Finally, Yahoo's decision to name their product Dashboard is really sad. Apple named theirs dashboard because they had no better name handy, and that was the easiest way to effectively communicate what the product is. The people who came up with the name Konfabulator really hit on a gold nugget from a sheer marketing perspective. Who doesn't want to own a 'Konfabulator?' Yahoo should have kept that name and leveraged it. It's akin to Apple buying the iPod from another company and then renaming it to 'MP3 Player.'
Exactly right. I keep expecting to wake up one day and find out that Flickr has been rebranded "Yahoo! Photo Sharing" and Del.ico.us as "Yahoo! Social Bookmarking"
They seem to have a knack for taking some very cool brands and making them sound about as much fun as oatmeal. I mean I get that they want to promote a brand identity and use descriptive names... but can't they leave well enough alone when it comes to brands already in place?
Why not "Konfabulator" with "a Yahoo! Widget Engine" in the subtext? Or even just "Yahoo! Konfabulator"?
It's really not an issue if they made it easy to copy an older format to the new. My CD collection currently resides in no less than three places: The physical CD's, my hard drive, and my portable player.
If my hard drive changes, as it does on occasion, it's fairly trivial to copy them to a new hard drive (the interface has even changed: IDE to SATA). If I want a new player, again it's trivial. If my last CD player breaks and its impossible to buy a new one... I have the data in newer formats.
How long a specific format lasts really doesn't matter as long as you can exercise your fair use right to format shift the content that you bought and paid for. The problem is that media companies don't want me to exercise the right; they want me to re-purchase the content every time I want to play it using a different format, and are willing to adopt draconian DRM schemes to ensure that I have to.
Heck, the mp3 is good enough for most people, and that's a step backwards from CD's as quality is concerned.
I think the movies studios are seriously overestimating how much people care about quality. Sure, there will always be the high end types that always have to have the latest and greatest home theater equipment - the kind of people who bought laserdiscs back in the pre-DVD days. But the vast majority of people just want to watch the movie, and will do so via the path of least resistance - it's convenience that matters, not quality.
The quality difference between DVD and HD is so marginal even I can barely see a difference, and HD-DVD/BluRay offers exactly *no* additional convenience that a DVD doesn't offer now (and depending on the DRM scheme they settle on, they stand to be a hell of a lot *less* convenient).
The "next" format is going to be some form of digital download, probably around the same level of quality that a DVD offers now. My prediction is that both BluRay and HD-DVD are going to go the way of the laser disk, at least as far as buying movies on them is concerned. They'll find a niche market of high end consumers and that's it.
Well, first of all, I don't see any reason why it can't be done with the existing Google Video service, for people (like me) that would rather watch it on a computer screen or portable device than a TV set anyway.
To get it on the TV, I suspect you'll need something like the "Google box" which was rumored and then denied earlier in the week (Or this Yahoo Go TV thing that was just announced) - a network device with a TV hookup, that pulls video from the internet rather than over Cable (and why I think those rumors of Google hardware might not have been too far off the mark after all). Or, as TV is moving to digital anyway (in 2009 now I think?), maybe it'll be something that works with existing cable TV, transforming it from something that's pushed into homes into something that's pulled from cable company servers.
The whole idea of "broadcasting" TV is dying anyway. I'd expect any service that Google or Yahoo offers to be based on the idea of narrowcasting (or "podcasting"), however they manage to accomplish it. The future is all about getting the content that you want (a la carte), the way you want it (TV, computer, portable), on the terms you want (free with targeted ads, pay for no ads). Certain companies might have to be dragged kicking and screaming into it, but I think it's what the market wants and in the end, the market gets what it wants.
Plus, why would they adopt a strategy any different than Adsense? Google doesn't mind sending you to other web pages, because their ads are on those pages. Similarly, they won't mind sending you to other people's video content.
Actually, this could be the catalyst for an explosion of amateur video content. Imagine: I make a video, doesn't matter what. Some sort of short clip, independent movie, even a regular TV show. I upload it to Google Video. Google dynamically inserts the ads every time someone watches it, and I get paid some micropayment for it.
Good, popular content will become a hit and make the producers a lot of money. Sucky content won't. Google, the mechanism that delivers the right eyeballs to advertisers, makes billions either way.
I'd suspect that if Google did go into the TV advertising realm, we would see more focused advertising based on a show and it's content (topics, actors, genre, etc.) rather than the the focusing on individual preferences as practiced by Google online.
Why? Television advertisers can already tie an ad to the content. They have a pretty good idea of what the average viewer of say, Smallville is, and what products they want to sell to that demographic.
Individual preferences make all the difference in the world. As a guy, I shouldn't be seeing tampon commercials. As a twenty-three year old, I shouldn't be seeing ads for age related prescription drugs. I shouldn't be seeing ads for cars that cost more than my annual income. If, for some reason, a 45 year old business executive was watching Smallville, he'd see ads relevant to him, not the ads that are targeted at the High School kids that normally watch the show.
Attaching ads to the viewer rather than the content is exactly what TV needs.
Not necessarily. As you say, a lot of consumers are currently disgusted with the amount of advertising they're inundated with.
Personalized ads could stand to change the max point on the revenue curve - if you can make the same amount of money with less ads, and attract more consumers to your content *because* there are less ads, there's a net gain for the content provider. It's possible that you'd drive away more consumers by having more than two or three ads than you could hope to make up for by charging for those extra ads.
Family Guy, as I recall, got a lot of flac for being controversial - besides the potty humor, sex jokes, and violence, they managed to target just about every special interest and minority under the sun. Not even in a satirical way, but a lets-stereotype-and-make-fun-of-it way. Family Guy had a decent viewership in its first run, but not enough to ride out the controversy it stirred up.
Firefly, I believe, was a victim of internal politics - the executives who greenlighted it got fired and the new executives rather intentionally mishandled it. Futurama was either a victim of something similar, or else simple gross incompetence.
Shows like Wonderfalls, I can't figure out why they even greenlight them, since they obviously have no interest in supporting them once they're on the air. It's such a quirky premise that it can only ever hope to develop a cult following - but a cult following takes a long time to develop - at least a season, possibly two or three. You can debate the wisdom of taking a risk on a cult show that will see most of its profits only in afterlife, but if you're going to produce one and put it on the air, at least have the balls to see it through. Cancelling it after four epsisodes is just a monumental waste of money.
Google is directly competing with Microsoft by developing a competing operating system - it's called the web. Bill Gates was afraid of this back when he crushed Netscape - seems all he managed to do was delay the inevitable.
The web threatens to render Windows irrelevant, because the only thing you need to access web applications is a machine capable of running Firefox (or any other web browser).
Google currently dominates this space - its leading the way not only in developing these OS agnostic web applications, but is fast on its way to becoming the default "operating system" that the web runs on - just think of Google API's as DLL files.
And as more core applications move to this new operating system, the less it matters what operating system the local system is running - Gmail, Google Maps, or a hypothetical Google Office suite works exactly the same on a Macintosh as it does on Linux as it does on Windows XP or Vista. The local operating system becomes the equivalent of choosing between an HP or Dell.
That's why this "IBM is our biggest competitor" is a line of BS. Twenty years ago, Microsoft rendered the hardware (and therefore IBM) irrelevant by making the software all important and hardware agnostic. Now the network threatens to make the software irrelevant in exactly the same way.
There were mp3 players before the iPod too. Brand and technology maturation count for a lot.
There are a lot of reasons why the market might now exist for "internet appliances" whereas they didn't just a few years ago. The robustness of web applications, broadband, the ubiquity of wifi networks, the presence of HDTV's to use as monitors. A dumb terminal to the internet has a much greater chance of working and being useful now than it did not that long ago.
I think there have been instances where blogs blew apart the MSM. During Hurricane Katrina, I'm convinced that CNN, Fox News, etc. simply didn't have the faintest clue what was going on.
In that case at least, it was the blogs that really generated the best coverage. People who were physically there, living it, reporting it - and finding its way into the blogosphere largely via cell phones and other communications devices. Since then, blogs have been just about the only way to stay on top of what's going on in New Orleans, since the MSM has long since moved on. I think that's just a situation where they really shine.
By contrast, I think they're pretty overrated when it comes to politics. The best a blogger can do is offer opinion on stories printed by the professional journalists that have networks and sources. That's not likely to change until bloggers can get the same access to politicians that those journalists have. Political blogs right now are really only useful for telling me which stories in the papers I should be reading on any given day, I don't think any of them are really making news - they're "citizen pundits" rather than "citizen journalists".
The other thing I'll note, I think that technology news *has* evolved to the point where blogs have effectively replaced professional journalists - just look at how many tech companies themselves have official blogs now, as well as the industry bigwigs and newsmakers, as well as those columnists that write for papers and magazines. Because tech news usually boils down to a press release, there's rarely any advantage a professional journalist has over a non-professional in this arena - and I think that blogs, working collectively, much more quickly and more accurately discern "what it means" than in the old days of printed media.
Yeah, I use Google's reader too. The interface is a little clunky, IMHO, but we're just learning that's because "lens" is little more than a proof of concept for the API to be released next month. The cool thing is that much like with Google Maps, we'll see a lot of interesting mashups appearing once the API is out there. Let Google worry about parsing all the formats and feeds, and anyone else can just focus on designing interfaces for the data.
I also only browse about 4-5 sites a day and no blogs, so I don't have the volume of sites I check to make it useful. This might be one of the key differences in RSS being useful or not - the volume of sites you check.
Bingo. Before I used to use RSS, there were about 10 sites a day I would check. Now that I do, I'm subscribed to about 70 (that I read, anyway).
It also depends heavily on the kind of site you want to check and the type of feed they offer. CNN's feeds are borderline useless, they only give the headline. BBC at least gives an article summary so I can decide whether I want to click through - but you get flooded if you subscribe to their main page.
Ideally, it's best for the sites which just syndicate the entirety of the content - essentially allowing you to read several sites at once with a common interface. More often than not, that's blogs, not the mainstream news sites.
Wired is better performance-wise than wireless, this is true.
But unless you're moving around multiple gigabyte files across your home network, I honestly can't see how you'd notice the difference. I get an effective bandwidth of about 20 Mbs on my Wireless G, which suits me just fine considering that I only get 3 Mbs from my cable modem anyway. I can play games, surf the web, and run bittorrent just as well off my wireless connection as I can from the wired PC.
Now, I do wind up rebooting my router an average of about once a month. I suppose it's an annoyance, but in truth the 15 seconds it takes to reboot it never bothered me too much. I have more and longer internet outages because of either my ISP or power outages.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to wire my house with a gigabit LAN. But beyond the fact that it's simply not practical to do so (one of the reasons I adopted Wi-Fi early on was an inability to get ethernet cords where I wanted them), wireless is just more convenient. It's annoying to carry ethernet cords with you whereever you go, and being limited to within a few feet of a jack would go a long way towards defeating the reason I have a laptop in the first place.
The range covers every room of my house, a good chunk of the backyard, and my front porch, without quite making it out to the street, at least not reliably. I can't say I've ever noticed signal fluctuations affecting performance except for when I'm on the very edge of that range.
The bottom line is that there's a negligible performance trade off for a huge amount of convenience. I guess every person has a different experience, but I gotta say it works for me.
Audio Blogs/Podcasts aren't meant to be consumed while you work in front of the computer, at least as far as I'm concerned.
They're the replacement radio. For those of who can't stand clearchannel top 40 crap or the talking heads on the AM band - podcasts are a godsend. I can find much more varied content, customize what I want to listen to, pause and play back, listen to it on the train, in the car, walking around the supermarket, and as a bonus I don't have to put up with nearly the same level of obnoxious ads.
Video casts, similarly, are going to be the replacement for TV. I don't watch TV at work - but while I'm cooking and eating dinner, cleaning, or collapsed on the couch at night, then yeah, I'd love to be able to take a video iPod or whatever, plug it into the TV, and watch the content I'm subscribed to.
As you said, 99% of everything sucks. The beautiful thing about this though is that when you have millions of amateurs doing this, that still leaves thousands which *don't* suck, producing more content than I could hope to consume in a lifetime.
I have to agree, although I think Windows 2000 was far superior to XP. Either way, I've run both for years with hardly a problem, and months between reboots.
I'm not much a fan of MS, but honestly I think Microsoft gets a lot of undeserved flak. (They get a lot of deserved flak too, I just want to be objective for a second.)
Face it, there's a lot of:
1) Shitty drivers. 2) Shitty third party software. 3) Idiot users.
That Microsoft has absolutely no control over and account for an awful lot of the problems so often attributed to problems inherent to Windows. I daresay that if Linux or Mac OS X had a 90% marketshare, you'd see a lot of the same problems with those platforms.
Live is just marketing-speak for dynamic and online, as opposed to static or offline. When you take something "live", you take it online.
So when Microsoft is rebranding these things as "Windows Live", "Office Live", etc - it's essentially saying "Hey look, we're taking our core products and moving them online". It's an admission from Microsoft that the web itself is now a platform that competes with Windows, and this is them playing catch up.
It's obfuscated by the marketing department, obviously (since much of it is a rebranding of products that were already online - the purpose of "Live" is mostly to create a uniform brand for their product line). But that's what it boils down to - Microsoft's strategy for dealing with the web-as-a-platform, which renders the operating system meaningless in much the same way MS Windows once rendered computer hardware meaningless, ending IBM's monopoly. It's Bill Gate's old nightmare from the Netscape days finally being realized.
IMHO, the in-browser (Safari, Firefox) RSS features kind of suck, and are fairly limited in their usefulness.
To really appreciate the technology, you need to be using a good aggregator. For desktop applications, Thunderbird is actually pretty decent (I like that it loads the web pages themselves in the preview pane). Or since you're using a Mac, you might want to try NetNewsWire (I'm not a Mac user so can't say anything about it personally, but I've heard good reviews on that one). Alternative, there are a number of free web-based aggregators out there - Bloglines, Newsgator, Google Reader, probably others I can't think of offhand. All have their own strengths and weaknesses.
For sites like the BBC, I find it's still easier to just go to the site when I want to check the latest news - the problem with it is that it generates so many headlines that your reader quickly gets flooded, and it's unlikely you're interested in all of them anyway.
Where it really shines though is for the sites that don't generate hundreds of headlines, but more like 10 a day, or 10 a week. If you've ever gone to a web site only to find there's no new content since your last visit, or forget to check it because it's updated so infrequently, or if you've missed content because it fell off the front page since your last visit - these are the problem RSS solves.
Personally, I like having a single interface for almost all of the content I like to read on the web. News sites will usually only syndicate the headline and a blurb, but most of the most popular blogs syndicate the entire item, so there's rarely even a need to click through to the web site to read it. I organize my feeds into folders - "Technology", "Politics", etc. It all gets aggregated into one place, and I can effectively read 5-10 sites at once, without seeing what I read already and without ever missing something new. In total I'm subscribed to about 70 feeds that I read - I honestly can't imagine that it would be possible to keep up with that much content manually checking all those sites.
If you've ever used e-mail alerts, it's quite similar, only a better implementation. Another close analog would be usenet, where newsgroups would be downloaded into your reader and there's a distinction between what you've read and haven't.
Plus, there's other uses of the technology besides getting headlines. I wouldn't subscribe to an RSS feed for the weather, but weather widgets certainly make use of them. It's obviously critical to podcasting. My Yahoo and other personalized portals make use of them, and "Friends pages" on social networking sites like Livejournal work by utilizing the RSS feeds. I haven't seen it implemented yet, but it's not hard to imagine their utility for pushing software updates in the future, and there's probably a dozen other uses.
What with the sudden popularity and prevalence of "Web 2.0" applications, I'd say that's the direction we're moving in.
I've done desktop support for a while. I too share your dream of "better software, better hardware" that would magically maintain themselves, clean itself of spyware and automagically make backups of critical data. Frankly it'll never come - the biggest security hole is the user, and it's one so wide I could drive a truck through. When someone gets an email with the subject "!!!!!FREEE V1A6RA!!!!!", and thinks its a good idea to download the attachment, unzip it, and then run the executable found inside... the problem really isn't the quality of the software.
Basically, the only way to really make a system secure is to take away control from morons who don't know what to do with in the first place. For someone like me or (I'm guessing) you, we're properly better off managing sensitive data locally. I know how to keep my system in working order, keep it free of viruses and spyware, and have multiple versions of my data backed up multiple times. For the average joe user though, they're better off with a thin client and letting Microsoft or Google manage it - for them, the threat of malware and system failures is a lot more real than the potential problems of using a third party host (which realistically is pretty marginal - I don't worry that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and be unable to access my Gmail account, for example).
There really needs to be some kind of a distinction between classic Simpsons and the new stuff. The Simpsons hasn't had an episode that I'd even call good in *years*. Other than that I'm with you - I have all the DVD releases so far, and I've caught myself watching the same episode back to back (Really, who can get tired of "Deep Space Homer"?)
I think the problem with rewatchability is that a lot of shows now are story-arc heavy, a lot moreso than they used to be. I'll occasionally re-watch a complete season of Buffy:TVS, but I find picking a random episode and watching it individually to be pretty unappealing. I imagine BSG will be much the same way - at some point I'll want to rewatch the series, but I doubt I'll ever have an interest in the individual episodes. By contrast, a show like The Simpsons or something like ST:TNG, the episodes really don't fit into a larger story and can be viewed individually.
I've done this and continue to do this - my laptop comes along with me pretty much anywhere I go socially, at least when I can reasonably expect to find a wi-fi connection. If my friends and I go to a coffee shop, we all have laptops, and essentially wind up surfing the web together - IM'ing links back and forth, chatting with people not present, and talking with each other at the same time. It's fun, it's convenient, and I daresay it's the norm for the current generation (a few years younger than me) that never knew a world where everyone didn't have their own cell phone or their own computer (or laptop).
And yeah, I've had dates like that too. If you just get together to hang out, the laptop is a part of it - not much different than watching a movie or TV with your date.
With regards to the many complaints of the annoyances brought about by technology - I think another poster nailed it when it was said that people have always been rude, technology just lets them express it in new ways. I get annoyed by obnoxious ringtones and the such too, but then I also get annoyed by any number of behaviors that have nothing to do with technology - yelling, poor hygiene, people that stand in the middle of a busy footpath, etc. So I have an easier time placing the blame where it belongs - people, not the technology.
Personally, I keep my cell phone on vibrate when I'm out in public, and I never raise my voice to talk on it - I'll step outside or resort to text messages if I have to. When I have my laptop in a coffee shop, I either have the volume muted or I'm using headphones. I don't believe I annoy anyone around me with it; the technology is fine when used appropriately.
First off, it is a nice application when it works right, and when you have the time to download such a huge beast.
It just took me five minutes to grab it from bittorrent in the background while I was reading the comments here. Coincidentally it finished just as I got to yours. The install was maybe another minute. Yeah, it'd be nice if they'd just released a simple patch... but unless you're on dialup, I don't see the big complaint.
I have to agree with you on the things that it does "automagically" though, it just serves to piss me off. Why does the program think it knows better what I want to do than I do? IMHO, the OOo team would do well to focus on just making a *good* word processor, rather than trying to clone MS Word and all its flaws (and between the two of them, I think MS Word is the better program, OOo just manages to be a "good enough" replacement). Right now, it's like if Firefox had simply tried to clone IE, rather than building a better browser.
It seems I have not been able to find a decent free word processor among the more popular ones available for Linux.
Well, I guess there's always writely... it's cross platform and at least you can't accuse if of being feature bloated.
Or maybe we're tired of the last decade of Simpson style jokes set in different places(Family guy, American dad, Simpsons and Futurama) and they should try something new?
The best part of Futurama was that it was something new. The Simpsons was a satire of the "Family Comedy" that dominated TV in the 80's and early 90's - a formula featuring a classic nuclear family that focused on the antics of a clueless dad, a reality-grounded wife, a couple of kids and a zany neighbor. Unfortunately, The Simpsons was just a continuation of this formula, although a satirical one. And when you look at Family Guy and American Dad - they're the same thing. Different jokes, but the same premise that's been on TV since the 50's.
Futurama was at least a departure from that: there were no analogs to a nuclear family. No father figure, no lessons learned. It was science fiction satire, but it didn't follow the formula of a typical science fiction/fantasy show. Soap Opera drama was present but used sparingly, and IMHO only when it contributed to the plot. It wasn't completely original (it borrows a lot from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), but it was a hell of a lot different than the majority of TV fare.
Otherwise you end up with a slow, steady descent into medeocrity like the Simpsons.
I've been re-watching the Simpsons in order, trying to figure out exactly when it started to suck. As near as I can figure it happened somewhere in season 9, which is likely the last season I'll get on DVD.
It's interesting to note though that the Simpsons didn't really start to rock until season 4, and didn't peak until seasons 5-6. Seasons 1 and 2, with a few exceptions (Bart the Daredevil) were pretty lame. Notably it seemed to get a lot better in season 3, when it seemed to move from being Bart-centric to Homer-centric.
I don't think that Futurama is very analogous though, as it was pretty consistent in quality throughout. I'd like to see what they could do with a few more seasons.
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Finally, Yahoo's decision to name their product Dashboard is really sad. Apple named theirs dashboard because they had no better name handy, and that was the easiest way to effectively communicate what the product is. The people who came up with the name Konfabulator really hit on a gold nugget from a sheer marketing perspective. Who doesn't want to own a 'Konfabulator?' Yahoo should have kept that name and leveraged it. It's akin to Apple buying the iPod from another company and then renaming it to 'MP3 Player.'
Exactly right. I keep expecting to wake up one day and find out that Flickr has been rebranded "Yahoo! Photo Sharing" and Del.ico.us as "Yahoo! Social Bookmarking"
They seem to have a knack for taking some very cool brands and making them sound about as much fun as oatmeal. I mean I get that they want to promote a brand identity and use descriptive names... but can't they leave well enough alone when it comes to brands already in place?
Why not "Konfabulator" with "a Yahoo! Widget Engine" in the subtext? Or even just "Yahoo! Konfabulator"?
It's really not an issue if they made it easy to copy an older format to the new. My CD collection currently resides in no less than three places: The physical CD's, my hard drive, and my portable player.
If my hard drive changes, as it does on occasion, it's fairly trivial to copy them to a new hard drive (the interface has even changed: IDE to SATA). If I want a new player, again it's trivial. If my last CD player breaks and its impossible to buy a new one... I have the data in newer formats.
How long a specific format lasts really doesn't matter as long as you can exercise your fair use right to format shift the content that you bought and paid for. The problem is that media companies don't want me to exercise the right; they want me to re-purchase the content every time I want to play it using a different format, and are willing to adopt draconian DRM schemes to ensure that I have to.
Heck, the mp3 is good enough for most people, and that's a step backwards from CD's as quality is concerned.
I think the movies studios are seriously overestimating how much people care about quality. Sure, there will always be the high end types that always have to have the latest and greatest home theater equipment - the kind of people who bought laserdiscs back in the pre-DVD days. But the vast majority of people just want to watch the movie, and will do so via the path of least resistance - it's convenience that matters, not quality.
The quality difference between DVD and HD is so marginal even I can barely see a difference, and HD-DVD/BluRay offers exactly *no* additional convenience that a DVD doesn't offer now (and depending on the DRM scheme they settle on, they stand to be a hell of a lot *less* convenient).
The "next" format is going to be some form of digital download, probably around the same level of quality that a DVD offers now. My prediction is that both BluRay and HD-DVD are going to go the way of the laser disk, at least as far as buying movies on them is concerned. They'll find a niche market of high end consumers and that's it.
Well, first of all, I don't see any reason why it can't be done with the existing Google Video service, for people (like me) that would rather watch it on a computer screen or portable device than a TV set anyway.
To get it on the TV, I suspect you'll need something like the "Google box" which was rumored and then denied earlier in the week (Or this Yahoo Go TV thing that was just announced) - a network device with a TV hookup, that pulls video from the internet rather than over Cable (and why I think those rumors of Google hardware might not have been too far off the mark after all). Or, as TV is moving to digital anyway (in 2009 now I think?), maybe it'll be something that works with existing cable TV, transforming it from something that's pushed into homes into something that's pulled from cable company servers.
The whole idea of "broadcasting" TV is dying anyway. I'd expect any service that Google or Yahoo offers to be based on the idea of narrowcasting (or "podcasting"), however they manage to accomplish it. The future is all about getting the content that you want (a la carte), the way you want it (TV, computer, portable), on the terms you want (free with targeted ads, pay for no ads). Certain companies might have to be dragged kicking and screaming into it, but I think it's what the market wants and in the end, the market gets what it wants.
Plus, why would they adopt a strategy any different than Adsense? Google doesn't mind sending you to other web pages, because their ads are on those pages. Similarly, they won't mind sending you to other people's video content.
Actually, this could be the catalyst for an explosion of amateur video content. Imagine: I make a video, doesn't matter what. Some sort of short clip, independent movie, even a regular TV show. I upload it to Google Video. Google dynamically inserts the ads every time someone watches it, and I get paid some micropayment for it.
Good, popular content will become a hit and make the producers a lot of money. Sucky content won't. Google, the mechanism that delivers the right eyeballs to advertisers, makes billions either way.
I'd suspect that if Google did go into the TV advertising realm, we would see more focused advertising based on a show and it's content (topics, actors, genre, etc.) rather than the the focusing on individual preferences as practiced by Google online.
Why? Television advertisers can already tie an ad to the content. They have a pretty good idea of what the average viewer of say, Smallville is, and what products they want to sell to that demographic.
Individual preferences make all the difference in the world. As a guy, I shouldn't be seeing tampon commercials. As a twenty-three year old, I shouldn't be seeing ads for age related prescription drugs. I shouldn't be seeing ads for cars that cost more than my annual income. If, for some reason, a 45 year old business executive was watching Smallville, he'd see ads relevant to him, not the ads that are targeted at the High School kids that normally watch the show.
Attaching ads to the viewer rather than the content is exactly what TV needs.
Not necessarily. As you say, a lot of consumers are currently disgusted with the amount of advertising they're inundated with.
Personalized ads could stand to change the max point on the revenue curve - if you can make the same amount of money with less ads, and attract more consumers to your content *because* there are less ads, there's a net gain for the content provider. It's possible that you'd drive away more consumers by having more than two or three ads than you could hope to make up for by charging for those extra ads.
Nitpick: technically there was no "Season 5". All those episodes were leftovers from season 4; the DVD sets organize them properly.
Family Guy, as I recall, got a lot of flac for being controversial - besides the potty humor, sex jokes, and violence, they managed to target just about every special interest and minority under the sun. Not even in a satirical way, but a lets-stereotype-and-make-fun-of-it way. Family Guy had a decent viewership in its first run, but not enough to ride out the controversy it stirred up.
Firefly, I believe, was a victim of internal politics - the executives who greenlighted it got fired and the new executives rather intentionally mishandled it. Futurama was either a victim of something similar, or else simple gross incompetence.
Shows like Wonderfalls, I can't figure out why they even greenlight them, since they obviously have no interest in supporting them once they're on the air. It's such a quirky premise that it can only ever hope to develop a cult following - but a cult following takes a long time to develop - at least a season, possibly two or three. You can debate the wisdom of taking a risk on a cult show that will see most of its profits only in afterlife, but if you're going to produce one and put it on the air, at least have the balls to see it through. Cancelling it after four epsisodes is just a monumental waste of money.
Google is directly competing with Microsoft by developing a competing operating system - it's called the web. Bill Gates was afraid of this back when he crushed Netscape - seems all he managed to do was delay the inevitable.
The web threatens to render Windows irrelevant, because the only thing you need to access web applications is a machine capable of running Firefox (or any other web browser).
Google currently dominates this space - its leading the way not only in developing these OS agnostic web applications, but is fast on its way to becoming the default "operating system" that the web runs on - just think of Google API's as DLL files.
And as more core applications move to this new operating system, the less it matters what operating system the local system is running - Gmail, Google Maps, or a hypothetical Google Office suite works exactly the same on a Macintosh as it does on Linux as it does on Windows XP or Vista. The local operating system becomes the equivalent of choosing between an HP or Dell.
That's why this "IBM is our biggest competitor" is a line of BS. Twenty years ago, Microsoft rendered the hardware (and therefore IBM) irrelevant by making the software all important and hardware agnostic. Now the network threatens to make the software irrelevant in exactly the same way.
There were mp3 players before the iPod too. Brand and technology maturation count for a lot.
There are a lot of reasons why the market might now exist for "internet appliances" whereas they didn't just a few years ago. The robustness of web applications, broadband, the ubiquity of wifi networks, the presence of HDTV's to use as monitors. A dumb terminal to the internet has a much greater chance of working and being useful now than it did not that long ago.
I think there have been instances where blogs blew apart the MSM. During Hurricane Katrina, I'm convinced that CNN, Fox News, etc. simply didn't have the faintest clue what was going on.
In that case at least, it was the blogs that really generated the best coverage. People who were physically there, living it, reporting it - and finding its way into the blogosphere largely via cell phones and other communications devices. Since then, blogs have been just about the only way to stay on top of what's going on in New Orleans, since the MSM has long since moved on. I think that's just a situation where they really shine.
By contrast, I think they're pretty overrated when it comes to politics. The best a blogger can do is offer opinion on stories printed by the professional journalists that have networks and sources. That's not likely to change until bloggers can get the same access to politicians that those journalists have. Political blogs right now are really only useful for telling me which stories in the papers I should be reading on any given day, I don't think any of them are really making news - they're "citizen pundits" rather than "citizen journalists".
The other thing I'll note, I think that technology news *has* evolved to the point where blogs have effectively replaced professional journalists - just look at how many tech companies themselves have official blogs now, as well as the industry bigwigs and newsmakers, as well as those columnists that write for papers and magazines. Because tech news usually boils down to a press release, there's rarely any advantage a professional journalist has over a non-professional in this arena - and I think that blogs, working collectively, much more quickly and more accurately discern "what it means" than in the old days of printed media.
Yeah, I use Google's reader too. The interface is a little clunky, IMHO, but we're just learning that's because "lens" is little more than a proof of concept for the API to be released next month. The cool thing is that much like with Google Maps, we'll see a lot of interesting mashups appearing once the API is out there. Let Google worry about parsing all the formats and feeds, and anyone else can just focus on designing interfaces for the data.
I also only browse about 4-5 sites a day and no blogs, so I don't have the volume of sites I check to make it useful. This might be one of the key differences in RSS being useful or not - the volume of sites you check.
Bingo. Before I used to use RSS, there were about 10 sites a day I would check. Now that I do, I'm subscribed to about 70 (that I read, anyway).
It also depends heavily on the kind of site you want to check and the type of feed they offer. CNN's feeds are borderline useless, they only give the headline. BBC at least gives an article summary so I can decide whether I want to click through - but you get flooded if you subscribe to their main page.
Ideally, it's best for the sites which just syndicate the entirety of the content - essentially allowing you to read several sites at once with a common interface. More often than not, that's blogs, not the mainstream news sites.
Wired is better performance-wise than wireless, this is true.
But unless you're moving around multiple gigabyte files across your home network, I honestly can't see how you'd notice the difference. I get an effective bandwidth of about 20 Mbs on my Wireless G, which suits me just fine considering that I only get 3 Mbs from my cable modem anyway. I can play games, surf the web, and run bittorrent just as well off my wireless connection as I can from the wired PC.
Now, I do wind up rebooting my router an average of about once a month. I suppose it's an annoyance, but in truth the 15 seconds it takes to reboot it never bothered me too much. I have more and longer internet outages because of either my ISP or power outages.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to wire my house with a gigabit LAN. But beyond the fact that it's simply not practical to do so (one of the reasons I adopted Wi-Fi early on was an inability to get ethernet cords where I wanted them), wireless is just more convenient. It's annoying to carry ethernet cords with you whereever you go, and being limited to within a few feet of a jack would go a long way towards defeating the reason I have a laptop in the first place.
The range covers every room of my house, a good chunk of the backyard, and my front porch, without quite making it out to the street, at least not reliably. I can't say I've ever noticed signal fluctuations affecting performance except for when I'm on the very edge of that range.
The bottom line is that there's a negligible performance trade off for a huge amount of convenience. I guess every person has a different experience, but I gotta say it works for me.
Audio Blogs/Podcasts aren't meant to be consumed while you work in front of the computer, at least as far as I'm concerned.
They're the replacement radio. For those of who can't stand clearchannel top 40 crap or the talking heads on the AM band - podcasts are a godsend. I can find much more varied content, customize what I want to listen to, pause and play back, listen to it on the train, in the car, walking around the supermarket, and as a bonus I don't have to put up with nearly the same level of obnoxious ads.
Video casts, similarly, are going to be the replacement for TV. I don't watch TV at work - but while I'm cooking and eating dinner, cleaning, or collapsed on the couch at night, then yeah, I'd love to be able to take a video iPod or whatever, plug it into the TV, and watch the content I'm subscribed to.
As you said, 99% of everything sucks. The beautiful thing about this though is that when you have millions of amateurs doing this, that still leaves thousands which *don't* suck, producing more content than I could hope to consume in a lifetime.
I have to agree, although I think Windows 2000 was far superior to XP. Either way, I've run both for years with hardly a problem, and months between reboots.
I'm not much a fan of MS, but honestly I think Microsoft gets a lot of undeserved flak. (They get a lot of deserved flak too, I just want to be objective for a second.)
Face it, there's a lot of:
1) Shitty drivers.
2) Shitty third party software.
3) Idiot users.
That Microsoft has absolutely no control over and account for an awful lot of the problems so often attributed to problems inherent to Windows. I daresay that if Linux or Mac OS X had a 90% marketshare, you'd see a lot of the same problems with those platforms.
Live is just marketing-speak for dynamic and online, as opposed to static or offline. When you take something "live", you take it online.
So when Microsoft is rebranding these things as "Windows Live", "Office Live", etc - it's essentially saying "Hey look, we're taking our core products and moving them online". It's an admission from Microsoft that the web itself is now a platform that competes with Windows, and this is them playing catch up.
It's obfuscated by the marketing department, obviously (since much of it is a rebranding of products that were already online - the purpose of "Live" is mostly to create a uniform brand for their product line). But that's what it boils down to - Microsoft's strategy for dealing with the web-as-a-platform, which renders the operating system meaningless in much the same way MS Windows once rendered computer hardware meaningless, ending IBM's monopoly. It's Bill Gate's old nightmare from the Netscape days finally being realized.
IMHO, the in-browser (Safari, Firefox) RSS features kind of suck, and are fairly limited in their usefulness.
To really appreciate the technology, you need to be using a good aggregator. For desktop applications, Thunderbird is actually pretty decent (I like that it loads the web pages themselves in the preview pane). Or since you're using a Mac, you might want to try NetNewsWire (I'm not a Mac user so can't say anything about it personally, but I've heard good reviews on that one). Alternative, there are a number of free web-based aggregators out there - Bloglines, Newsgator, Google Reader, probably others I can't think of offhand. All have their own strengths and weaknesses.
For sites like the BBC, I find it's still easier to just go to the site when I want to check the latest news - the problem with it is that it generates so many headlines that your reader quickly gets flooded, and it's unlikely you're interested in all of them anyway.
Where it really shines though is for the sites that don't generate hundreds of headlines, but more like 10 a day, or 10 a week. If you've ever gone to a web site only to find there's no new content since your last visit, or forget to check it because it's updated so infrequently, or if you've missed content because it fell off the front page since your last visit - these are the problem RSS solves.
Personally, I like having a single interface for almost all of the content I like to read on the web. News sites will usually only syndicate the headline and a blurb, but most of the most popular blogs syndicate the entire item, so there's rarely even a need to click through to the web site to read it. I organize my feeds into folders - "Technology", "Politics", etc. It all gets aggregated into one place, and I can effectively read 5-10 sites at once, without seeing what I read already and without ever missing something new. In total I'm subscribed to about 70 feeds that I read - I honestly can't imagine that it would be possible to keep up with that much content manually checking all those sites.
If you've ever used e-mail alerts, it's quite similar, only a better implementation. Another close analog would be usenet, where newsgroups would be downloaded into your reader and there's a distinction between what you've read and haven't.
Plus, there's other uses of the technology besides getting headlines. I wouldn't subscribe to an RSS feed for the weather, but weather widgets certainly make use of them. It's obviously critical to podcasting. My Yahoo and other personalized portals make use of them, and "Friends pages" on social networking sites like Livejournal work by utilizing the RSS feeds. I haven't seen it implemented yet, but it's not hard to imagine their utility for pushing software updates in the future, and there's probably a dozen other uses.
What with the sudden popularity and prevalence of "Web 2.0" applications, I'd say that's the direction we're moving in.
I've done desktop support for a while. I too share your dream of "better software, better hardware" that would magically maintain themselves, clean itself of spyware and automagically make backups of critical data. Frankly it'll never come - the biggest security hole is the user, and it's one so wide I could drive a truck through. When someone gets an email with the subject "!!!!!FREEE V1A6RA!!!!!", and thinks its a good idea to download the attachment, unzip it, and then run the executable found inside... the problem really isn't the quality of the software.
Basically, the only way to really make a system secure is to take away control from morons who don't know what to do with in the first place. For someone like me or (I'm guessing) you, we're properly better off managing sensitive data locally. I know how to keep my system in working order, keep it free of viruses and spyware, and have multiple versions of my data backed up multiple times. For the average joe user though, they're better off with a thin client and letting Microsoft or Google manage it - for them, the threat of malware and system failures is a lot more real than the potential problems of using a third party host (which realistically is pretty marginal - I don't worry that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and be unable to access my Gmail account, for example).
There really needs to be some kind of a distinction between classic Simpsons and the new stuff. The Simpsons hasn't had an episode that I'd even call good in *years*. Other than that I'm with you - I have all the DVD releases so far, and I've caught myself watching the same episode back to back (Really, who can get tired of "Deep Space Homer"?)
I think the problem with rewatchability is that a lot of shows now are story-arc heavy, a lot moreso than they used to be. I'll occasionally re-watch a complete season of Buffy:TVS, but I find picking a random episode and watching it individually to be pretty unappealing. I imagine BSG will be much the same way - at some point I'll want to rewatch the series, but I doubt I'll ever have an interest in the individual episodes. By contrast, a show like The Simpsons or something like ST:TNG, the episodes really don't fit into a larger story and can be viewed individually.
I've done this and continue to do this - my laptop comes along with me pretty much anywhere I go socially, at least when I can reasonably expect to find a wi-fi connection. If my friends and I go to a coffee shop, we all have laptops, and essentially wind up surfing the web together - IM'ing links back and forth, chatting with people not present, and talking with each other at the same time. It's fun, it's convenient, and I daresay it's the norm for the current generation (a few years younger than me) that never knew a world where everyone didn't have their own cell phone or their own computer (or laptop).
And yeah, I've had dates like that too. If you just get together to hang out, the laptop is a part of it - not much different than watching a movie or TV with your date.
With regards to the many complaints of the annoyances brought about by technology - I think another poster nailed it when it was said that people have always been rude, technology just lets them express it in new ways. I get annoyed by obnoxious ringtones and the such too, but then I also get annoyed by any number of behaviors that have nothing to do with technology - yelling, poor hygiene, people that stand in the middle of a busy footpath, etc. So I have an easier time placing the blame where it belongs - people, not the technology.
Personally, I keep my cell phone on vibrate when I'm out in public, and I never raise my voice to talk on it - I'll step outside or resort to text messages if I have to. When I have my laptop in a coffee shop, I either have the volume muted or I'm using headphones. I don't believe I annoy anyone around me with it; the technology is fine when used appropriately.
First off, it is a nice application when it works right, and when you have the time to download such a huge beast.
It just took me five minutes to grab it from bittorrent in the background while I was reading the comments here. Coincidentally it finished just as I got to yours. The install was maybe another minute. Yeah, it'd be nice if they'd just released a simple patch... but unless you're on dialup, I don't see the big complaint.
I have to agree with you on the things that it does "automagically" though, it just serves to piss me off. Why does the program think it knows better what I want to do than I do? IMHO, the OOo team would do well to focus on just making a *good* word processor, rather than trying to clone MS Word and all its flaws (and between the two of them, I think MS Word is the better program, OOo just manages to be a "good enough" replacement). Right now, it's like if Firefox had simply tried to clone IE, rather than building a better browser.
It seems I have not been able to find a decent free word processor among the more popular ones available for Linux.
Well, I guess there's always writely... it's cross platform and at least you can't accuse if of being feature bloated.
Or maybe we're tired of the last decade of Simpson style jokes set in different places(Family guy, American dad, Simpsons and Futurama) and they should try something new?
The best part of Futurama was that it was something new. The Simpsons was a satire of the "Family Comedy" that dominated TV in the 80's and early 90's - a formula featuring a classic nuclear family that focused on the antics of a clueless dad, a reality-grounded wife, a couple of kids and a zany neighbor. Unfortunately, The Simpsons was just a continuation of this formula, although a satirical one. And when you look at Family Guy and American Dad - they're the same thing. Different jokes, but the same premise that's been on TV since the 50's.
Futurama was at least a departure from that: there were no analogs to a nuclear family. No father figure, no lessons learned. It was science fiction satire, but it didn't follow the formula of a typical science fiction/fantasy show. Soap Opera drama was present but used sparingly, and IMHO only when it contributed to the plot. It wasn't completely original (it borrows a lot from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), but it was a hell of a lot different than the majority of TV fare.
Otherwise you end up with a slow, steady descent into medeocrity like the Simpsons.
I've been re-watching the Simpsons in order, trying to figure out exactly when it started to suck. As near as I can figure it happened somewhere in season 9, which is likely the last season I'll get on DVD.
It's interesting to note though that the Simpsons didn't really start to rock until season 4, and didn't peak until seasons 5-6. Seasons 1 and 2, with a few exceptions (Bart the Daredevil) were pretty lame. Notably it seemed to get a lot better in season 3, when it seemed to move from being Bart-centric to Homer-centric.
I don't think that Futurama is very analogous though, as it was pretty consistent in quality throughout. I'd like to see what they could do with a few more seasons.