They're not as dangerous as before, except if you live in a place where their competition has been muscled out through legally dubious tactics (Covad), or has been late in entering the came (Comcast). A choice between two crappy monoliths isn't much of a choice. SBC has screwed me consistently since they pushed Covad out of our area back in 2000 or so. Going from Covad to SBC was torturous. Then when I moved (still in the same general area) I had to go with SBC for my DSL from the get-go, but they screwed up the account transfer and I was without DSL service for FIVE weeks. I called several different departments and spent over three hours on the phone with literally over a dozen people before it was finally cleared up.
The problem with Big Telecom is that in general they don't seem to have a friggin' clue about customer service. They accept the status quo (crappy support, customers get bounced from dept to dept on the phone, arcane billing) and we all do to, because in many geographic regions there is still simply not enough choice. A market split between two of these lumbering giants isn't a truly competitive environment.
That is basically why he makes no sense to people (and vice-versa I'd guess). I truly believe that his driving motivation is to create a system of information that WORKS LIKE HE DOES.
Thanks for the insight into Ted's way of doing things. That makes a lot of sense. So much of what we do is governed by our own peculiar ways of sifting the information we receive. For example, some posters have said that you can't do anything without heirarchy. Perhaps the experience of growing up working with computers makes most of us think that way, or maybe it's something hard-wired into most people at birth. The few people who do think in a radically nonlinear way tend to be either totally nuts or utterly brilliant, or a hybrid of the two.
If you're thinking that long and hard about how the world *should* be, as opposed to how it is, in a sense you're already living in something of a fantasy. The question is really whether you can do something to make your reality everyone else's reality. Hopefully Ted will have many more years to keep pushing for his vision. I don't necessarily think he's got a chance, or even that his vision is The One True Way, but it bothers me when people, particularly in Slashdot, kick a guy for being different.
Maybe we have fallen into the trap of only rewarding those original thinkers who have become famous, rich, or both.
First, Schmidt used to be the Chief Security Officer at Microsoft.
Second, companies usually have liablility for the actions of their employees under respondeat superior.
Third, the proposal is a bad idea. Companies gain tremendous benefits from their employees. Making employees individually liable for their mistakes while profiting from their efforts is obviously imbalanced.
OK, the name "blog" is pretty pathetic. But a blog can be many things. It can be Daring Fireball or GrokLaw or Gelf Magazine. Sure, there are thousands of blogs of no interest to anyone but their creators, but really, is there anything wrong with that? I thought the Slashdot ethos encompassed the notion that diversity is a good thing. Or is that true only of technology, but not expression of thought?
Seriously, every time someone bashes on "blogs" it sounds to me like people bashing on television. Fine. Don't watch television. Or watch only the three or four shows you want to watch. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. The same thing is true of blogs. Don't want to see all of that trite bullshit that bothers you so much? Then don't read it!
The dark secret of homosexual society - the one that dares not speak its name - is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
Apple realized that "good enough" is good enough for now. The lesson learned from the rise of MP3 and the iPod is that portability is the key. If I can watch the video when I want to, wherever I am, I may be willing to sacrifice video quality. They're aiming for the fat middle of the market, not the people who are willing to spend the time and effort to deal with BitTorrent, et. al..
I see this as a first step in creating a new market. Apple has learned to roll out the features incrementally, which is particularly important when you're developing a new market. They learned some lessons from the Newton fiasco. This is a test, a foot in the water. If people like watching video on their iPods, great. Apple will certainly find ways to improve the experience. If people don't like watching video on their iPods, it's not a big failure for Apple, because the iPod continues to sell to music lovers.
are very accurate. It's brain-dead easy to find major targets using commercially-available maps in those cities. I've never been to an American city where I thought, "gee, this map is just totally out of whack. I can't find the capital building." Commercial maps leave off the details of American military reservations, but it's always been rather easy to find the details for most of those facilities as well. It seems that the accuracy of maps of the countryside are really of little consequence anyway, since terrorists don't go after low-visibility targets. Their stock and trade is hitting urban targets.
I see what this article talks about as useful in some sense, but the sum total malaise caused by contamination of our food supply with weird (and to many, unknown) chemicals outpaces, outweighs, and almost trumps the money that would be spent on a massive RFID program.
Tracking food is very useful when your distribution system is so bad that people are starving because the food isn't making it to market. Talking about the corruption of the food supply is a luxury afforded only to those who have enough food in the first place.
Unless you desparately, need to watch the show right now
I think paying for ringtones is fuggin' absurd. But there are people willing to spend $30/mo. just on ringtones. I'm not going to pay $2 to watch an episode of anything ABC puts on TV, but if I were addicted to Lost I just might pay for portable access to the show. Portability is big for many people, because they want their media at a time and place of their choosing. As the MP3 revolution has shown, the quality of the output is less of a factor than the convenience.
Time will tell if there's much of an audience for iTunes TV shows, but I think their pricing isn't going to turn too many people off. The other factors will be more important, in my opinion.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. How is defining an age of majority an adoption of a "holier-than-thou" attitude? Society needs to define the legal age of adulthood. Is there something inherently wrong with this, or do you think the age should be 20, or 21, or some other number?
Do you really think "Right, now this person has turned 18, it's OK for them to die"? Really? If it's OK by The Law, it's OK by you? Hmm.
Actually, I do. I think it's ok for an 18 year old to decide whether they want to join an all-volunteer military and take that risk. You're conflating two issues:
1) When is someone an adult? In my opinion, you need to draw a line somewhere, and the age of 18 seems appropriate to me. Everyone is different. Some 16 year olds are very mature, while some 30-somethings I know still don't run their lives like adults. When do you think people should be allowed to make the decision on their own to join the military? If think the law is inappropriate, when should we legally consider someone an adult?
2) Is there a difference between foreign policy decisions and how the military is structured? Again, in my opinion, there is a difference. The fact that the American public is very concerned about the risks its soldiers face means that the military has relied extensively on technology to minimize American casualties. That is wholly separate from the Bush Administration's decision to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. The government is not monolithic. In particular, while the civilian leadership changes radically every four years, most of the rest of the federal government is run by career civil servants. This includes the military.
As for reducing casualties by not invading other countries, a lot of people in government, and in particular in the military, were opposed to the invasion of Iraq. Seeing as how we managed to elect Bush II on two separate occasions, I'd say we ought to be blaming him and those who voted for him rather than the government as a whole. He's the mad captain. The rest of the ship isn't all bad.
Why is it the government's job to protect the children?
If there were still any kids kids in America who worked in grimy factories on 12 hour shifts, six days a week, you could ask them if they were in favor of child labor laws.
After all, back when kids worked in factories here in the U.S., the parents could have simply decided not to have their kids work, right?
Not everything can be reduced down to the hallowed libertarian bottom line of "personal responsibility".
The government is not protecting children. They just sent thousands of 18 year olds to Iraq. They don't give a flying fuck.
Umm... you realize 18 year olds are adults according to the law, right? Also, if they didn't care about American deaths in Iraq, our military would have a much different structure. Essentially, we use technology as a force-multiplier because we are obsessed with preventing American casualties, sometimes to operational detriment.
Yahoo and other organizations are blocking out the group with the most potential to make damaging comments bad enough that the forums can get sued. And if you have seen some of the other public forums, teenagers are absolutely out of control.
I don't see the logic here. Damaging comments? Like what? "Yahoo sux!" ? This sort of teenage chat room behavior has been going on for years. I doubt Yahoo cares, really. They're acquiescing to political pressure.
And no, politicans are not blocking video game violence for kids. They are doing it for their own political agenda.
Oh no! Political agendas! Ahhh, run away! Politicians are pandering to parents, who are also voters. If voters didn't care about this issue, politicians wouldn't be using it as a lever to get votes.
Actually, the "halo effect" seems to be real. The quarterly earnings statement shows that Mac sales were up 48% over the same quarter last year.
As for whether the move to Intel was a bad idea or not, Apple users have been happy with PowerPC chips for a long time, but dissatisfied with IBM/Moto's ability to get them delivered in a timely fashion. We'll see if Intel can deliver on its promises.
How would someone be discriminated against based on Genetic Material?
It's not the material itself, but extrapolations based on analysis of the material.
An analysis of your genetic material indicates that you have a higher than normal chance of becoming mentally unstable. We therefore will not hire you.
Your genetic material shows a predisposition to a certain inherited disease that is expensive to treat. We don't want our health coverage plan to have to deal with a claim for this sort of disease, so we will not hire you.
The DRM aspects of this fight bother me, but competing standards have been part of the computer and games industries for decades. I think people, even most grandparents, know by now that some programs only work on Windows, and that some games only work on the PlayStation. Customers will adapt to the format choices, but only if they find the new formats compelling enough. That's where Microsoft and Sony are treading on thin ice.
you know, the one about how basically we all keep moving into larger domiciles in order to have enough room for our "stuff". I remember in the early days of the Web, a program manager I worked for complained about the extreme bloat of (then) current software. "Back in my day, I wrote a medical device reader that only took up 64k, and man did that thing haul ass!" Of course, when you have less room, you trim everything down to the bare essentials.
As memory, storage, and bandwith increase, the available room always gets filled. The question is in how we fill it. To me it seems that in an increasingly mobile, always-on Internet, there will still be factors militating in favor of bandwidth-optimized applications. Although as the user experience becomes "richer" the bandwidth requirements will necessarily increase. The trick is finding the balance between necessary elements of a good user experience, and fluffy code that does nothing to enhance that experience.
I have noticed a clear liberal bias among many articles.
Is that because social liberals are more willing to work on something like Wikipedia for free, without a fiscal incentive? If you want it to be more conservative in outlook, why not get involved?
While I don't know anything about Little Siagon, you pointed to articles about Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan, two lightning-rods for political debate in the United States. Articles about topics that are inherently political will always be interpreted by some people as being biased, regardless of which news source publishes them.
I don't mind finding occasional bias in articles I know will be controversial. It's when you can't detect bias that it is most dangerous, imho. Let me end by asking you this: Did you get a lot of good historical info on Gingrich and Reagan, or were there factual errors?
Wasn't the Times one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq invasion and the WMD nonsense?
So was The New Republic. So were a lot of publications. Most of the press screwed that one up, plain and simple. But is the Iraq War really the only issue of importance? Does the rest of their reporting suddenly become less valuable because of their reporting failures with the Iraq War?
It's not like anyone is working on doing away with your model or anything. You can milk the Windows/Office cow for some time to come, but once one of the two loses hegemony, the legs will be knocked out from the whole beast.
Unless you can figure out how to make customers happy outside of your monopoly zone, you're in serious trouble over the long term.
The New York Times has had its problems, but their reporters are some of the best in the business, and while there is an editorial slant, it isn't extreme. The Atlantic provides good monthly material, and The Economist does so on a weekly basis. Those are my picks for daily, weekly, and monthly news, but there are other sources. The Christian Science Monitor is a great daily paper, for example. You may agree or disagree with my picks, but the profession of journalism isn't dead, and good sources of news are available.
I would also advance the notion that just because the editorial bias of a newspaper is disagreeable to you doesn't mean that the organization is corrupt. Newspapers are run by people, and people sometimes make mistakes. Note that during the runup to the Iraq invasion, The Atlantic provided excellent coverage and made many warnings that the Administration's plans were misguided. To me that is proof that following only one news source is a bad idea. You have to read from more than one source, whose biases you know, and make your own assessments from there.
I realize that it's de rigeur to bash on the news media, whether you're attacking from the Right or the Left, but the media is a business, and it gives people what they want. Americans need to take responsibility for at least some of the sorry state of our media. We have consistently voted in politicians who allowed the media conglomerates more and more power. We watch trash like Fox News. We read USA Today. That's not proof of a lack of credible journalism. It's proof that we're lazy.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Big Telecom is that in general they don't seem to have a friggin' clue about customer service. They accept the status quo (crappy support, customers get bounced from dept to dept on the phone, arcane billing) and we all do to, because in many geographic regions there is still simply not enough choice. A market split between two of these lumbering giants isn't a truly competitive environment.
Thanks for the insight into Ted's way of doing things. That makes a lot of sense. So much of what we do is governed by our own peculiar ways of sifting the information we receive. For example, some posters have said that you can't do anything without heirarchy. Perhaps the experience of growing up working with computers makes most of us think that way, or maybe it's something hard-wired into most people at birth. The few people who do think in a radically nonlinear way tend to be either totally nuts or utterly brilliant, or a hybrid of the two.
If you're thinking that long and hard about how the world *should* be, as opposed to how it is, in a sense you're already living in something of a fantasy. The question is really whether you can do something to make your reality everyone else's reality. Hopefully Ted will have many more years to keep pushing for his vision. I don't necessarily think he's got a chance, or even that his vision is The One True Way, but it bothers me when people, particularly in Slashdot, kick a guy for being different.
Maybe we have fallen into the trap of only rewarding those original thinkers who have become famous, rich, or both.
Second, companies usually have liablility for the actions of their employees under respondeat superior.
Third, the proposal is a bad idea. Companies gain tremendous benefits from their employees. Making employees individually liable for their mistakes while profiting from their efforts is obviously imbalanced.
Seriously, every time someone bashes on "blogs" it sounds to me like people bashing on television. Fine. Don't watch television. Or watch only the three or four shows you want to watch. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. The same thing is true of blogs. Don't want to see all of that trite bullshit that bothers you so much? Then don't read it!
"Folks, the Mac platform is through... ." - John C. Dvorak, 1998
The dark secret of homosexual society - the one that dares not speak its name - is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
I see this as a first step in creating a new market. Apple has learned to roll out the features incrementally, which is particularly important when you're developing a new market. They learned some lessons from the Newton fiasco. This is a test, a foot in the water. If people like watching video on their iPods, great. Apple will certainly find ways to improve the experience. If people don't like watching video on their iPods, it's not a big failure for Apple, because the iPod continues to sell to music lovers.
Hey, it's a joke. Don't get bent out of shape if you went to Humbolt. I know not everyone who goes there smokes pot, and I know it's a good school.
are very accurate. It's brain-dead easy to find major targets using commercially-available maps in those cities. I've never been to an American city where I thought, "gee, this map is just totally out of whack. I can't find the capital building." Commercial maps leave off the details of American military reservations, but it's always been rather easy to find the details for most of those facilities as well. It seems that the accuracy of maps of the countryside are really of little consequence anyway, since terrorists don't go after low-visibility targets. Their stock and trade is hitting urban targets.
Tracking food is very useful when your distribution system is so bad that people are starving because the food isn't making it to market. Talking about the corruption of the food supply is a luxury afforded only to those who have enough food in the first place.
I think paying for ringtones is fuggin' absurd. But there are people willing to spend $30/mo. just on ringtones. I'm not going to pay $2 to watch an episode of anything ABC puts on TV, but if I were addicted to Lost I just might pay for portable access to the show. Portability is big for many people, because they want their media at a time and place of their choosing. As the MP3 revolution has shown, the quality of the output is less of a factor than the convenience.
Time will tell if there's much of an audience for iTunes TV shows, but I think their pricing isn't going to turn too many people off. The other factors will be more important, in my opinion.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. How is defining an age of majority an adoption of a "holier-than-thou" attitude? Society needs to define the legal age of adulthood. Is there something inherently wrong with this, or do you think the age should be 20, or 21, or some other number?
Do you really think "Right, now this person has turned 18, it's OK for them to die"? Really? If it's OK by The Law, it's OK by you? Hmm.
Actually, I do. I think it's ok for an 18 year old to decide whether they want to join an all-volunteer military and take that risk. You're conflating two issues:
1) When is someone an adult? In my opinion, you need to draw a line somewhere, and the age of 18 seems appropriate to me. Everyone is different. Some 16 year olds are very mature, while some 30-somethings I know still don't run their lives like adults. When do you think people should be allowed to make the decision on their own to join the military? If think the law is inappropriate, when should we legally consider someone an adult?
2) Is there a difference between foreign policy decisions and how the military is structured? Again, in my opinion, there is a difference. The fact that the American public is very concerned about the risks its soldiers face means that the military has relied extensively on technology to minimize American casualties. That is wholly separate from the Bush Administration's decision to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. The government is not monolithic. In particular, while the civilian leadership changes radically every four years, most of the rest of the federal government is run by career civil servants. This includes the military.
As for reducing casualties by not invading other countries, a lot of people in government, and in particular in the military, were opposed to the invasion of Iraq. Seeing as how we managed to elect Bush II on two separate occasions, I'd say we ought to be blaming him and those who voted for him rather than the government as a whole. He's the mad captain. The rest of the ship isn't all bad.
If there were still any kids kids in America who worked in grimy factories on 12 hour shifts, six days a week, you could ask them if they were in favor of child labor laws.
After all, back when kids worked in factories here in the U.S., the parents could have simply decided not to have their kids work, right?
Not everything can be reduced down to the hallowed libertarian bottom line of "personal responsibility".
Umm... you realize 18 year olds are adults according to the law, right? Also, if they didn't care about American deaths in Iraq, our military would have a much different structure. Essentially, we use technology as a force-multiplier because we are obsessed with preventing American casualties, sometimes to operational detriment.
Yahoo and other organizations are blocking out the group with the most potential to make damaging comments bad enough that the forums can get sued. And if you have seen some of the other public forums, teenagers are absolutely out of control.
I don't see the logic here. Damaging comments? Like what? "Yahoo sux!" ? This sort of teenage chat room behavior has been going on for years. I doubt Yahoo cares, really. They're acquiescing to political pressure.
And no, politicans are not blocking video game violence for kids. They are doing it for their own political agenda.
Oh no! Political agendas! Ahhh, run away! Politicians are pandering to parents, who are also voters. If voters didn't care about this issue, politicians wouldn't be using it as a lever to get votes.
As for whether the move to Intel was a bad idea or not, Apple users have been happy with PowerPC chips for a long time, but dissatisfied with IBM/Moto's ability to get them delivered in a timely fashion. We'll see if Intel can deliver on its promises.
You say that like it's a *bad* thing.
It's not the material itself, but extrapolations based on analysis of the material.
An analysis of your genetic material indicates that you have a higher than normal chance of becoming mentally unstable. We therefore will not hire you.
Your genetic material shows a predisposition to a certain inherited disease that is expensive to treat. We don't want our health coverage plan to have to deal with a claim for this sort of disease, so we will not hire you.
The DRM aspects of this fight bother me, but competing standards have been part of the computer and games industries for decades. I think people, even most grandparents, know by now that some programs only work on Windows, and that some games only work on the PlayStation. Customers will adapt to the format choices, but only if they find the new formats compelling enough. That's where Microsoft and Sony are treading on thin ice.
MiniDisc, anyone?
As memory, storage, and bandwith increase, the available room always gets filled. The question is in how we fill it. To me it seems that in an increasingly mobile, always-on Internet, there will still be factors militating in favor of bandwidth-optimized applications. Although as the user experience becomes "richer" the bandwidth requirements will necessarily increase. The trick is finding the balance between necessary elements of a good user experience, and fluffy code that does nothing to enhance that experience.
Is that because social liberals are more willing to work on something like Wikipedia for free, without a fiscal incentive? If you want it to be more conservative in outlook, why not get involved?
While I don't know anything about Little Siagon, you pointed to articles about Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan, two lightning-rods for political debate in the United States. Articles about topics that are inherently political will always be interpreted by some people as being biased, regardless of which news source publishes them.
I don't mind finding occasional bias in articles I know will be controversial. It's when you can't detect bias that it is most dangerous, imho. Let me end by asking you this: Did you get a lot of good historical info on Gingrich and Reagan, or were there factual errors?
So was The New Republic. So were a lot of publications. Most of the press screwed that one up, plain and simple. But is the Iraq War really the only issue of importance? Does the rest of their reporting suddenly become less valuable because of their reporting failures with the Iraq War?
Unless you can figure out how to make customers happy outside of your monopoly zone, you're in serious trouble over the long term.
The New York Times has had its problems, but their reporters are some of the best in the business, and while there is an editorial slant, it isn't extreme. The Atlantic provides good monthly material, and The Economist does so on a weekly basis. Those are my picks for daily, weekly, and monthly news, but there are other sources. The Christian Science Monitor is a great daily paper, for example. You may agree or disagree with my picks, but the profession of journalism isn't dead, and good sources of news are available.
I would also advance the notion that just because the editorial bias of a newspaper is disagreeable to you doesn't mean that the organization is corrupt. Newspapers are run by people, and people sometimes make mistakes. Note that during the runup to the Iraq invasion, The Atlantic provided excellent coverage and made many warnings that the Administration's plans were misguided. To me that is proof that following only one news source is a bad idea. You have to read from more than one source, whose biases you know, and make your own assessments from there.
I realize that it's de rigeur to bash on the news media, whether you're attacking from the Right or the Left, but the media is a business, and it gives people what they want. Americans need to take responsibility for at least some of the sorry state of our media. We have consistently voted in politicians who allowed the media conglomerates more and more power. We watch trash like Fox News. We read USA Today. That's not proof of a lack of credible journalism. It's proof that we're lazy.