When colleges were paid for primarily by the student or private funds, you KNEW what type of college you were attending. The best schools even had professors who still worked in the industry "Those who can't do, teach" was not really an accurate cliche.
When was this? Oh, right. Back in the 1930s, when only a small fraction of the population attended college, before World War II and the GI Bill. You knew what you were getting alright. You were getting an elitist preserve of WASP men that excluded virtually everyone else.
Now we have primarily public funding in college. What do you expect but State-loving socialists instead of true masters of academia? Is college even necessary [lewrockwell.com] if you're to go on to a non-science profession?
The humanities in academia are obviously dominated by liberal Democrats, which is probably not good for academic discourse. As to whether the cause is public funding can be debated, particularly in the absence of proof. If public funding automatically leads to socialism, then the military ought to be populated by Lefties. As to whether a college education is necessary for non-science people, that seems to be an obvious expression of bias: The sciences require learning and rigorous thinking, but the humanities do not.
One of the few professors I still admire is Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who had something to say [lewrockwell.com] about the system and the garbage bin it has fallen into. I'm not sure we'll see any real changes until we remove the federal funding of education from all education, especially the college grants and loans that the government seems to happy to dole out.
That would certainly make changes. Things could go back to the way they were back in the halcyon days before the GI Bill and the democratization of higher education, when Jews could be excluded by policies crafted specifically to deny them entrance into top schools. I suppose that doesn't matter if you're a white male, but a lot of other people out there might not be so excited about the society without democracy that Hans-Hermann Hoppe advocates. He goes far beyond the question of public funding of higher education, and into the realm misty-eyed libertarianism, where unimpeded commerce rids us of all social ills:
In subsidizing the malingerers, the neurotics, the careless, the alcoholics, the drug addicts, the Aids-infected, and the physically and mentally 'challenged' through insurance regulation and compulsory health insurance, there will be more illness, malingering, neuroticism, carelessness, alcoholism, drug addiction, Aids infection, and physical and mental retardation. By forcing non-criminals, including the victims of crime, to pay for the imprisonment of criminals (rather than making criminals compensate their victims and pay the full cost of their own apprehension and incarceration), crime will increase. By forcing businessmen, through 'affirmative action' ('non-discrimination') programs, to employ more women, homosexuals, blacks, or other 'minorities' than they would like to, there will be more employed minorities, and fewer employers and fewer male, heterosexual, and white employment. By compelling private land owners to subsidize ('protect') 'endangered species' residing on their land through environmental legislation, there will be more and better-off animals, and fewer and worse-off humans.
Do you suppose the good Professor would have wanted to fight to free slaves in the days leading up to the American Civil War? Would he have fought for a woman's right to vote? He obviously would not have wanted the government to stop "businessmen" from employing 10-year old children. But hey, economic efficiency invariably leads to nirvana for white males, who cares if the scum have to suffer?
Technology, VCs, and Users
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Web 3.0
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Users tend to like Web 2.0 apps. A friend of mine showed me his company's Basecamp setup and I was blown away. He had over 30 employees and outside vendors working on about a dozen different projects, and all of it was managed in Basecamp. For $100/month, he is able to keep much better track of everything than in the past, when he relied on Entourage and a variety of other apps to pull it all together. He has people using Windows, he has people using Macs. He has a slim IT department. His people actually enjoy using Backpack, which also makes his job easier, because he doesn't have to cajole them all the time.
The best of the Web 2.0 apps have a transformative effect for users not because of any technological revolution, but because the apps feel much more like client-side apps. They operate smoothly and feel more fluid. Scoffing at this is akin to saying that user interface improvements are not very important, which is odd coming from someone like Zeldman. Even subtle changes in how an app works at the user end can make a huge difference in how the user feels about the app. The very fact that people refer to Web 2.0 products as apps rather than sites shows this. Sure, dynamic websites have always really been applications. It's just that to most users, they didn't feel that way. Now, because of new coding approaches, the apps feel like apps.
Is this an epic revolution? No. But it is the start of something new, in that a host of small companies with far less startup funding than in the Dot Com era are starting to pop up. They're trying different things. Many of them are trying the same things in slightly different ways. Most of them will not last very long. But this time, the money situation is different. Web 2.0 isn't about huge VC money and absurdly valued IPOs. It's about real businesses following established business practices. Figure out how to make something that people want to use. Figure out how to make money doing it. Go do it.
I can understand why Zeldman is wary of the hype, but just because the VCs are jumping on the bandwagon doesn't mean that Web 2.0 is pure hype. To me it is invigorating to check out my TechCrunch feed and see so many interesting web applications popping up. The future has not yet been commoditized. As a whole, the web development community has learned a great deal about what works and what doesn't, not just from a technology perspective, but from a business persepective. In my opinion, Web 2.0 is much more about applying those lessons than about the breathless hyperbole of VCs. It really is different from the Dot Com era.
The most carpul tunnel-inducing game I ever played was Shadowrun (though I'm sure others can name worse).
Aftermath! back in early 1980s (don't ask me how old I am) used a system combining a d20 to hit (including many complicated modifiers), a d100 for hit location, and variable damage dice. Armor reduced damage after damage was calculated, and the amount of damage prevented by a particular type of armor could vary depending on the type of damage inflicted (projectile, bashing, etc.).
It was a ludicrously complicated game, and combat between four or five PCs and a half-dozen opponents could easily take an hour to complete. Still, we loved it. Then again, we had more time than we knew what to do with. To think that I could have been learning the piano or playing on the football team or actually working on my homework during all those hours that were consumeed by battles between the grim survivors of the apocalypse and their mutant enemies.
As for elegant RPG systems, the second and third editions of RuneQuest win, hands-down in my book. RQ was attribute and skills-based. Everything, including magic, had skill percentages attached. Becoming better at skills became more difficult as you improved, so building up a truly powerful character took real effort. There were no feats or talents, but RQ's simplicity encouraged more role-playing and less power gaming. It also encouraged you to be careful with combat, because even the most powerful character could be taken out with a couple of lucky shots.
These original RQ rules served as the basis for the Call of Cthulhu rules, and a host of other games (like Stormbringer!) which have since faded into the same obscurity that long ago enveloped Aftermath! I play d20 games now, primarily because my gaming friends and I only get to play about four times a year, and we decided to standardize on one set of rules that would apply to a variety of genres. Still, the use of PC classes to define characters seems limiting to me, and the hit die mechanics of combat make for (in my opinion) an artificial distinction between weak characters and godlike characters. In all of the best fantasy and sci-fi fiction, even the most powerful character can be taken down by a lucky or inspired but weaker character. That just doesn't happen in d20, which leads to more wargaming/power gaming, and less roleplaying.
Judging by the review, this book is filled with overqualified obfuscated definitions of simple concepts that have never needed names before and don't now. I doubt I'll ever need to read this blinding glimpse of the obvious.
I finished the book a few days ago. For me it was a difficult book to put down - I powered through it quickly because I was so absorbed by it. The review didn't really get to the heart of why the book is so good. In my opinion, Morville excels at explaining complex interactions and bringing important questions to light. He does this by starting out with clear definitions of the terms he is investigating. For example, the term *findability* is about more than finding what you're looking for; it's also about discovering information objects which you were not explicitly looking for, but that provide the information you need. Some of the concepts may not need names, but having terms to define concepts makes it easier to discuss them.
Morville's discussion of the marriage of the physical and virtual worlds through geocaching and tagging is particularly illuminating, as is his comparison of taxonomies, ontologies, and folksonomies. These are not just academic terms; they have great bearing on how information is organized and found. I also found the inquiry into what constitutes a document to be very thought-provoking.
Ambient Findability is not a book full of answers. It outlines how we find data, how technology is changing that process, and what opportunities and dangers await us in the future. The topics Morville raises affect much more than just commerce, and his plea for information literacy is an important warning. Technology is only half of the equation, and it can create new problems even as it solves old ones.
If you want a receipe book for SEO, this won't really help you very much. If you want to know how people find information and how human behavior affects information technology and vice-versa, you'll probably enjoy this book.
I don't understand hostility to RSS. To me it's one of the best things that ever happened to the Internet. Setting up RSS feeds is not difficult, and obtaining them isn't either. If most people don't use RSS feeds, is that really such a big deal?
And, actually, the old Netnews protocol does the same job. More efficiently, using less bandwidth.
That's great, but if you're arguing that nobody uses RSS because the demand is artificially being driven by content producers, what makes you think netnews is better for real-world use, given that most Internet users in 2006 don't know what netnews is either?
"Now, you can shove your crap right onto user's machines, when you want to." It's about making the Web into a broadcast medium.
Push technology *was* about making the Web a broadcast medium. RSS is not. PointCast and Backweb sucked eggs through a straw. I was tasked with evaluating push for an organization that had a lot of money to spend on cutting-edge Net technology. In the end the single biggest thing that killed push for us was that the apps were absolute resource hogs. It was virtually impossible to get anything else done while they were running. Something that should have been lightweight and nonintrusive became something you had to manage every few minutes.
RSS is a means by which I can quickly skim through a wide variety of information sources that I set up according to my own needs. I actually have more control over how I obtain information using an RSS reader like NetNewsWire than I do by moving from site to site in a browser. For one thing, there is far less extraneous visual crap to manage. If I already know what a site is offering, I don't want to have to see the marketing language on the home page every time I simply want some new information. I can always bounce over to the site and explore further.
I wouldn't call RSS perfect, but it allows me to obtain news and opinions from sites I like about the topics I am interested in far more efficiently than I could if I bounced from website to website in a browser. It's nothing like broadcast, which is about shoving the whole damned thing in your face. RSS provides flexibility and puts power in the hands of the user.
Look at the number of chain letter emails in your spam folder that are filled with misinformation easily checked at Snopes. Otherwise intelligent people pass on this crap without realizing they're polluting the information stream with fiction passed off as facts.
In the United States we need an education system that is actually oriented around giving children the ability to analyze information and make rational decisions. If you know how to swim, an ocean of information isn't very scary.
I find it very disturbing that people far younger than I, who have grown up in the Internet Age, often have no idea that the information they are absorbing is not all equally reliable. One of the first things I learned in school was that you can't believe everything you read. Perhaps we've forgotten how to teach that lesson, even though it is more important now than ever before.
The push is on to privatize schools and abandon the government's role in education. Market forces being what they are, I wouldn't be surprised if education conglomerates began to take over K-12 education. While privatization of education might not be a bad thing in other respects, something tells me large for-profit entities wouldn't be interested in pushing a curriculum that fosters healthy scepticism of marketing, mainstream media, and corporations.
They expect to spur demand, but is that rational?
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'Intel Inside' No More
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· Score: 1
Intel explains it as creating a recognizable brand that makes people comfortable when they're shelling out big bucks on a new computer (mind you, they use different words). This increases demand and makes OEMs happy because they are essentially riding on the coattails of Intel's branding effort. It also makes Intel happy, because regardless of which OEM sells the machine, as long as it's got an Intel chip inside, Intel makes money.
That said, not everyone believes that branding really provides much value to companies. I'd say that in general whether you believe in the power of branding or not depends in large part on how much money you've spent on branding and how successful your company has been in the marketplace. If you've spent a lot of money on branding and have risen to dominate your market, you likely won't want to stop your branding efforts, if for no reason other than to avoid rocking the boat. I'm sure many big branding spenders don't have much emperical data to back up their belief that branding is effective. On the other hand, bean counters aren't always very good at incorporating intangibles into their calculations. When is the last time you heard a CFO say, "Yeah, we need to spend more money on tech support, so people will get a warm fuzzy feeling after we respond to their problem."
Yeah this is a clear cut case of them using their monopoly position to undercut Sony
If MS successfully undercuts Sony by leveraging their Windows dominance, then I suppose Microsoft's monopoly power won't be diminishing as quickly as some of us would like. On the other hand, if they try it and fail, we'll have some strong evidence that Microsoft can no longer tell OEMs when and how high to jump.
Also, if MS uses the same sort of "incentive" deals it has used in the past, that would seem to be rather clear evidence that Microsoft's internal culture hasn't really changed all that much, despite the company's concerted efforts to appear less bullying. Microsoft could conceivably win the battle over next generation disc technology and lose the larger mindshare war.
They share much in common with this comment of yours, then.
I'd say poot_rootbeer has it right. I don't think calling someone on an obviously hypocritical statement is flamebait. After all, isn't stating an opinion as fact in itself an act of vanity? Isn't maintaining an identity in a public forum and posting your opinions essentially the same thing as blogging?
The summary "why do we keep calling Microsoft a monopoly?" is silly.
Not really. If you read the article, Rob's points are pretty clear. The point isn't whether Microsoft is filled with goodness and light, but whether they actually exert monopoly power now, in December, 2005. I'm no Microsoft fan, but I have to agree with Rob. There is increasing competition in operating systems, Microsoft has been forced to change its pricing in response to the rise of Linux, and Office is facing new threats that are small right now but could be huge in a year or two.
Microsoft has had a difficult time leveraging its dominance in operating systems and office software. Look at the long uphill battle they've had with the XBox. Their record with media ventures is mixed at best. They're locked in a heated struggle with Google, and in the mean time Yahoo! is stealing a march on MSN.
Rob's piece goes against the conventional Slashdot wisdom, but it makes sense. Many Slashdotters have been arguing for some time that Microsoft reached its peak and is on a downhill slide. MS can't exert monopoly power and simultaneously be losing its grip on the industry. The times are changing. Now the question is, if Microsoft really no longer calls the shots in the industry, what does that mean for the other players like Red Hat, IBM, Apple, and Dell?
p.s. - Would any piece stating Microsoft is no longer a monopoly incur a "that was written by a Microsoft attorney" slur?
p.p.s. - What does Fox News have to do with any of this?
Ok, since I may have missed the bus, are you being sarcastic or are you being serious?
Sorry for the late reply. I was being sarcastic there. I'm just getting a bit tired of hearing the same quasi-libertarian, noodle-brained bullshit on Slashdot. People want to cherry-pick. They love the Internet and GPS. When the courts deliver the smackdown on Creationism or overweaning corporate behavior, they cheer. But at the same time they talk about how governments are passe. I've heard endless variations on the theme that representative democracy is hopelessly fucked up.
These people seem to think we can all effortlessly self-organize in meatspace the way we do online. Of course, judging by the MySpace bashing I've seen in Slashdot, alot of Slashdotters don't even have much tolerance for self-organizing online communities that aren't of their liking. Working together with other people takes compromise and hard work.
Government is intrinsically screwed up, but in my opinion that's primarily due to apathy, and the alternative is something most of the denizens of Slashdot haven't ever seen or even contemplated. If you don't have some mechanism for protecting the rights of the few, the people with big enough guns and fat enough wallets take everything. I've seen that environment up close, and it sucks. Life in places where there is no collaborative structure for peaceably sharing power is so far removed from daily life in our gilded world as it would be on another planet.
I've read posts where people actually compare limitations on copyright fair use to physical enslavement. That's how distorted the dialogue becomes when you're living in a cyber-bubble.
Would you prefer we didn't have any of those laws available
The government is intrusive and bad, except when it is needed to stop monopolists from exerting too much power. It did not create the Internet. Coders working in the dark corners of universities created it all by themselves without any government interference. The physical infrastructure of roads, sewers, and power systems that form the basis of the American economy were also created without any meddlesome government interference. In fact, it is very obvious that except where needed to stop overweening corporate actors or to guarantee personal freedoms, the government is a horrible monstrosity that never does anything right. The baby *must* be thrown out with the bathwater, for all our sakes.
Sadly, most, if not all of the SEOs are actually both.
I don't think all SEO specialists employ both ethical and unethical techniques. You've made an awfully broad generalization, and I can understand why, but I used to do a lot of SEO work, and I've come to a different conclusion.
They are trying to figure out how to cheat the system.
There's an awful lot you can do without resorting to "cheating the system," that can have a very positive long-term effect for your search engine position. The basics:
Use of a robots.txt tag
Use of meta description tags
Writing of copy that more accurately emphasizes the products you're trying to sell
Manually submitting a site to numerous search engines and using optimized copy in each submission
Contacting partner companies and asking them to link to your site?
There are a lot of SEO specialists who act unethically, but I don't buy the argument that all of them do. For one thing, it is possible to obtain excellent SEO results without doing anything unethical, using the techniques I listed above.
In my experience, many companies have done nothing to optimize their sites for search engines. This applies to a lot of technology companies you would think are all over SEO. There are also situations where entrants into a market have a huge disadvantage because of the longevity of content and number of links the encumbents enjoy.
For example, I did some work once for a company that was a market leader in a new technology. They were attempting to get their name noticed, but had to compete against huge companies that competed not only in their market, but in several others. The client was at a distinct disadvantage because although their huge competitors were doing nothing new in the market, they were established and therefore had a lot of content that had been on the Web for a few years.
We figured out which keywords to target and began developing content that specifically incorporated those keywords. The important point here is that these keywords accurately reflected the content. There's no need to use bait-and-switch tactics if you actually have something to offer. Companies that rely on sleazy SEO techniques do so because they know they can't succeed on the merits of what they're offering. Companies that rely on legitimate SEO techniques have confidence that their content is worthwhile. Another thing to remember is that when companies employ legit SEO techniques and develop content accordingly, they are responding to demand from search engine users for that very content.
I'd suggest that SEO firms are like many other providers of specialized skills. Some percentage are above-board, and some are scumbags. I agree with you that the percentage of scumbags in the SEO industry is probably higher than in most. But when I did SEO work, I refused to work with a couple of clients because they wanted me to do shady things. I've had conversations with other SEO experts who have turned away clients for similar reasons.
Gamers are used to having their hands on the joystick, so they don't *TALK WITH THEIR HANDS* which is the single most annoying thing to watch when you're cycling along on a narrow shoulder. You look over and see some idiot gesticulating as they drive, whether talking on a hands-free set or to another person in the car. Meanwhile, you're thinking, "Great, if this guy forgets to put his hands back on the wheel, or if he has to react suddenly, I'll wind up as road pizza."
As others have mentioned, when you're driving, you're taking control of a weapon. Even a small amount of carelessness when driving can kill one or more people. I find it mind-boggling how so many people have become anesthetized to the fact that they're actually driving a vehicle. Automatic transmissions, cush interiors, shock absorbtion that cushions the road, and other modern enhancements to automobiles make people remove the sense of inherent danger that makes people pay attention.
It's great that cars are safer and more comfortable than they used to be, but the number of near-accidents I see on a daily basis makes me think that we'd better hurry up with self-driving automobiles. The actual driving part of driving a car has become so secondary that we may as well remove it from human control altogether.
Google's approach is tool-centric. Yahoo is finally consolidating their tools under a community-oriented approach, which may in the long run be better for advertisers. Since the acquisition of flickr, their strategy seems to look more focused. The deli.cio.ous acquisition fits right in with this strategy. All of their beta apps (360, et. al.) are better integrated than their first-generation applications. My feeling is that AOL has more to fear from Yahoo than from Google. While alpha geeks will continue to use Google for the tools, average Internet users may start moving from AOL to Yahoo in droves, enticed by Yahoo's ease of use and broad range of community-oriented services.
The US military defends on technology more than any fighting force in the history of the world. Excessive reliance on technology could become an Achilles Heel. As a military preparedness question, it is a no-brainer that the US military should take a very active interest in cyberwarfare. The neocons certainly didn't invent the idea of military preparedness. Unlike traditional defense hawks, they believe in using that well-prepared military to transform the world in America's image.
As to the Air Force taking the mantle of Cyber Guardian upon itself, I'm not surprised. There is no viable competition for the US Air Force in the air. They've already branched into space, and so far there's no action there. Everyone anticipates that cyberwarfare contracts will only expand in the future. The Air Force wants to be the branch of service running the show and getting all of that money.
Clearly they are not serving their purpose, and should be abolished.
The state of California's criminal laws are flawed. Therefore we should get rid of them.
The American electorate voted in George W. Bush. Therefore we should no longer hold elections.
The USPTO has many internal problems, some of which stem from how the office is funded, some from the pressures on patent agents, and some from rulings outside the control of the patent office itself. Does that mean that patents themselves are no longer serving their purpose? We see almost daily evidence of the limitations and problems of the patent regime as it is currently implemented, but to me that shows that the system needs to be reformed, not eliminated.
If you think the deck is stacked against small innovators now, think about what would happen if patents were elminated altogether. The big players would be free to utterly crush would-be competitors. A properly functioning patent system protects the little guy and the big guy alike. No patent system leaves the little guy completely defenseless.
Blogging is writing and giving it away. Open Source is programming and giving it away. MP3s through Knapster is giving music away.
Free newspapers have been around since the birth of the republic. People have been free to give away their writing for all that time, in spite of the rise of Big Media. Give me one example of Big Media stopping someone from writing their own material and giving it away for free.
Open Source has not been defeated even though Microsoft has attacked it relentlessly. Plus, at this point there are plenty of big players who want Open Source to stick around. In any event, Open Source is still alive and doing very well. The SCO case will likely only solidify the legal underpinnings of Open Source.
P2P networks lost in court because they not only allowed people to infringe on copyrighted material, but because they actively enouraged it. Had they been smarter in their marketing, they may have won their court case on a fair use defense, the way Sony won the Betamax case. It's not about being attacked for "giving away music," it's about profiting from the giving away of pirated music. Nobody is trying to get Magnatune or TMBG to shut down, right?
I won't touch the assertion that everybody who voted for Bush has seen the light and repented their warmongering and bought "Farenheit 911" DVDs and started pooling their resources to save whales.
I wouldn't either. But that's not what I said. I did say: "judging by the opinion polls, even the voters who brought Bush into office are starting to realize that his fear-based policies don't make any sense." There are people on the fringe Right and the fringe Left, but most Americans are in the middle politically. Historically the American voting public do change their minds in the face of evidence, and the evidence against the Bush approach is mounting to a degree that can't be ignored.
When did all the minds close around here?
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The MySpace Generation
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This is amazing. There are a few positive responses to MySpace, but the vast majority of the responses seem to be along the lines of:
1) There are so many low-class/stupid/aesthetically-challenged/offensiv e-in-some-other-way people on MySpace and I can't stand that.
2) MySpace is mostly populated by teenagers, and this particular batch of teenagers is so much worse than teenagers from my generation.
3) MySpace is ripping off the people who use it, through TOS that allow MySpace to profit from content created by MySpace denizens.
4) The content on MySpace is total crap. There's nothing of value on MySpace. Ten thousand monkeys could create better content.
The "I can't stand the people on MySpace" response is similar to the bitching and moaning about blogging, which comes up on Slashdot constantly these days. On the one hand, Slashdotters are happy to carry the torch of freedom, demanding that Big Media should no longer control us, that TV should get hit with a clue stick, and so on. Yet when a community does spring up and people of all kinds, the unwashed digital masses, get on board, it freaks out a lot of Slashdotters. This is so reminiscent of the "if you don't know how to run UNIX, you shouldn't be doing things on the Internet" attitude so prevalent among alpha-geeks in the mid 1990s. The Internet shouldn't just be for geeks, any more than athletics should just be for jocks, or beaches should just be for beautiful people.
Not everyone on MySpace is a teenager. But people seem hungup on the large number of teens on MySpace. Teenagers are teenagers are teenagers are teenagers. My father's generation was the one that screwed up the Vietnam War and turned the whole nation upside down. When they started causing trouble in the early 60s, they were the scourge of America. They turned out ok. A bit self-righteous, but ok.;-) My generation was described as a bunch of shiftless slackers when we were teens. We had no soul, no drive, no moral compass, and nothing to contribute to society. Somehow that opinion changed when we hit the workforce in big numbers and contributed to the boom in the Information Economy. The teenagers of today are obsessed with the superficial, spoiled, and unconnected to reality. I'm sure by the time they reach their 20s and 30s, they'll somehow magically be transformed into good citizens. Funny how that works, isn't it?
The using MySpace are just like any slice of a given population. Some of them have interesting things to say and some of them don't. Some of them are creative and others aren't too imaginative. Maybe the venue attracts one type of person more than another, but generalizing about content on MySpace, even if the generalization is correct, doesn't mean that there's nothing of value on MySpace.
As for the Terms of Service, MySpace users are making an exchange. They get to tap into a huge network of people and information without cost. In return, MySpace (Fox) can use content from MySpace if it wants to, for commercial gain. 99.9% of the content on MySpace, no matter how good, is not going to be used for commercial purposes by Fox, simply because there's so much of it. The content that is good enough (and that depends on how you define "good") to be used by Fox may in some way be exploited commercially. Do you really think that the creator of such content wouldn't be happy to have their content publicized by Fox?
Think back to when you were a bit younger, and imagine that something like MySpace existed at the time. You'd probably be pretty excited by it, perhaps because you hadn't yet become jaded to all things Internet, perhaps because you liked the idea of communicating with people outside of the narrow confines of the community you lived in.
MySpace isn't for me. It obviously isn't for a lot of Slashdot regulars. So what. Get off the high horse. Diversity is good. Peer to peer communication is good. Or should we just go back to the monoculture of NBC, CBS, and ABC?
Slashdot Mirror
When colleges were paid for primarily by the student or private funds, you KNEW what type of college you were attending. The best schools even had professors who still worked in the industry "Those who can't do, teach" was not really an accurate cliche.
When was this? Oh, right. Back in the 1930s, when only a small fraction of the population attended college, before World War II and the GI Bill. You knew what you were getting alright. You were getting an elitist preserve of WASP men that excluded virtually everyone else.
Now we have primarily public funding in college. What do you expect but State-loving socialists instead of true masters of academia? Is college even necessary [lewrockwell.com] if you're to go on to a non-science profession?
The humanities in academia are obviously dominated by liberal Democrats, which is probably not good for academic discourse. As to whether the cause is public funding can be debated, particularly in the absence of proof. If public funding automatically leads to socialism, then the military ought to be populated by Lefties. As to whether a college education is necessary for non-science people, that seems to be an obvious expression of bias: The sciences require learning and rigorous thinking, but the humanities do not.
One of the few professors I still admire is Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who had something to say [lewrockwell.com] about the system and the garbage bin it has fallen into. I'm not sure we'll see any real changes until we remove the federal funding of education from all education, especially the college grants and loans that the government seems to happy to dole out.
That would certainly make changes. Things could go back to the way they were back in the halcyon days before the GI Bill and the democratization of higher education, when Jews could be excluded by policies crafted specifically to deny them entrance into top schools. I suppose that doesn't matter if you're a white male, but a lot of other people out there might not be so excited about the society without democracy that Hans-Hermann Hoppe advocates. He goes far beyond the question of public funding of higher education, and into the realm misty-eyed libertarianism, where unimpeded commerce rids us of all social ills:
Do you suppose the good Professor would have wanted to fight to free slaves in the days leading up to the American Civil War? Would he have fought for a woman's right to vote? He obviously would not have wanted the government to stop "businessmen" from employing 10-year old children. But hey, economic efficiency invariably leads to nirvana for white males, who cares if the scum have to suffer?
As for the old c
He's a businessman, one of three founders of a usability consulting company with six offices in the US.
Looks interesting indeed. Thanks for the link.
Users tend to like Web 2.0 apps. A friend of mine showed me his company's Basecamp setup and I was blown away. He had over 30 employees and outside vendors working on about a dozen different projects, and all of it was managed in Basecamp. For $100/month, he is able to keep much better track of everything than in the past, when he relied on Entourage and a variety of other apps to pull it all together. He has people using Windows, he has people using Macs. He has a slim IT department. His people actually enjoy using Backpack, which also makes his job easier, because he doesn't have to cajole them all the time.
The best of the Web 2.0 apps have a transformative effect for users not because of any technological revolution, but because the apps feel much more like client-side apps. They operate smoothly and feel more fluid. Scoffing at this is akin to saying that user interface improvements are not very important, which is odd coming from someone like Zeldman. Even subtle changes in how an app works at the user end can make a huge difference in how the user feels about the app. The very fact that people refer to Web 2.0 products as apps rather than sites shows this. Sure, dynamic websites have always really been applications. It's just that to most users, they didn't feel that way. Now, because of new coding approaches, the apps feel like apps.
Is this an epic revolution? No. But it is the start of something new, in that a host of small companies with far less startup funding than in the Dot Com era are starting to pop up. They're trying different things. Many of them are trying the same things in slightly different ways. Most of them will not last very long. But this time, the money situation is different. Web 2.0 isn't about huge VC money and absurdly valued IPOs. It's about real businesses following established business practices. Figure out how to make something that people want to use. Figure out how to make money doing it. Go do it.
I can understand why Zeldman is wary of the hype, but just because the VCs are jumping on the bandwagon doesn't mean that Web 2.0 is pure hype. To me it is invigorating to check out my TechCrunch feed and see so many interesting web applications popping up. The future has not yet been commoditized. As a whole, the web development community has learned a great deal about what works and what doesn't, not just from a technology perspective, but from a business persepective. In my opinion, Web 2.0 is much more about applying those lessons than about the breathless hyperbole of VCs. It really is different from the Dot Com era.
The most carpul tunnel-inducing game I ever played was Shadowrun (though I'm sure others can name worse).
Aftermath! back in early 1980s (don't ask me how old I am) used a system combining a d20 to hit (including many complicated modifiers), a d100 for hit location, and variable damage dice. Armor reduced damage after damage was calculated, and the amount of damage prevented by a particular type of armor could vary depending on the type of damage inflicted (projectile, bashing, etc.).
It was a ludicrously complicated game, and combat between four or five PCs and a half-dozen opponents could easily take an hour to complete. Still, we loved it. Then again, we had more time than we knew what to do with. To think that I could have been learning the piano or playing on the football team or actually working on my homework during all those hours that were consumeed by battles between the grim survivors of the apocalypse and their mutant enemies.
As for elegant RPG systems, the second and third editions of RuneQuest win, hands-down in my book. RQ was attribute and skills-based. Everything, including magic, had skill percentages attached. Becoming better at skills became more difficult as you improved, so building up a truly powerful character took real effort. There were no feats or talents, but RQ's simplicity encouraged more role-playing and less power gaming. It also encouraged you to be careful with combat, because even the most powerful character could be taken out with a couple of lucky shots.
These original RQ rules served as the basis for the Call of Cthulhu rules, and a host of other games (like Stormbringer!) which have since faded into the same obscurity that long ago enveloped Aftermath! I play d20 games now, primarily because my gaming friends and I only get to play about four times a year, and we decided to standardize on one set of rules that would apply to a variety of genres. Still, the use of PC classes to define characters seems limiting to me, and the hit die mechanics of combat make for (in my opinion) an artificial distinction between weak characters and godlike characters. In all of the best fantasy and sci-fi fiction, even the most powerful character can be taken down by a lucky or inspired but weaker character. That just doesn't happen in d20, which leads to more wargaming/power gaming, and less roleplaying.
Judging by the review, this book is filled with overqualified obfuscated definitions of simple concepts that have never needed names before and don't now. I doubt I'll ever need to read this blinding glimpse of the obvious.
I finished the book a few days ago. For me it was a difficult book to put down - I powered through it quickly because I was so absorbed by it. The review didn't really get to the heart of why the book is so good. In my opinion, Morville excels at explaining complex interactions and bringing important questions to light. He does this by starting out with clear definitions of the terms he is investigating. For example, the term *findability* is about more than finding what you're looking for; it's also about discovering information objects which you were not explicitly looking for, but that provide the information you need. Some of the concepts may not need names, but having terms to define concepts makes it easier to discuss them.
Morville's discussion of the marriage of the physical and virtual worlds through geocaching and tagging is particularly illuminating, as is his comparison of taxonomies, ontologies, and folksonomies. These are not just academic terms; they have great bearing on how information is organized and found. I also found the inquiry into what constitutes a document to be very thought-provoking.
Ambient Findability is not a book full of answers. It outlines how we find data, how technology is changing that process, and what opportunities and dangers await us in the future. The topics Morville raises affect much more than just commerce, and his plea for information literacy is an important warning. Technology is only half of the equation, and it can create new problems even as it solves old ones.
If you want a receipe book for SEO, this won't really help you very much. If you want to know how people find information and how human behavior affects information technology and vice-versa, you'll probably enjoy this book.
I don't understand hostility to RSS. To me it's one of the best things that ever happened to the Internet. Setting up RSS feeds is not difficult, and obtaining them isn't either. If most people don't use RSS feeds, is that really such a big deal?
And, actually, the old Netnews protocol does the same job. More efficiently, using less bandwidth.
That's great, but if you're arguing that nobody uses RSS because the demand is artificially being driven by content producers, what makes you think netnews is better for real-world use, given that most Internet users in 2006 don't know what netnews is either?
"Now, you can shove your crap right onto user's machines, when you want to." It's about making the Web into a broadcast medium.
Push technology *was* about making the Web a broadcast medium. RSS is not. PointCast and Backweb sucked eggs through a straw. I was tasked with evaluating push for an organization that had a lot of money to spend on cutting-edge Net technology. In the end the single biggest thing that killed push for us was that the apps were absolute resource hogs. It was virtually impossible to get anything else done while they were running. Something that should have been lightweight and nonintrusive became something you had to manage every few minutes.
RSS is a means by which I can quickly skim through a wide variety of information sources that I set up according to my own needs. I actually have more control over how I obtain information using an RSS reader like NetNewsWire than I do by moving from site to site in a browser. For one thing, there is far less extraneous visual crap to manage. If I already know what a site is offering, I don't want to have to see the marketing language on the home page every time I simply want some new information. I can always bounce over to the site and explore further.
I wouldn't call RSS perfect, but it allows me to obtain news and opinions from sites I like about the topics I am interested in far more efficiently than I could if I bounced from website to website in a browser. It's nothing like broadcast, which is about shoving the whole damned thing in your face. RSS provides flexibility and puts power in the hands of the user.
Look at the number of chain letter emails in your spam folder that are filled with misinformation easily checked at Snopes. Otherwise intelligent people pass on this crap without realizing they're polluting the information stream with fiction passed off as facts.
In the United States we need an education system that is actually oriented around giving children the ability to analyze information and make rational decisions. If you know how to swim, an ocean of information isn't very scary.
I find it very disturbing that people far younger than I, who have grown up in the Internet Age, often have no idea that the information they are absorbing is not all equally reliable. One of the first things I learned in school was that you can't believe everything you read. Perhaps we've forgotten how to teach that lesson, even though it is more important now than ever before.
The push is on to privatize schools and abandon the government's role in education. Market forces being what they are, I wouldn't be surprised if education conglomerates began to take over K-12 education. While privatization of education might not be a bad thing in other respects, something tells me large for-profit entities wouldn't be interested in pushing a curriculum that fosters healthy scepticism of marketing, mainstream media, and corporations.
That said, not everyone believes that branding really provides much value to companies. I'd say that in general whether you believe in the power of branding or not depends in large part on how much money you've spent on branding and how successful your company has been in the marketplace. If you've spent a lot of money on branding and have risen to dominate your market, you likely won't want to stop your branding efforts, if for no reason other than to avoid rocking the boat. I'm sure many big branding spenders don't have much emperical data to back up their belief that branding is effective. On the other hand, bean counters aren't always very good at incorporating intangibles into their calculations. When is the last time you heard a CFO say, "Yeah, we need to spend more money on tech support, so people will get a warm fuzzy feeling after we respond to their problem."
If MS successfully undercuts Sony by leveraging their Windows dominance, then I suppose Microsoft's monopoly power won't be diminishing as quickly as some of us would like. On the other hand, if they try it and fail, we'll have some strong evidence that Microsoft can no longer tell OEMs when and how high to jump.
Also, if MS uses the same sort of "incentive" deals it has used in the past, that would seem to be rather clear evidence that Microsoft's internal culture hasn't really changed all that much, despite the company's concerted efforts to appear less bullying. Microsoft could conceivably win the battle over next generation disc technology and lose the larger mindshare war.
I'd say poot_rootbeer has it right. I don't think calling someone on an obviously hypocritical statement is flamebait. After all, isn't stating an opinion as fact in itself an act of vanity? Isn't maintaining an identity in a public forum and posting your opinions essentially the same thing as blogging?
Not really. If you read the article, Rob's points are pretty clear. The point isn't whether Microsoft is filled with goodness and light, but whether they actually exert monopoly power now, in December, 2005. I'm no Microsoft fan, but I have to agree with Rob. There is increasing competition in operating systems, Microsoft has been forced to change its pricing in response to the rise of Linux, and Office is facing new threats that are small right now but could be huge in a year or two.
Microsoft has had a difficult time leveraging its dominance in operating systems and office software. Look at the long uphill battle they've had with the XBox. Their record with media ventures is mixed at best. They're locked in a heated struggle with Google, and in the mean time Yahoo! is stealing a march on MSN.
Rob's piece goes against the conventional Slashdot wisdom, but it makes sense. Many Slashdotters have been arguing for some time that Microsoft reached its peak and is on a downhill slide. MS can't exert monopoly power and simultaneously be losing its grip on the industry. The times are changing. Now the question is, if Microsoft really no longer calls the shots in the industry, what does that mean for the other players like Red Hat, IBM, Apple, and Dell?
p.s. - Would any piece stating Microsoft is no longer a monopoly incur a "that was written by a Microsoft attorney" slur?
p.p.s. - What does Fox News have to do with any of this?
Sorry for the late reply. I was being sarcastic there. I'm just getting a bit tired of hearing the same quasi-libertarian, noodle-brained bullshit on Slashdot. People want to cherry-pick. They love the Internet and GPS. When the courts deliver the smackdown on Creationism or overweaning corporate behavior, they cheer. But at the same time they talk about how governments are passe. I've heard endless variations on the theme that representative democracy is hopelessly fucked up.
These people seem to think we can all effortlessly self-organize in meatspace the way we do online. Of course, judging by the MySpace bashing I've seen in Slashdot, alot of Slashdotters don't even have much tolerance for self-organizing online communities that aren't of their liking. Working together with other people takes compromise and hard work.
Government is intrinsically screwed up, but in my opinion that's primarily due to apathy, and the alternative is something most of the denizens of Slashdot haven't ever seen or even contemplated. If you don't have some mechanism for protecting the rights of the few, the people with big enough guns and fat enough wallets take everything. I've seen that environment up close, and it sucks. Life in places where there is no collaborative structure for peaceably sharing power is so far removed from daily life in our gilded world as it would be on another planet.
I've read posts where people actually compare limitations on copyright fair use to physical enslavement. That's how distorted the dialogue becomes when you're living in a cyber-bubble.
The government is intrusive and bad, except when it is needed to stop monopolists from exerting too much power. It did not create the Internet. Coders working in the dark corners of universities created it all by themselves without any government interference. The physical infrastructure of roads, sewers, and power systems that form the basis of the American economy were also created without any meddlesome government interference. In fact, it is very obvious that except where needed to stop overweening corporate actors or to guarantee personal freedoms, the government is a horrible monstrosity that never does anything right. The baby *must* be thrown out with the bathwater, for all our sakes.
I don't think all SEO specialists employ both ethical and unethical techniques. You've made an awfully broad generalization, and I can understand why, but I used to do a lot of SEO work, and I've come to a different conclusion.
They are trying to figure out how to cheat the system.
There's an awful lot you can do without resorting to "cheating the system," that can have a very positive long-term effect for your search engine position. The basics:
Use of a robots.txt tag
Use of meta description tags
Writing of copy that more accurately emphasizes the products you're trying to sell
Manually submitting a site to numerous search engines and using optimized copy in each submission
Contacting partner companies and asking them to link to your site?
There are a lot of SEO specialists who act unethically, but I don't buy the argument that all of them do. For one thing, it is possible to obtain excellent SEO results without doing anything unethical, using the techniques I listed above.
In my experience, many companies have done nothing to optimize their sites for search engines. This applies to a lot of technology companies you would think are all over SEO. There are also situations where entrants into a market have a huge disadvantage because of the longevity of content and number of links the encumbents enjoy.
For example, I did some work once for a company that was a market leader in a new technology. They were attempting to get their name noticed, but had to compete against huge companies that competed not only in their market, but in several others. The client was at a distinct disadvantage because although their huge competitors were doing nothing new in the market, they were established and therefore had a lot of content that had been on the Web for a few years.
We figured out which keywords to target and began developing content that specifically incorporated those keywords. The important point here is that these keywords accurately reflected the content. There's no need to use bait-and-switch tactics if you actually have something to offer. Companies that rely on sleazy SEO techniques do so because they know they can't succeed on the merits of what they're offering. Companies that rely on legitimate SEO techniques have confidence that their content is worthwhile. Another thing to remember is that when companies employ legit SEO techniques and develop content accordingly, they are responding to demand from search engine users for that very content.
I'd suggest that SEO firms are like many other providers of specialized skills. Some percentage are above-board, and some are scumbags. I agree with you that the percentage of scumbags in the SEO industry is probably higher than in most. But when I did SEO work, I refused to work with a couple of clients because they wanted me to do shady things. I've had conversations with other SEO experts who have turned away clients for similar reasons.
Thanks for the "Bravo!" in there. I needed a lift today.
As others have mentioned, when you're driving, you're taking control of a weapon. Even a small amount of carelessness when driving can kill one or more people. I find it mind-boggling how so many people have become anesthetized to the fact that they're actually driving a vehicle. Automatic transmissions, cush interiors, shock absorbtion that cushions the road, and other modern enhancements to automobiles make people remove the sense of inherent danger that makes people pay attention.
It's great that cars are safer and more comfortable than they used to be, but the number of near-accidents I see on a daily basis makes me think that we'd better hurry up with self-driving automobiles. The actual driving part of driving a car has become so secondary that we may as well remove it from human control altogether.
As to the Air Force taking the mantle of Cyber Guardian upon itself, I'm not surprised. There is no viable competition for the US Air Force in the air. They've already branched into space, and so far there's no action there. Everyone anticipates that cyberwarfare contracts will only expand in the future. The Air Force wants to be the branch of service running the show and getting all of that money.
The state of California's criminal laws are flawed. Therefore we should get rid of them.
The American electorate voted in George W. Bush. Therefore we should no longer hold elections.
The USPTO has many internal problems, some of which stem from how the office is funded, some from the pressures on patent agents, and some from rulings outside the control of the patent office itself. Does that mean that patents themselves are no longer serving their purpose? We see almost daily evidence of the limitations and problems of the patent regime as it is currently implemented, but to me that shows that the system needs to be reformed, not eliminated.
If you think the deck is stacked against small innovators now, think about what would happen if patents were elminated altogether. The big players would be free to utterly crush would-be competitors. A properly functioning patent system protects the little guy and the big guy alike. No patent system leaves the little guy completely defenseless.
That's actually open to interpretation.
Free newspapers have been around since the birth of the republic. People have been free to give away their writing for all that time, in spite of the rise of Big Media. Give me one example of Big Media stopping someone from writing their own material and giving it away for free.
Open Source has not been defeated even though Microsoft has attacked it relentlessly. Plus, at this point there are plenty of big players who want Open Source to stick around. In any event, Open Source is still alive and doing very well. The SCO case will likely only solidify the legal underpinnings of Open Source.
P2P networks lost in court because they not only allowed people to infringe on copyrighted material, but because they actively enouraged it. Had they been smarter in their marketing, they may have won their court case on a fair use defense, the way Sony won the Betamax case. It's not about being attacked for "giving away music," it's about profiting from the giving away of pirated music. Nobody is trying to get Magnatune or TMBG to shut down, right?
I won't touch the assertion that everybody who voted for Bush has seen the light and repented their warmongering and bought "Farenheit 911" DVDs and started pooling their resources to save whales.
I wouldn't either. But that's not what I said. I did say: "judging by the opinion polls, even the voters who brought Bush into office are starting to realize that his fear-based policies don't make any sense." There are people on the fringe Right and the fringe Left, but most Americans are in the middle politically. Historically the American voting public do change their minds in the face of evidence, and the evidence against the Bush approach is mounting to a degree that can't be ignored.
1) There are so many low-class/stupid/aesthetically-challenged/offensiv e-in-some-other-way people on MySpace and I can't stand that.
2) MySpace is mostly populated by teenagers, and this particular batch of teenagers is so much worse than teenagers from my generation.
3) MySpace is ripping off the people who use it, through TOS that allow MySpace to profit from content created by MySpace denizens.
4) The content on MySpace is total crap. There's nothing of value on MySpace. Ten thousand monkeys could create better content.
The "I can't stand the people on MySpace" response is similar to the bitching and moaning about blogging, which comes up on Slashdot constantly these days. On the one hand, Slashdotters are happy to carry the torch of freedom, demanding that Big Media should no longer control us, that TV should get hit with a clue stick, and so on. Yet when a community does spring up and people of all kinds, the unwashed digital masses, get on board, it freaks out a lot of Slashdotters. This is so reminiscent of the "if you don't know how to run UNIX, you shouldn't be doing things on the Internet" attitude so prevalent among alpha-geeks in the mid 1990s. The Internet shouldn't just be for geeks, any more than athletics should just be for jocks, or beaches should just be for beautiful people.
Not everyone on MySpace is a teenager. But people seem hungup on the large number of teens on MySpace. Teenagers are teenagers are teenagers are teenagers. My father's generation was the one that screwed up the Vietnam War and turned the whole nation upside down. When they started causing trouble in the early 60s, they were the scourge of America. They turned out ok. A bit self-righteous, but ok. ;-) My generation was described as a bunch of shiftless slackers when we were teens. We had no soul, no drive, no moral compass, and nothing to contribute to society. Somehow that opinion changed when we hit the workforce in big numbers and contributed to the boom in the Information Economy. The teenagers of today are obsessed with the superficial, spoiled, and unconnected to reality. I'm sure by the time they reach their 20s and 30s, they'll somehow magically be transformed into good citizens. Funny how that works, isn't it?
The using MySpace are just like any slice of a given population. Some of them have interesting things to say and some of them don't. Some of them are creative and others aren't too imaginative. Maybe the venue attracts one type of person more than another, but generalizing about content on MySpace, even if the generalization is correct, doesn't mean that there's nothing of value on MySpace.
As for the Terms of Service, MySpace users are making an exchange. They get to tap into a huge network of people and information without cost. In return, MySpace (Fox) can use content from MySpace if it wants to, for commercial gain. 99.9% of the content on MySpace, no matter how good, is not going to be used for commercial purposes by Fox, simply because there's so much of it. The content that is good enough (and that depends on how you define "good") to be used by Fox may in some way be exploited commercially. Do you really think that the creator of such content wouldn't be happy to have their content publicized by Fox?
Think back to when you were a bit younger, and imagine that something like MySpace existed at the time. You'd probably be pretty excited by it, perhaps because you hadn't yet become jaded to all things Internet, perhaps because you liked the idea of communicating with people outside of the narrow confines of the community you lived in.
MySpace isn't for me. It obviously isn't for a lot of Slashdot regulars. So what. Get off the high horse. Diversity is good. Peer to peer communication is good. Or should we just go back to the monoculture of NBC, CBS, and ABC?