Today’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.