The majority of people have a basic desire to be honest - and I mean actually honest, rather than some limited definition based strictly on the law. People will go to reasonable lengths to be honest. It makes us feel good about ourselves, and it confers a certain immunity from legal problems.
But then you fuck us. First you fuck us with exorbitant pricing. Then you fuck us with inconvenience by not making your content universally available when we want it. Then you fuck us by treating every paying customer like a criminal.
Fucked by money, fucked by convenience, and fucked by judgement. We know that you hate us, and you’d better be aware that we absolutely hate you too.
]]>Wouldn’t the better solution just be to have an app, or web app, that users pull up on their phone? That is: why should a restaurant pay to provide the hardware that most are already carrying with them?
No.
A geek would happily install an app on their phone. To us, it would seem nifty, fun, and easy.
A regular person would walk in, find out they have to install an app on their personal phone to order lunch, then walk out and find a restaurant whose head was not up its own ass.
]]>Every day I read a new article about some company whining about how hard it is to hire technical staff. Invariably it turns out that they’re only looking for people within a commuters distance of their office. I refuse to feel sorry for such companies.
]]>If you clicked the op link above, you may have noticed that it goes to a 404 page. (If you’re in the future maybe it works again; congratulations!) At least, as of December 2011, it is a 404 page and it’s been that way for at least a year now. The maintainer of the site (Alec Thomas) tells me that his server crashed some time back, and he hasn’t had the time to get all of the old content back online. His site mentions an upcoming daughter, and those of you with kids are already nodding your heads, because you know exactly how this story goes.
In any case, since there is currently no other place online to download this code so far as I know, I dug up a tarball and mirrored it on GitHub. You can get the latest code for op at tangledhelix/op.
My C skills are not up to par, so I am not currently planning to do anything with the code except host a copy of it. If Alec never gets back to it, and I decide to brush up on C in the future… well, we’ll see.
]]>A few centuries ago, the penalty for unauthorized copying was breaking on the wheel. It is a term we’re not very familiar with these days, but it was a form of prolonged torturous death penalty where the convict first had every bone in his body broken, and then was weaved into the spokes of a wagon wheel and set up on public display. The cause of death was usually thirst, a couple of days later.
Back then the issue was duplicating popular fabric patterns. Yes, that was really a thing. And note that this didn’t happen to only a handful of offenders. Sixteen thousand people suffered this fate. Over fabric patterns.
The brutality of our forebears never fails to amaze me.
But it’s the end result of this practice that I find the most fascinating:
Capital punishment didn’t even make a dent in the pirating of the fabrics. Despite the fact that some villages had been so ravaged that everybody knew somebody personally who had been executed by public torture, the copying continued unabated at the same level.
I guess some things never change.
And When Even The Death Penalty Doesn’t Deter Copying — What Then? | TorrentFreak
]]>Another HUGE complaint I’d like to add to Brad’s list is when these websites draw a story out over 10 pages.
Welcome to the Internet — a place where physical pages don’t exist, and there’s no such thing as “no space left”. There is absolutely NO REASON for any story to span over more than one single page.
I wholeheartedly agree.
But the problem here isn’t cluelessness on the part of the editors. The problem is that newspapers aren’t in the business of providing news, and they never have been. They are in the business of gathering page views. They used to call it circulation, and they used to sell half-page ads, classifieds, and coupon inserts, but it’s the same game as it ever was (except less profitable).
Back in the 90s, I toured a local NBC affiliate’s offices with a friend who was in the news business. Two things I heard that day have informed my opinion of commercial news ever since.
My friend, a local news producer for many years:
How we decide what’s on tonight’s news: News is whatever I say it is.
Down in the bowels of the building was a room where two men watched a wall of monitors. A videotape robot busily swapped tapes behind them. This room aired the commercials.
]]>This is the only room in the whole building that matters. What you think of as TV is just the stuff we cram in between commercials to keep you from changing channels.
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.
It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life.
I watch the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realize, They can’t be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child’s ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge quantities of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell endless numbers of unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart beats firmly, unreached and unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I turn to them.
How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later
]]>Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with self-esteem. Why is this? “Narcissists are happy when they’re younger, because they’re the center of the universe,” Twenge explains. “Their parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.”
In early adulthood, this becomes a big problem. “People who feel like they’re unusually special end up alienating those around them,” Twenge says. “They don’t know how to work on teams as well or deal with limits. They get into the workplace and expect to be stimulated all the time, because their worlds were so structured with activities. They don’t like being told by a boss that their work might need improvement, and they feel insecure if they don’t get a constant stream of praise. They grew up in a culture where everyone gets a trophy just for participating, which is ludicrous and makes no sense when you apply it to actual sports games or work performance. Who would watch an NBA game with no winners or losers? Should everyone get paid the same amount, or get promoted, when some people have superior performance? They grew up in a bubble, so they get out into the real world and they start to feel lost and helpless. Kids who always have problems solved for them believe that they don’t know how to solve problems. And they’re right—they don’t.”
On not acknowledging that your children have flaws:
“A principal at an elementary school told me that a parent asked a teacher not to use red pens for corrections,” she said, “because the parent felt it was upsetting to kids when they see so much red on the page. This is the kind of self-absorption we’re seeing, in the name of our children’s self-esteem.”
Paradoxically, all of this worry about creating low self-esteem might actually perpetuate it. No wonder my patient Lizzie told me she felt “less amazing” than her parents had always said she was. Given how “amazing” her parents made her out to be, how could she possibly live up to that? Instead of acknowledging their daughter’s flaws, her parents, hoping to make her feel secure, denied them. “I’m bad at math,” Lizzie said she once told them, when she noticed that the math homework was consistently more challenging for her than for many of her classmates. “You’re not bad at math,” her parents responded. “You just have a different learning style. We’ll get you a tutor to help translate the information into a format you naturally understand.”
With much struggle, the tutor helped Lizzie get her grade up, but she still knew that other classmates were good at math and she wasn’t. “I didn’t have a different learning style,” she told me. “I just suck at math! But in my family, you’re never bad at anything. You’re just better at some things than at others. If I ever say I’m bad at something, my parents say, ‘Oh, honey, no you’re not!’”
On over-indulging your children:
]]>This same teacher—who asked not to be identified, for fear of losing her job—says she sees many parents who think they’re setting limits, when actually, they’re just being wishy-washy. “A kid will say, ‘Can we get ice cream on the way home?’ And the parent will say, ‘No, it’s not our day. Ice-cream day is Friday.’ Then the child will push and negotiate, and the parent, who probably thinks negotiating is ‘honoring her child’s opinion,’ will say, ‘Fine, we’ll get ice cream today, but don’t ask me tomorrow, because the answer is no!’” The teacher laughed. “Every year, parents come to me and say, ‘Why won’t my child listen to me? Why won’t she take no for an answer?’ And I say, ‘Your child won’t take no for an answer, because the answer is never no!’”
After the conference, though, Hare seemed introspective. He said, almost to himself, “I shouldn’t have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well.” “But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,” I said. “Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Hare. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”
How to spot a psychopath | Jon Ronson | Books | The Guardian
]]>There is a reason why JSON is becoming very popular as a data exchange format (more important than it being less verbose than XML): programmers are sick of writing parsers! But “wait”, you say — “surely there are XML parsers available for you to use so that you don’t have to roll your own…”. Yes, there are. But while XML parsers handle the low-level syntactic parsing of XML tags, attributes, etc…, you still need to walk the DOM tree or, worse, build one yourself with nothing but a SAX parser (Objective-C iPhone SDK I’m looking at you!).
Why is JSON so popular? Developers want out of the syntax business. | MongoLab
]]>After a minute or two you don’t even think about it. This is how it should be: formatting is of no interest to the writer. Only one thing matters: words.
]]>There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.
The Clock is real. It is now being built inside a mountain in western Texas. This Clock is the first of many millennial Clocks the designers hope will be built around the world and throughout time.
]]>This anxiety is about more than failing to keep up with a serialized source, though. It’s also about the primitive pleasure of constant and arbitrary stimulation. That’s why the Facebook newsfeed is no longer shown chronologically. Refresh Facebook ten times and the status updates rearrange themselves in nonsensical, anachronistic patterns. You don’t refresh Facebook to follow a narrative, you refresh to register a change—not to read but to see.
And it’s losing track of this distinction—between reading and seeing—that’s so shameful. It’s like being demoted from the category of thinking, caring human to a sort of rat that doesn’t know why he needs to tap that button, just that he does.
]]>Clearly, they are technically correct. Nobody writes letters anymore. It’s archaic, a relic of a bygone era. It’s simple economics. In the old days, a letter was the best option to reach across a great distance and communicate with someone. Technology has changed the equation; many better options now exist.
Think of the oldest person you know. Consider life when they came of age. That’s when we set our expectations of how the world is supposed to work. I’ll use my wife’s grandmother as an example. She will turn 91 in a few weeks, meaning she was born in the spring of 1920, in rural Poland. Since then she has seen a lot, including the inside of a Nazi work camp.
What was life like when she came of age? Well, she lived in the country. She probably walked everywhere. Maybe she had a bike, maybe not. There was no Internet. There were no mobile phones. The television would not be invented until she was eight years old, but I suspect she did not personally see one until she emigrated to the United States after World War II. A trip to the next town over would probably have been a major undertaking, let alone a long trip (even one to a country next door, a fairly short trip by modern first-world standards).
I am not saying she rants about people not writing letters; I can’t say I have ever heard her say anything on the subject. But within her life experience, a letter was the best option for most of the time. Only after she was entering her 70s were better options coming into play: cheap long-distance rates and the Internet.
As I age, I find myself thinking about the longevity of the information artifacts we generate. In the beginning, I was mostly worried about digital photos. How could I ensure they survived? Unlike film negatives, digital storage technology changes quickly. Think fast: here’s a ZIP disk. Can you read it? No? What about this 5.25” floppy? 3.5”? What is the likelihood that the JPEG format will be readable by computers in common use when I am a grandparent?
These days, I am concerned about digital artifacts as a whole. My life is ever-increasingly digital, as it is with all of us. I have scanned and shredded most of my file cabinet. I get my bills via email. I communicate with everyone online, leaving no persistent trail (or so I hope). I haven’t used a film camera in years. My magnetic-tape videocamera is in a bag somewhere, but my Flip Mino and my iPhone shoot video all the time.
For the past ten years, I have been a member of Distributed Proofreaders, whose mission is to help Project Gutenberg digitize public domain works for safekeeping and distribution. We scan old books using OCR software, and then the hive mind goes to work. I and many others proofread scanned text. Others take the output from proofreaders and add formatting markup (italics, footnotes, etc.). After several rounds of work, a completed ebook is handed off to Project Gutenberg for publication. It is, for me, important work that I am happy to help with. Time will destroy all old books eventually; I believe they should be preserved for future generations.
I am currently working on a biography about William Cowper, a writer and poet who lived during the latter half of the 18th century. As with many such books, it is full of correspondence, which tells the story of his life. You get a feel for who he was, how he lived, how his relationships worked. I had never heard of William Cowper before I began scrutinizing these scans for errors, but I now find myself fascinated with his story.
I wonder: will anyone be able to write such books about us in a hundred years? How would they go about it? There will be so little left behind. Will your blog still be running for someone to analyze? Where will your emails be accessible? Your tweets? God help you, your Facebook photos from college?
They say the Internet never forgets, but I’m not so sure. I suspect that over a long enough period of time, the Internet will in fact forget. It will forget us all.
]]>What’s so amazing is that Apple hasn’t even needed the fastest chips on the market to guarantee a silky smooth, memorable tablet experience for its users. The original iPad performed incredibly well. The new iPad 2, however, just screams. Any slowdowns in entering menus, or launching apps, or waiting for a Web page to render have been completely eliminated. This is incredibly important, because the experience Apple promises, and delivers, is an instant love affair with its iOS devices; something that to this day, no other manufacturer can come close to matching. Not by a mile.
This is why I waited out the first iPad and didn’t order until the second version. I remember when Apple made this jump with the iPhone and figured I’d skip their first attempt this time around.
(No, I don’t have mine yet. The earthquake in Japan distracted me that morning and I didn’t get around to ordering until 10:30, so I have another two and a half weeks to wait).
]]>Friday, 3am. I wake up. Groggy, confused. This isn’t my bed. Where am I?
Conclusion: PAAARRRRTTTTYYY!!!
2011:
Friday, 3am. I wake up. Groggy, confused. This isn’t my bed. Where am I?
Conclusion: Must have fallen asleep in my kid’s room at 8pm again.
]]>The Xoom has an impressive list of features that will only come to work by way of future upgrades.
Oh, and you can’t charge it via USB.
I can’t wait … to order an iPad 2.
]]>This would be awesome. And I bet Apple would do it, if people would pay $699 for the base model. So… no. Check back next year.
Really? You’re confused about this? Let’s review how stereo works. You have a right channel and a left channel. You use them to create an illusion that is targeted to the right and left ears of the listener. Let’s review how the iPad works. You hold it in any orientation as you see fit. Now, where exactly do you suggest we put the “left” and “right” speakers?
Oh, sure. 10gb/s I/O wouldn’t kill the battery at all. Especially because, like USB, it can power connected devices.
Really? Okay, so people in the ten square miles of the US with 4G/LTE coverage would be happy, and everybody else would think the iPad sucks.
]]>]]>A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college.
For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good college was more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up. What was I? A student. To do that well meant to get good grades. Why did one have to get good grades? To get into a good college. And why did one want to do that? There seemed to be several reasons: you’d learn more, get better jobs, make more money. But it didn’t matter exactly what the benefits would be. College was a bottleneck through which all your future prospects passed; everything would be better if you went to a better college.
A few weeks ago I realized that somewhere along the line I had stopped believing that.
What first set me thinking about this was the new trend of worrying obsessively about what kindergarten your kids go to. It seemed to me this couldn’t possibly matter. Either it won’t help your kid get into Harvard, or if it does, getting into Harvard won’t mean much anymore. And then I thought: how much does it mean even now?
It turns out I have a lot of data about that.