Posts
...to understand this amazing post from Moby about taxis:
Read more...some cab drivers come from conservative islamic countries where women are 3rd class citizens, jews are seen as the enemy, and homosexuals are put to death.
so imagine how they feel picking up a successful, gay, jewish woman who then tells them where to go?
i sometimes wonder why islamic cab drivers don't move to oklahoma.
I have recently been thinking about Studio 60, one of my favorite new shows of the season. You see, the show is generally getting trashed by everyone from the critics to the online forum-crawlers. Its creator, Aaron Sorkin, seems to be struggling to follow up The West Wing.
There are many things I could say about what might be wrong with Studio 60, but I'm just going to share some wisdom from the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams:
Have you ever wondered why great musicians can’t keep cranking out hits every year? Consider Neal Diamond, for example. He wrote and recorded some of the greatest songs ever. But then the hits stopped coming, despite the fact that his talent probably improved with experience.
He’s not alone. That’s the normal pattern. Most musicians have their time, and then it’s over. How do you explain it?
Lots of great artists such as the Rolling Stones continue to draw huge crowds. But they don’t produce number one hits anymore. And the most popular songs in their concerts are the hits from the past. Do the Rolling Stones have less talent than they did when they were in their twenties? It seems unlikely.
One explanation is that the public’s musical tastes change while the musicians stay the same. But the drop-off in popularity always seems too abrupt for that explanation.
Another explanation is that the musicians stop taking drugs and their creativity dries up. But that doesn’t explain all the musicians who never took drugs, or never stopped.
There’s also a hungriness factor. Before the musicians hit it big, they have more motivation and fewer distractions. That probably counts for some of it. But you’d expect their experience to compensate.
Some of it is surely because youth can connect with youth better than geriatrics can connect with youth. But getting old is gradual, and the drop-off in appeal is sudden.
I think I discovered the main problem several years ago when I experimented with introducing a new comic strip called Plop.
{this is a techie post. the rest of you, move along}
Via Ars Technica, I came across this article speaking to Vista's inadequacy for gaming:
So, I've said it before and will say it again. Vista is a good operating system... but it's -far- from being even 90% reliable. When going from an XP machine to Vista, it feels like you just went from a Toyota Celica to a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano. The only problem is, that it feels like your new Ferrari borrowed your Celicas engine. We'll let the numbers speak for themselves.
In the end, if you are making the move to Vista and are a gamer, you may as well prepare to partition your hard drive to dual boot. You are not going to want to go through the hassle of making your games run smooth in Vista, or go through the trouble of tweaking to make it happen. Hopefully within the next two months, NVIDIAs drivers will be much more refined and -all- games should run as they do on XP, or at least close to it. I regret not having an ATI card on hand to perform testing there as well, but it may not be a far stretch to expect a similar experience there.
Check out the rest of the article. He has test scores and FPS rates on many of today's popular games.
This made me think about a bunch of other related things:
- For the last month or so on the terrific TWIT podcast "Security Now," Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson have been discussing the recent paper by Peter Gutman revealing the extremity of the DRM baked into the Windows Vista kernel and the extent of the performance hit that results.
- Way back when, Scoble did an interview on Microsoft's Channel 9 developer network with a team called, "Windows Audio Video Excellence." This is a team focusing on video and audio playback on Windows Vista. In particular, they were proud of their work on "glitch free playback," which was a system that would keep video and audio content playing even under "resource-constrained situations." At the time it just seemed like Microsoft was playing catch-up to Apple, as anyone who had tried IMing and surfing and emailing while watching video in both OS X and XP knew that Windows just wasn't very good at doing that. However, hindsight always does seem to be 20/20, because now it seems like we know two things: 1.The "resource-intensive" system that they were anticipating is now clearly the DRM-heavy Vista kernel. Listen to some of Steve Gibson's podcasts and you will hear about systems bogging down with multiple levels of encryption and decryption. All so that Hollywood can be sure they can extort $20 more from you the next time they re-release Mission Impossible. 2.Microsoft either didn't have a similar performance-focused group for Gaming, or it was simply impossible for them to implement the Vista kernel and NOT negatively impact gaming performance.
{this is a techie post. the rest of you, move along}
Mike Arrington, over at TechCrunch, reports that:
Seriously folks, this is how Google gets turned into yet another Microsoft.The controversial Google “Tips,” where Google promoted certain of their own products over organic search results, have been quietly pulled down.
The real problem with many large software companies today is the tremendous weight of doing anything.
Software patents, process manuals, governing bodies, approval processes. It matters more at many of these companies what formatting your document is using for the proposal than it does what you are proposing. The best possible result of that is Microsoft today. A company so encumbered by bureaucracy and cruft that it takes them half a decade to create some software.
This is what Sanaz Ahari was responding against when she and Steve Rider created Start.com. It was about a small team (that worshiped Google) working on a product without the process (not to say they weren't following best practices, just that they were able to be light and nimble). They were coding, testing, and supporting -- all themselves.
Why am I bringing this up? Because this kind of vitriol from VIP's like Mike Arrington is exactly the sort of thing that transforms a company like Google into a company like Microsoft (or what MS was originally founded to be the polar opposite of: IBM). Every time that the company comes under siege for not thinking about every single locale or every regulations body or everybody's feelings, more and more process gets layered on top of the engineers. It keeps getting worse until it gets to the point where a software engineer cannot change one single word without getting it approved throughout the company. Think about what that does to the potential for creativity and innovation.
Promoting their own products? Are you kidding me, Mike? Do you honestly believe that this was some Marissa Mayer-spun plot to make some extra bucks? NO! This was simply some sweet, young engineer who thought wouldn't it be great if when you searched for calendar related items, it would let the user know about their new Calendar product. That's it. No diabolical machinations. But then again, Arrington has had an axe to grind with the "Do No Evil" corp for quite some time.
Khoi Vinh, of NYTimes.com, writes the absolute best article on the new Apple-made cell phone that everyone and their grandmother seems to think is being announced/released at MacWorld Expo on Tuesday.
Vinh talks about how he has been planning on replacing his Palm Treo 650 with whatever Apple decides to release in the mobile phone arena:
It's a great piece - go read it.In fact, when I think of that passel of features in terms of what a design tyrant like Jobs might release, it seems somewhat unlikely. Very unlikely. I mean, think about it: does it seem remotely possible that Steve Jobs would release a phone that’s a browser, an application platform, a camera, a PDA, an email client and an iPod? Would you bet money that he would? That kind of modal schizophrenia seems like it would be a clear affront to his sensibilities, and none of this even addresses whether the phone will sport a keyboard. I’d be happy if I’m wrong, but can we really expect a phone with a keyboard from the Barnum-like genius who gave us an iPod without a screen?
Go take test yourself and let me know who you are in the Comments!
In an office full of computers I sit next to the printers, so I spend my days listening to the constant churn of lasers fusing ink to paper and of my coworkers cursing and fighting with the machines to try to get their documents. With that in mind, Smeliana writes about paper, paperwork, and an unfortunate lack of moisturizer:
Before nanochips, paper was very very popular, for hundreds of years.""NO WAY!""Way, my loves. Now let me get back to what I was saying. You see, back when I was a young woman, I worked in a hospital and had a job that required huge amounts of information changing hands."
"DATA TRANSFERS!""Yes, children. But then they called it 'Paperwork' because everything was written on paper. Lots and lots of paper. Paper everywhere! Whole cabinets full of paper in stacks, held together with more paper of a different color and thickness to show that it was a special section. We called those different colored papers, 'Folders.'"
"Like in a filing system!"
"Exactly, my precious. In fact, we called them 'Files' just like we do today, but the difference is that instead of it all being encoded on a chip, it was printed onto separate pieces of paper. And we'd have filing cabinets full of this paper. Every house had paper. Every office had paper. And because of all this pesky paper people had to work nearby each other if they wanted to share information."
I'm not saying that Alfonso Cuaron's new film is not great. On the contrary, I think it is certainly one of the best films of the year. What I am saying is that for it to be considered (and written off) as "Science Fiction," it would have to be imaginative. It would need to possess those qualities of a Philip K. Dick or an Isaac Asimov story -- that seeing far enough into the possibility of our future mixed with a certain element of creativity and fancy.
Children of Men is many things, but it is most certainly not a flight of some author/filmmaker's fancy.
Last year, Paul Haggis' Crash was given the Best Picture Oscar, to many many peoples' chagrin. I agreed with that decision, not only because I thought it was a great film, but because more than any other film, it spoke to the persistent problem of race in this country. In the year of Katrina, that was incredibly and indelibly relevant.
As of today, more American soldiers have been killed in Iraq than Americans died on 9/11. The cold war with Iran is heating up and immigration issues here and abroad show no signs of calming. I have not seen, nor do I expect to see, any film, tv show, nor have I heard of or read any novel, that better responds to the times we live in than Cuaron's Children of Men.
I would not bet against the likelihood of our 2027 looking quite a bit like the 2027 in the film.
Pretty scary.
Great movie.
