Wednesday, December 28, 2011
This kind of this is the best argument for how we've strayed from
respresentation of the people into a policitical oligarcy:
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/12/13/the-political-one-percent-of-the-one-percent/
Categories: Rants, Things to learn
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Today I posted a note to a local list and misspelled "upgrade" as
"ungrade". Todd Lewis, an excellent fellow all around whom I have known
for too many years to think about, commented in a reply to my message:
Hey, Bil! I know it was a typo, but I really like the word: ungrade.
Because until a few days after it's done, you don't really know if it
was an upgrade, downgrade, degrade, retrograde, or what. "Ungrade"
sounds like you're stepping off into an unknown state, which is exactly
what's happening.
He's exactly right, and I wish I had thought of it. For example, I
recently thought I was upgrading my workstation from Snow Leopard to
Lion, but I decided I couldn't stand Lion yet. As as aside, I have about
decided that you should only do one major system upgrade on mac
hardware, since I often have problem with the second major rev, but in
fairness, I'm pretty hard on the software. But I digress. I lived with
Lion for a week or so, decided to go back, and found it a difficult
process involving blanking drives and mounting machines in target disk
mode. So it wasn't an upgrade, clearly, nor a downgrade, since the
downgrade was going back to Snow. Ungrade suits perfectly, and it will
the next time I try Lion as I'll have a cold ball of concern in my soul
as I start the installer.
Categories: Rants, Things to learn
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Gruber's got a
nice take on the recently announced pay wall for the New York Times,
which is basically $35 a month for web, phone, and tablet access. To be
fair, the paywall is very easy to circumvent, and they do allow 20
articles a month for free, tho.
I find myself thinking of this in conjunction with the news that Angry
Birds has had over 2.5 million paid downloads. I like the NY Times, and
have used it as a source for Wikipedia fairly often. But I would never
pay $35 a month for online access, and I think they are missing a good
opportunity by setting the price this high. Of course, I have no
knowledge of their balance sheets, and I'm just guessing about what
would work for them, but it seems to me that they'd do better to send a
monthly price for online access for more like $2-10 a month. I'd bite
for $2 for sure, even with ads, just for the basic news articles. I'm
just not interested in most of what they are publishing, but it's a good
source for news.
What is interesting to me is the notion that if they set the price low
enough, the New York Times might be able to pick up enough readers
internationallly to become a multinational newspaper. We need something
like that, with all the churnalism out there.
Categories: Rants
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Last week, I caught a bloody awful cold and was trapped in the house for
three days. Really a small problem, and the time off gave me some time
to play around with software and poke around wikipedia. By sunday, I was
pretty much out of fresh food and not feeling much like cooking anyway,
I turned to the metalware in the panty. Progresso clam chowder, that'll
do the trick, esp. with some extra clams and a bit of lousiana hot
sauce. So I open the can of soup, then the clams, strain the latter, and
here's what I find:
Over half the can is just filled with water/clam juice.
Now this is a can of chopped clams from Snow, but in fairness, I found
the same thing in a can of Chicken of the Sea's canned clams. And this
is getting to be a pet peeve of mine, since I'm finding more and more of
nothing in cans and bottles of various types. The last aspirin bottle I
bought was 75% volume of air, and 25% volume of aspirin, and the same is
true of many vitamins and supplements.
Here's the thing--it's not so much that I'm not getting the product I
expect, since my expectations are pretty low when it comes to this kind
of thing. Rather, it is the waste that bothers me--this can of clams
carries half the clams it could, and that means that there's about a
third more metal in the can than is needed, and that the shipping costs
are about twice what they could be. That's a lot of energy wasted, oil
burned, fuss and muss for no real advantage. It's a shame, really.
Categories: Rants