giant corporations will own the rights to just about all ideas -- there are only so many ways to tell a story, and eventually giant corporations will control enough of them that nobody will be able to publish anything new without sounding kinda similar to something a giant corporation owns the rights to.
So seriously, cut it out. These laws are bullshit. They need to stop. You are hurting the U.S., and hurting the world by doing this.
Every time I see a story like this, it reinforces the idea that there should be a hard limit on the size of corporations. Number of employees, amount of revenue, whatever. Exceed the number and we break you into tiny little pieces.
I remember several years ago seeing an ad for an oil company, where the whole ad was talking about clean energy and the environment and all that. At first I thought, "Cool, I'm glad they're doing something positive." Then a while later I read an article which pointed out that such ad campaigns were of course feel-good nonsense, and the oil companies were acting just the same as before. I felt like an idiot, and that was a big wake-up call to me. I'm not dumb by any means, but I had just been accustomed to the normative view that advertising is at least MOSTLY true, right? I mean, they can't outright lie, right?
Oh, my eldest is 5. In a couple of years I'm going to start training him hardcore to recognize deceptions and lies -- in a word, advertising. Here's what they do to trick you. He's too young to really comprehend it at this point, so I think it's better if he just doesn't see it.
I might start with magazine ads soon, actually -- being static, and usually aimed at an older audience (we only subscribe to two magazines, neither aimed at children) they're less likely to have a negative impact on him, especially if I'm explaining how they trick us.
It wasn't always so. Ben Franklin and Henry David Thoreau very eloquently expressed a thriftiness that was uniquely American. It went hand in hand with self-reliance. When I see the over-fed, demanding, soft, food-stamp using Americans of 2010 who are claiming to champion a return to "every man for himself", I wonder how long they would last if any one of them were to actually be expected to pull their own not inconsiderable weight.
It's become obvious to me lately that advertising is a big culprit here. For the last sixty years, Madison Avenue and friends have been refining ways to convince us to do things that aren't in our best interests: buy more than we can afford, buy things that we don't need, buy, buy, BUY!
Advertising is corrosive. It sells an idea of a world where everything has a simple solution. Buy our product, and life will be BETTER! Even if you're smart and assume that advertising is always lying to you, being exposed to lies for years on end will start to make you believe them, or at least believe the normative view they come from.
My friends' kids, and my older son's friends are frequently obsessed with this cartoon character or that. Ours aren't. Why? We don't have TV. We haven't for about three years now, and so our son isn't getting exposed to constant advertising that exhorts him to eat shitty fake food at shitty fast-food chains, or to harass us to buy character-branded toys. All the video we watch, we watch on our computers after he's in bed. (And it's all ad-free; I don't really want to see ads any more than I want him to. In fact, I'd happily pay $2-3 per episode for the few shows we watch, if it meant no ads.)
A huge problem with "free" TV (that is, ad-supported TV) is that there's a cost associated with watching ads. As I said, it promotes a false worldview; even if the ad is relatively accurate, its sole purpose is to get you to spend money on something that you may not actually have any real need for. And the advertisers don't care if you spend money you don't have, or spend money on a product you don't need instead of saving for retirement, or your kids' education.
Oh, I think it will eventually exist. See how the RIAA has basically given up on DRM schemes for music. They figured out it cost them more to build and implement those schemes than they'd ever make up in revenue from the few nimmers who couldn't find DRM-broken content.
The movie industry is farther behind because video piracy took longer to get started (what with the vastly larger amount of data needed per second of video compared to audio; the average mp3 back in the day was a few megabytes, but the average pirated video these days is a few hundred to several thousand megabytes), but eventually they too will figure out that there's just no profit in it, and will give up, and provide inexpensive high-quality video downloads that don't require bizarre DRM schemes or custom software.
I love Hanlon's Razor as much as the next guy, but this phenomenon cannot be adequately explained by stupidity; it is extraordinarily unlikely that the marketing departments at every major processor manufacturer have, for the past 20 years, been populated entirely by morons.
(It's pathetic that the marketing departments at the companies that make these things are so incompetent that we need tools like these to sort out what exactly they're selling us, but until they get on the ball I'm glad these tools exist.)
You think they don't provide a clear chart of performance differences because they're incompetent? They do it because they're deliberately trying to confuse people into buying the highest-margin CPUs.
and the stuff that is radioactive for 10,000 years is dangerous... but not any more dangerous than the chemicals that get spewed from Coal-fired plants or the chemicals that are used in manufacturing photo-voltaic solar panels.
It's usually a good deal less dangerous than that, because frequently the "low-level" waste you hear about is stuff like gloves, screwdrivers, and other equipment that is used in nuclear plants but is not normally directly exposed to high levels of radiation. It's contaminated by proxy, and the extremely stringent rules dictate that it has to be treated as if it were highly radioactive.
Yeah, if you define "everyone" as "influential tech pundits." The iPhone's got an 18% market share; if this isn't a shining example of how the choices of the mainstream media control people's perception of reality, I don't know what is.
Think about it this way: if you could (somehow) track every conversation involving cellphones that occurs on a daily basis, what percentage A do you think would be primarily about iPhones? What percentage B do you think would mention iPhones incidentally? Do you think those percentages would be the same? Do you think there's the slightest chance that A or B is anywhere as high as C, the percentage of tech news articles/columns that are primarily about, or incidentally mention, the iPhone?
I don't use gmail (not counting work mail, I get about 2-3 emails a day, on a busy day), so its wonderful dealing-with-lots-of-mail features don't help me, but I do make use of its contacts manager. But I wish it were better, and more standalone from gmail. The main reason is that we've got a few different places that need to access contact info: our phones (G1s), our mail clients (IMAP via Thunderbird, sometimes webmail), various private web apps that I've written. I *hate* having to manage and manually synchronize contact info; I want a single master database of contact info that has everything we know about everyone we know, and have all our devices/programs access it directly.
Google Contacts allows this (it's even got an API, yay), but it still could be better. My main issue is that I don't see any (easy) way for me and my wife to share a contact list. We have separate Google accounts, and so separate contacts lists. We can obviously export/import to each other, but that's a pain. I really wish there was a way for us to designate a central set of shared contacts that we can use and tag individually. (I also wish that every piece of data we entered had a timestamp, so that we could see how long ago it was that we added Soandso's phone number, etc.)
This "nomination" is nothing special. Anyone can nominate anyone for the Nobel Peace Prize; whether the Nobel committee opts to accept those nominations is another matter, and they don't reveal the list of nominees, just the winner.
Note that "The nomination was proposed by the Italian edition of Wired magazine for promoting 'dialogue, debate and consensus through communication' as well as democracy."" This is basically a press release from Wired Magazine (Italy) saying that they sent a nomination to the Nobel committee. The committee itself probably rolled its eyes and threw the form in the trash can.
Actually, if they'll give an award to Obama after six months in office, they're probably nuts enough to give it to an inanimate object.
Slashdot Mirror
The other thing that's astonishing to me is that someone who writes a market research report could be so piss-poor at reading a graph.
To me, it seems far more likely that the author wants to present a particular narrative, rather than that he's honestly reporting misunderstood statistics. Keep in mind that all journalism is the work of humans, who inevitably bring their biases into play, no matter how hard they try to be objective and neutral.
It's entirely possible that they misunderstood the statistics, or it's possible that they know that this article will stir shit up and get them more pageviews (and ad revenue) than it might otherwise.
All the talk in the world about HTML 5 doesn't change the fact that many, many web sites use Flash, or that there's no HTML 5 equivalent of the Flash developer tools. Until either the iPad changes or the web changes, the iPad will be cut off from a big part of the web.
True, but it's a part that Apple is okay with their users being cut off from. When I think about what Flash is used for, mostly I think of games; and the iPad already has, by virtue of the app store, thousands of games available. iPad owners aren't going to miss it much. Besides games, the other big app for Flash is video. I honestly don't know where the iPad stands with respect to video, so I can't comment on it, but I'm under the impression that most of the big-name places on the web that provide video also provide H.263 or H.264 streams that iPhone OS can play natively? Or something like that?
Comparable screen, lower price tag, actual keyboard, and uncrippled OS.
Dude, most people don't care. Maybe it would be better if everyone had the same concerns about OS openness that we do, but they don't, and that's unlikely to ever change. The underlying OS and internals of tech are not interesting to the overwhelming majority of people, no matter how interesting they are to you and me.
For the record, I despise the walled garden that is Apple and have never once given them any money. Their products are not for me, and I don't like their corporate behavior. But to act like they don't know what they're doing is ludicrous.
I wonder how they hope to stop situations like this.
As I understand it, certain Unicode characters are not allowed in IDNS (Internationalized DNS) names. If there's nine versions of the letter 'e' then the only one that's allowed is U+0065; any other version of that character will get normalized into an 'e'.
There's more to it than that, of course, but there has been plenty written about this; here's a starting place.
I have a solid brass key ring, like this. I've had it for about 20 years. It's got a series of four thick rings attached to it, on which are about 14 keys and my SecurID fob for work. I hook the clip around the belt loop above my right front pocket, and the keys themselves hang down into the pocket. I've been wearing my keys this way since high school, and it's never failed me. (I wear jeans 99% of the time, which helps; on the rare occasions I have to wear slacks, usually I attach the clip to the upper corner of the pocket itself, and the keys still hang down inside it.)
I don't keep my pocketknife on my key ring; it's too big.
I'd just like to point out to whatever dipshit marked that "troll" that it was an attempt (apparently failed) to make a joke about offshoring jobs/offshore wind farms. Durp.
Hey, government. Yeah, that's right, I'm talking to you, the guys that I voted for or against. That's right, I'm a U.S. citizen, and you're representing me to the world when you say things like this.
Come closer, I have something to tell you. Closer. There you go. It's real simple.
Copyright should last for 15-20 years, renewable once. It's a civil matter if someone violates copyright; the author can go after them for damages in court.
That's it. That's all you need to ensure a great deal of creative effort on the part of "authors" whose interests you claim to represent. This 95 years, or lifetime plus 70 years stuff, it's horseshit. With these ridiculous laws that you have let corporations buy from you, nothing created since I was born will enter the public domain before my sons have both grown old and died. There is plenty of impetus to innovate and create without locking up ideas for centuries. You do realize that the end result is that giant corporations will own the rights to just about all ideas -- there are only so many ways to tell a story, and eventually giant corporations will control enough of them that nobody will be able to publish anything new without sounding kinda similar to something a giant corporation owns the rights to.
So seriously, cut it out. These laws are bullshit. They need to stop. You are hurting the U.S., and hurting the world by doing this.
That's all.
So now they're offshoring wind production, too? What, good ol'-fashioned landlocked American wind isn't good enough for your Cape Cod liberal sissies?
Name ideas:
- Yetanotherium
- Unremarkablum
- Irrelevantium
- Onehundredseventeenium
- Instantlydecaysium
Every time I see a story like this, it reinforces the idea that there should be a hard limit on the size of corporations. Number of employees, amount of revenue, whatever. Exceed the number and we break you into tiny little pieces.
Too big to fail means too big to exist.
I remember several years ago seeing an ad for an oil company, where the whole ad was talking about clean energy and the environment and all that. At first I thought, "Cool, I'm glad they're doing something positive." Then a while later I read an article which pointed out that such ad campaigns were of course feel-good nonsense, and the oil companies were acting just the same as before. I felt like an idiot, and that was a big wake-up call to me. I'm not dumb by any means, but I had just been accustomed to the normative view that advertising is at least MOSTLY true, right? I mean, they can't outright lie, right?
Yeah, now I know better.
Oh, my eldest is 5. In a couple of years I'm going to start training him hardcore to recognize deceptions and lies -- in a word, advertising. Here's what they do to trick you. He's too young to really comprehend it at this point, so I think it's better if he just doesn't see it.
I might start with magazine ads soon, actually -- being static, and usually aimed at an older audience (we only subscribe to two magazines, neither aimed at children) they're less likely to have a negative impact on him, especially if I'm explaining how they trick us.
It wasn't always so. Ben Franklin and Henry David Thoreau very eloquently expressed a thriftiness that was uniquely American. It went hand in hand with self-reliance. When I see the over-fed, demanding, soft, food-stamp using Americans of 2010 who are claiming to champion a return to "every man for himself", I wonder how long they would last if any one of them were to actually be expected to pull their own not inconsiderable weight.
It's become obvious to me lately that advertising is a big culprit here. For the last sixty years, Madison Avenue and friends have been refining ways to convince us to do things that aren't in our best interests: buy more than we can afford, buy things that we don't need, buy, buy, BUY!
Advertising is corrosive. It sells an idea of a world where everything has a simple solution. Buy our product, and life will be BETTER! Even if you're smart and assume that advertising is always lying to you, being exposed to lies for years on end will start to make you believe them, or at least believe the normative view they come from.
My friends' kids, and my older son's friends are frequently obsessed with this cartoon character or that. Ours aren't. Why? We don't have TV. We haven't for about three years now, and so our son isn't getting exposed to constant advertising that exhorts him to eat shitty fake food at shitty fast-food chains, or to harass us to buy character-branded toys. All the video we watch, we watch on our computers after he's in bed. (And it's all ad-free; I don't really want to see ads any more than I want him to. In fact, I'd happily pay $2-3 per episode for the few shows we watch, if it meant no ads.)
A huge problem with "free" TV (that is, ad-supported TV) is that there's a cost associated with watching ads. As I said, it promotes a false worldview; even if the ad is relatively accurate, its sole purpose is to get you to spend money on something that you may not actually have any real need for. And the advertisers don't care if you spend money you don't have, or spend money on a product you don't need instead of saving for retirement, or your kids' education.
Okay, okay, I could go on for hours. Rant over.
Oh, I think it will eventually exist. See how the RIAA has basically given up on DRM schemes for music. They figured out it cost them more to build and implement those schemes than they'd ever make up in revenue from the few nimmers who couldn't find DRM-broken content.
The movie industry is farther behind because video piracy took longer to get started (what with the vastly larger amount of data needed per second of video compared to audio; the average mp3 back in the day was a few megabytes, but the average pirated video these days is a few hundred to several thousand megabytes), but eventually they too will figure out that there's just no profit in it, and will give up, and provide inexpensive high-quality video downloads that don't require bizarre DRM schemes or custom software.
At least, it seems a likely path.
I love Hanlon's Razor as much as the next guy, but this phenomenon cannot be adequately explained by stupidity; it is extraordinarily unlikely that the marketing departments at every major processor manufacturer have, for the past 20 years, been populated entirely by morons.
I think I speak for us all when I ask...
Novell still exists?
(It's pathetic that the marketing departments at the companies that make these things are so incompetent that we need tools like these to sort out what exactly they're selling us, but until they get on the ball I'm glad these tools exist.)
You think they don't provide a clear chart of performance differences because they're incompetent? They do it because they're deliberately trying to confuse people into buying the highest-margin CPUs.
It's usually a good deal less dangerous than that, because frequently the "low-level" waste you hear about is stuff like gloves, screwdrivers, and other equipment that is used in nuclear plants but is not normally directly exposed to high levels of radiation. It's contaminated by proxy, and the extremely stringent rules dictate that it has to be treated as if it were highly radioactive.
Keep in mind that the only thing the iPhone dominates is the tech news media. It has an 18% market share.
Yeah, if you define "everyone" as "influential tech pundits." The iPhone's got an 18% market share; if this isn't a shining example of how the choices of the mainstream media control people's perception of reality, I don't know what is.
Think about it this way: if you could (somehow) track every conversation involving cellphones that occurs on a daily basis, what percentage A do you think would be primarily about iPhones? What percentage B do you think would mention iPhones incidentally? Do you think those percentages would be the same? Do you think there's the slightest chance that A or B is anywhere as high as C, the percentage of tech news articles/columns that are primarily about, or incidentally mention, the iPhone?
but what I didn't realize is that Texas schoolbooks set the standard for the rest of the country.
Wow... I sure hope their schoolbook depositories don't set a standard for the rest of the country.
I don't use gmail (not counting work mail, I get about 2-3 emails a day, on a busy day), so its wonderful dealing-with-lots-of-mail features don't help me, but I do make use of its contacts manager. But I wish it were better, and more standalone from gmail. The main reason is that we've got a few different places that need to access contact info: our phones (G1s), our mail clients (IMAP via Thunderbird, sometimes webmail), various private web apps that I've written. I *hate* having to manage and manually synchronize contact info; I want a single master database of contact info that has everything we know about everyone we know, and have all our devices/programs access it directly.
Google Contacts allows this (it's even got an API, yay), but it still could be better. My main issue is that I don't see any (easy) way for me and my wife to share a contact list. We have separate Google accounts, and so separate contacts lists. We can obviously export/import to each other, but that's a pain. I really wish there was a way for us to designate a central set of shared contacts that we can use and tag individually. (I also wish that every piece of data we entered had a timestamp, so that we could see how long ago it was that we added Soandso's phone number, etc.)
F# is an abbreviation -- the language's full name is F#$@!
Hollywood just had its highest box office year EVER! Clearly piracy is taking a huge toll, and... ...uh... wait...
This "nomination" is nothing special. Anyone can nominate anyone for the Nobel Peace Prize; whether the Nobel committee opts to accept those nominations is another matter, and they don't reveal the list of nominees, just the winner.
Note that "The nomination was proposed by the Italian edition of Wired magazine for promoting 'dialogue, debate and consensus through communication' as well as democracy."" This is basically a press release from Wired Magazine (Italy) saying that they sent a nomination to the Nobel committee. The committee itself probably rolled its eyes and threw the form in the trash can.
Actually, if they'll give an award to Obama after six months in office, they're probably nuts enough to give it to an inanimate object.
Matt's First Law of Television: Everything on TV is entertainment, even programs billed as "news."