I met an interesting gentleman in Detroit once — his name is Collin LaLonde and he’s a recruiter. I liked him because, while everyone else seemed to try to do a sales job with no substance behind it, he listened to my skill set, assessed how solid I was as a worker, and placed me well. He’s got a new blog, Changing Fast, which chronicles the development of the tech workplace.
Archive for the ‘Linkpost’ Category
Changing Fast
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Linkpost 5-7-08
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008Neat stuff during a busy time.
Blizzard is fighting against a company that sells a bot program for use with World of WarCraft, but is doing so in a novel, and scary way: using your RAM to play games is copyright infringement, until Blizzard tells you it isn’t.
Today’s conventional wisdom, based on more than a year’s worth of relentless negative publicity, says Vista is hopelessly broken. In fact, my experience says the exact opposite is true. I proved the point in the first installment of this series, where I restored a sluggish $2500 Sony Vaio notebook to peak performance in a few hours. And I think anyone with a modicum of PC smarts can do the same.
“I think part of the problem is that people aren’t held accountable on the Web,” Brady said. “People say things online they would never say when disagreeing with someone at the dinner table. I think heated debate is fine, but when there are (flame wars), many people won’t take part for fear they will be attacked and bashed over the head with the (Internet-equivalent) of a steel pipe.”
Travelers want to log on everywhere at no charge, while hotels, airports and coffee shops are looking for a way to pay for their Wi-Fi networks as visitors increasingly use greater amounts of bandwidth.
The compromise that is emerging is to offer both free and paid options, with the free services increasingly requiring something in return, like viewing an advertisement or signing up for a loyalty program.
Sounds like TV and cable, respectively, to me.
can remember thinking at the time that I would be able to sell these, along with the SDK, to clients who wanted sophisticated and easy-to-use windowing components all over the globe, and then be able to retire and ride my bike forever more. It didn’t quite work out like that. I was smart enough (but only after I’d spent all the effort) to realise the daunting challenge it would be to control installation and version, handle environmental issues and bug reports, and manage the trade-offs between protecting intellectual property and hindering users. And then there’s the hassles of the financial side and the daunting nature of the warranties. Long story short is that the controls were never commercialised. They see action in various bespoke projects for clients from time to time, as well as in several of my internal / free tools. But all that effort has never seen a direct payoff. The payoff in learning was immense, however, and I’m very glad for it.
By distilling climate policy choices down to the most key, and letting you rate them all for reasonableness, — these being the ones to which the accepted econometric models are generally most ’sensitive’ — anyone can model the economic impact of climate policy ideas being bandied about by politicians, lobbyists, Think Tank “experts” and newspaper editors. You don’t have to be an mathematician or economist to work the scenarios.
The effect, we hope, will be to “disintermediate” the pundits and paid experts who so dominate American political life.
It’s been well established how TV shows, ads and videogames are growing areas of music discovery and promotion. But until “GTA IV,” there’s been no construct that allows for the immediate identification and purchase of those songs from videogames. “GTA IV” has added that “buy” button, and record labels welcome the innovation.
Linkpost 5-1-08
Thursday, May 1st, 2008Lots of good things these past few weeks, and it’s hard to pick just a few.
Linkpost 4-15-08
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008Happy Tax Day! You’re probably more responsible than me, so you sent yours in weeks ago. If not, why not have a tax party? Pull out the power strip, plug in a wireless router, network a printer, and you’ve got a home office for as many friends as fit into your place to work on taxes until 11:35, when you can dash to the post office and use their electronic mailing system to get that all-important 4-15 timestamp. While you’re in line, read The history of the post office.
i am sadaf mansoor.i am a student of fine arts.i need ur help for my thesis.my topic is the value of writings.
The power of writing is ending b’coz of computer.now a days people do there work on computer.they don’t read books n write on a paper.the value of writing is ending.if we see in history of writing we will find it’s value.how it’s come to us.can u tell me how computer as affect the power of writing ^
How did computers affect the power of writing. Well, computers increased the general literacy process, so now more people than ever before can read a newspaper, write a simple response, and navigate a computer and network. However, this means that those who are writing have simplified their content for that audience. In addition, the increase in common knowledge means that writing becomes more specialized, so niches are most common and few generalists exist. This all adds up to a lack of clear voices and more confusion, but more flexibility about what people can choose to believe, which means that most people read what they already agree with. There’s also another side effect of this opinion pluralism:
1) If a media outlet cares about its reputation for accuracy, it will be reluctant to report anything that counters the audiences’ existing beliefs because such stories will tend to erode the company’s standing. Newspapers and news programs have a visible incentive to “distort information to make it conform with consumers’ prior beliefs.”
2) The media can’t satisfy their audiences by merely reporting what their audience wants to hear. If alternative sources of information prove that a news organization has distorted the news, the organization will suffer a loss of reputation, and hence of profit. The authors predict more bias in stories where the outcomes aren’t realized for some time (foreign war reporting, for example) and less bias where the outcomes are immediately apparent (a weather forecast or a sports score). Indeed, almost nobody accuses the New York Times or Fox News Channel of slanting their weather reports.
3) Less bias occurs when competition produces a healthy tension between a news organization’s desire to conform to audience expectations and maintaining its reputation. ^
That’s probably not the most complete answer, but this at least addresses media writing. For fiction writing, the answer is similar. Everyone knows we have not produced a single author as great as those from our grandparents’ generation. At the same time, we all have our favorites that speak to our point of view. We’re still waiting for the voice that can unify a generation. And the post you responded to contained a thoughtful analysis of the computer’s effect on technical writing.
Chickens coming home to roost
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008Today’s post is part-Linkpost, and part a summary of some trends predicted on this blog. Hold on for a slightly wild ride through the return of the boomerang on some of these important but understressed topics:
Fear of Piracy is Overstated
Internet piracy, no matter how pervasive, is not about to bring the worldwide production of literature to a grinding halt, just as rampant music piracy isn’t stopping my neighbor’s kid from playing his drum kit in the garage every day before dinner. But the piece does raise the real question of whether the best writers will continue to work to their full potential in a world where their main product can be had for free. ^
Why this is true: people who pirate extensively are those with more time than money, and there’s no evidence to suggest they would buy the products in the first place. Additionally, for the near term, eBook readers are still a work in progress, although Amazon’s Kindle is probably the best of breed so far. Books, like CDs, endure wherever we go and can always be referred to even if the publisher goes bankrupt, the book goes out of print or society collapses because kids text too much.
Another article that covered this brilliantly:
So why aren’t these games, which, combined, have sold half a million units on a small budget, getting more attention? Because they’re not aimed at some nebulous idea of the “hardcore gamer.” This is a market that may exist in the minds of people writing about games, and it may describe those who buy gaming magazines, but such gamers are certainly not a force at retail. “Heck, how much buzz does The Sims get in terms of editorial when compared to its popularity?” Wardell asks.
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The way to make money in the world of PC gaming, according to Wardell, is to make sure many systems can play your games, while continuing to make them attractive. Find a market where people want to buy and support the games, and don’t go by what the magazines and the blogs seem to think are the big name titles. Don’t let people who aren’t your audience control the titles you make, and ignore piracy. This is much like Trent Reznor’s strategy, although the execution is different.
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“The reason why we don’t put copy protection on our games isn’t because we’re nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don’t like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count,” Wardell argues. ^
Macs Aren’t the New Savior
Yet, depending on how a company uses Macs, trying to integrate the computers into a company’s workflow can kill productivity, Keanini says. The applications never quite match up, data has to be massaged to be useful, and the company has to design workarounds for each issue, he says. ^
Why this is true: It’s the software that drives people to an operating system and Apple, with its mercurial product lines and even more chaotic series of corporate strategies, has never nurtured software apps or developers except in the arts. Quite simply, Microsoft has Linux and Apple beat in this regard, and only if they screw up and follow the dying trend of SaaS will they fail at this. The negative FUD (fear, uncertainty, despair) over Windows Vista is also overstated, because in the real world, people who did not buy $400 Dell boxes are enjoying the Vista experience — and it’s getting better.
The New Security Woes: Mesh Apps, Thumb Drives
One solution is to take a hybrid approach, using a software product that only allows usage of thumb drives with pre-defined serial numbers in conjunction with an IronKey to handle the encryption. Some antivirus suites, like Symantec’s Endpoint Protection (SEP) 11, already offer this type of capability.
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If you’re on a very tight budget — and if you have a high level of trust in your users and don’t need an enterprise solution — cheap thumb drives and the open-source TrueCrypt technology could be the way to go. ^
Why this is true: we’ve seen how the loss of laptops containing seven million customer records and credit card numbers is a catastrophe. As thumb drives continue to be popular, and people spending more time at work use those work networks for their downloads and Amazon shopping and so on, we’re going to see more people also using those thumb drives to take work home — and losing those drives or having them stolen inside a purse, car or luggage. Since every person in North America now knows how to load up a thumb drive, and open basic file types like MS Word, and many of them also know how to bypass the passwords, it’s important to have a more robust system in place. Also look for mesh apps and SaaS apps to become big security holes when users adopt their hotmail password for their Google apps and vice versa. We all know how secure hotmail passwords are, right?
Why Social Media is Expanding
Job hunting has literally become a contact sport. That is, you need contacts—lots of them—to expedite the process of landing your next job. In particular, you need connections inside the companies you’re targeting. Why? Because employee referrals are becoming a proportionately bigger source of new hires, according to recruiting consultancy CareerXroads. Employers are keen on employee referrals because they generally come from trusted internal sources and because they serve to pre-vet candidates. Consequently, between 70 percent and 80 percent of new hires join their new employers through a personal connection or a networking referral. ^
Why this is true: companies can get sued if they hire the wrong person and then have to fire them, which is the same reason it’s often hard to get fired even if you are incompetent, drunk and downloading porn at work. They’ve circled the wagons because of this, and casual contacts even through social networks get through the initial barrier. They give the company some way to vet the candidate, and yet do so without being intrusive or requiring people to remember more names and faces than their overloaded brains can already handle. There’s also no question of impropriety regarding the buying of dinners, drinks and gifts. I’m sure there’s a witty parallel for our personal lives, or some social network called actuallynotarapistorstalker.com for single people, but it’s unknown to me.
The Wisdom of Crowds is Not Wisdom
And I say we’re Web 3.0 (now) because we’re the only news aggregator out there which is edited, which I think is the next step in social networks because right now everybody is talking about the wisdom of crowds, and all that—which is complete horse shiat, and I think the next step is realizing that what crowds pick is pretty much pornography and Internet spam, and as a result you’ve got to have some editing involved there somewhere.
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I’ll tell you the one I’ve seen recently which is really funny, ‘Dig,’ another news aggregator, had a top link that got 15,000 ‘digs’ on it, which is something phenomenally high—maybe a record for all I know. (It was) puppies playing around, which again, goes back to the whole idea of the wisdom of crowds. No. They’re stupid they want to see puppies…all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Wow man, people will click on fuzzy cute animals. We need more of these.’ ^
Why this is true: life without editors is chaotic because each person begins acting exclusively in their own interests, not in the intersection of their interests with those of the group and any goals it may have. Peoplemedia sounds good until you realize that most of the loudest voices on the Internet are people with nothing better to do, little money to spend, and few actual ideas. So they can imitate something they saw other people like, but not invent one. The exception is Wikipedia, which encouraged college students to plagiarize their professors and so has actually gotten quite good in some articles.
Turning Off the Gadgets Gives You More Life
In the headquarters of Dogster, a networking site for pets, employees are allowed to bring their dogs into meetings but they can’t bring their laptops or any other electronic device.
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Laptops are not allowed in some classrooms at USC’s law school. Etiquette coach Colette Swan said, “We are becoming an internalized society. We are living in our laptops, our cell phones, in our texting.”
The experts don’t call it attention deficit as much as continuous partial attention. As Swan said, “If you’re multi-tasking, no matter how good you are, you’re still half-ignoring someone else.”
Why this is true: “Western man is externalizing himself through gadgets,” William S. Burroughs once famously wrote. What is called “internalizing” in the article is what he calls “externalizing”; paradoxically, putting our lives into gadgets allows us to introvert, although we’re doing it with external means. Meetings are overused, and are inefficient ways of communication that are generally favored for the appearance of keeping everyone informed, but when people look out at a sea of laptops, they drone on assuming that no one is paying attention — and they’re right. If you have ten employees paid $30 an hour in a meeting that lasts one hour, and it achieves what five minutes of direct conversation could from a $60 an hour manager, what kind of money did you just lose?
Literature Is Life
It didn’t take long for police to realize the man swerving through town with a missing rear wheel and no headlights was intoxicated.
Police caught up with the driver after the vehicle was found in a ditch on the side of the road. The man who exited the driver side claimed he had only had four beers but could barely walk when it came time to exit the vehicle.
When asked why he was driving without a rear wheel the man responded with extremely slurred speech that he had hit a sign and was “just trying to get home.â€
While being transferred to the Summit County Jail the main spontaneously uttered to the officer driving, “Thanks for getting me off the road, I’m in no condition to drive.†^
Why this is true: As reported before, scenes from literature often come to life, which tells us why people read books in the first place. We can find patterns and archetypes of real life in them and through those, can steer ourselves around hypocrisy and self-deception. In addition to the inherent comedy of being physical, and so having brains that can be “hacked” by too much alcohol, we face an era where our machines can dominate us in many ways if we let them.
Linkpost 3-10-08
Monday, March 10th, 2008The information transmitted might include the person’s ZIP code, a search for anything from vacation information to celebrity gossip, or a purchase of prescription drugs or other intimate items. Some types of data, like search queries, tends to be more valuable than others.
Yahoo came out with the most data collection points in a month on its own sites — about 110 billion collections, or 811 for the average user. In addition, Yahoo has about 1,700 other opportunities to collect data about the average person on partner sites like eBay, where Yahoo sells the ads.
JZ’s taxonomy of organisational forms.
Polyarchical/top-down is where the market lives. Polyarchical in that competition means that there are many ways of achieving almost identical ends. Top-Down in that the control structure within the firm is pretty centrally directed …it is also the space of federalism, where may equal units of government, each of them moderately centralised, come together to coordinate joint problems.
Hierarchical Top-Down Is the space of most our politics–representative democracies establish a single structure of control, with, in reality, little choice between them
Polyarchical//Bottom-up is where the techno-libertarians and anarchists live: each individual–or at most small ad hoc groups–pursues projects and purposes frequently exercising the right (and real option) to secede and fragment. Pirates, and some parts of FOSS live these lives.
Hierarchical/Bottom-up is the home of the communitarians. Communities coalesce around projects–like Wikipedia–and follow strict rules that establish hierarchies and distinctions amongst participants. The difference between the top-down and the bottom-up hierarchies is that the top-down ones make a claim to the total organisation of affairs. The bottom-up hierarchies emerge as ad hoc, purposive, but not totalizing. Wikipedia is only an encyclopedia, not a way of life …The Hierarchical/Bottom-up is often monopolistic–there is just one Wikipedia–and often competes with all the other quadrants. Wikipedia runs up against Britannica, it poaches energy from the cyber-anarchists who might become contributors and it provides the sense of meaning and belonging–or a part of it–that is the most powerful offering of the top-down hierarchies.