August 2000 Archives
Greg Knauss, Media Hacker.
Some idiots in Wales have gotten so worked up over recent reports of pedophilia that they vandalized the home of a pediatrician. Aside from the sheer ignorance of someone who gets the two words confused, this sounds like a sign of a hysterical "witch hunt" mentality. Who's next? Pedicurists? Pedestrians?
In case anybody who watched last night's rerun of The West Wing was wondering where "The Jackal" came from, an old post to a Mighty Big TV forum says you can find it on the CD "The Quiet Revolution" by Ronny Jordan. Took some digging, which you might be able to duplicate by searching for "jackal" and playing around with time frames.
"I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me." Dave "Scripting News" Winer must be running for student body president; he's put up a poll (registration required) to see whether people like him better than Tim O'Reilly. I'm not saying who I voted for, and certainly wouldn't presume to tell anyone who they should vote for. However, if you feel you have a stake in this important issue, be sure to get out and vote. Update: Gee, the election isn't going as planned.
I'm kind of pissed that Tim O'Reilly is more popular than me, on my own damned site! What can I do to be more popular? Can I bribe you in some way? Is there a feature you'd like? Should I buy another server? Send flowers? Take some time off? Eat fewer beans?How's about doing something more interesting and/or useful with your time than whinging about your popularity?
Now that I'm actively maintaining two different weblogs, I'm using the generic BlogThis! bookmarklet that lets me pick which weblog to update. Unfortunately, the Blog of Holding, being alphabetically first, is the default. Therefore, I keep posting entries I intend for this site to my other site. Bleah.
New World Order trying to control your mind? What you need is an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie to keep out those nasty psychotronic rays! [via Wannabe]
Sony enters the PDA market.
What's the difference between software piracy and music piracy?
Look at who the recording industry is suing. Not the people who actually want the different use. Rather they are suing the companies that are trying to figure out how to get those users what they want. They think that by stopping the people providing what people want they will stop the need. This is not how the software industry fought piracy. The software industry tried to figure out how to give people what they wanted, even if it meant changing the distribution methods, bundling methods, or pricing. The software industry grew incredibly and is well respected. The recording industry needs to copy from the software industry more than just hiring lawyers.Software pioneer Dan Bricklin relates his experiences in the Software Publishers Association to the recording industry's current crusade against Napster and MP3's.
Terry Gilliam's plan to work on the film version of Gaiman & Pratchett's Good Omens wasn't news to me, although the big-screen adaptation of Neverwhere was. Still, Gilliam has a good brief description of Good Omens:
It's a good tale. The book is probably the eleventh most talked about sci-fi book. I don't know that it's really sci-fi but it involves the anti-Christ. The angel from the Garden of Eden and the serpent from the Garden of Eden have now, thousands of years later, grown to like humanity. Kind of like a couple of diplomats to some banana republic and they've been away from their home countries for a very long time and they've gone a bit native. Unfortunately, the anti-Christ has been delivered and the whole place is going to come to an end in a few days and they really don't want it to happen.[via Ghost]
A boy named IUMA. What, no MP3?
"The physical world sucks."
Sony backs down from last week's Napster-blocking comments.
Thirteen Days, an upcoming movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis, looks good.
They call him Filippo, Filippo, faster than lightning...
I really must insist you play Bingo. Patti Ann, you and Sandy both have my sympathy. Sandy, because I still remember the fear and helplessness of watching my father go through chemotherapy, not to mention his recent heart surgery. Patti, because I've been a- or anti- social for quite some time, and a renewed interest in Dungeons & Dragons is getting me out among new friends more than I have in months.
Multiculturalism? No, transculturalism.
All of the major political candidates are talking a good game about protecting American children, but is this any more than empty campaign rhetoric?
If the political exploitation of children were a crime, most of our political leaders would be doing hard time.
Those who want gun control say they're doing it for the children. Those who want universal health care say they want to start with children's health care. If these things are so right, what's wrong with doing them for adults?I have no objection to protecting children from real dangers, but a lot of the talk of "protecting the children" seems to be an attempt to make some only marginally child-related legislation seem more palatable. [via Flutterby]
I'm a pro wrestling fan, but not enough to spend my money on the Pay-Per-View events. Fortunately, IGN Wrestling posts summaries of major PPV events within a couple of hours.
I wasn't going to go public with my new site until I did a bit more design work, but I've decided to let the cat out of the blog. The Blog of Holding is a new weblog I've created for coverage of the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This site was inspired in part by other subject-specific weblogs like Kevin Murphy's Leaky Cauldron of Harry Potter Links, and Jen Kitchen's food-centric Eat, Link & Be Merry. The template is skeletal at best for the moment; I plan to get a slightly less basic design in place over the next few days. Anyway, some hot Open Gaming news seemed worth publicizing, so I moved a couple of links from earlier today over to that site. I'm not quite ready for co-contributors yet; when I am, I know one reader who's interested, and I'd still consider applications.
Never trust the recording industry.
Last November, acting at the RIAA's request, Mitch Glazier, then chief counsel for Congress' copyright subcommittee, inserted the "sound recording" amendment to an unrelated bill. (The bill in question, the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, had been green-lighted for safe passage through Congress.) The change effectively made all new commercial cassettes and CDs -- from Britney Spears to Slipknot, from Eminem to Andrea Bocelli -- a new category qualifying as work for hire.
No hearings were held, no public debate took place and no member of Congress sponsored the act. Glazier, who now works for the RIAA, consulted only a handful of congressional assistants last fall. He was able to make the change because he explained the alteration was non-controversial and technical in nature.Never trust your elected representatives to pay any attention to the bills they pass at the request of lobbyists, either.
What the heck. Let's just pick the next president by drawing lots while we're at it.
Third parties? Bunkum! If you voters had more than two choices, you wouldn't know what to do with yourselves.
Am I taking the "people are taking Survivor too seriously" thing too seriously? Maybe not, as long as newspapers compare the "Rats and Snakes" speech to "I Have a Dream".
But if I were ever to pass you along in life again and you were laying there dying of thirst, I would not give you a drink of water. I would let the vultures take you and do whatever they want with you with no ill regrets.OK, it does have its moments, but nobody's going to remember this six months from now. [via Ghost]
I've read and linked a bit of Survivor news from time to time, but I've watched a total of at most five minutes of the show over the twelve-week run. Now that the show is over, and the winner has been revealed (actually, he seems to have been revealing himself all along), "news" organizations are writing all kinds of analysis of What This Says About Society. As far as I'm concerned, it says that a lot of TV viewers have gotten so emotionally involved in a piece of popular entertainment that they need to find some "deeper meaning" to justify the intensity of their interest. So, the most manipulative contestant won the game show; what did you expect from a modern Lord of the Flies? The belief that people in such a situation would form some kind of microcosm of the greater society says more about that society than the show itself did.
A working, Gecko-based, stand-alone browser? Wow. Must download this weekend. [via MeFi]
Replicant presidential candidate goes berserk. ALGORE2000 unit taken to lab for repairs; corporate media initiates coverup. Voight-kampf testing of all future presidential candidates recommended. [via MediaNews]
Am I the only one who finds news about reality TV more interesting than the shows themselves?
Salon on the great internet pedophila scare:
But we haven't seemed to learn that our ability to convince ourselves that a threat exists is no guarantee that there is one; our ability to make arrests does not mean crimes have been committed; our determination to protect our children does not mean we are doing so. Satanic ritual abuse, we recall, did not exist at all -- nowhere, not once, not to anybody: So says the FBI.
If we have evidence that sexual abuse is not the greatest problem facing our children, and that sexual abusers are almost always (up to 99 percent of the time) within the family or the family circle, why do we land so heavily -- almost exclusively -- on the image of the abductor? Surely we should ask whether this Internet predator isn't simply the latest version of the figure we keep seeking out, the Other, the monster who is threatening our kids. We should at least wonder if it's the kids we are protecting by this maneuver.There's an opposing view as well.
Someone is trying to work up a set of cyberpunk role-playing rules using the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition "D20" rules system. Basically, Wizards of the Coast is "open sourcing" some part of the basic mechanics of the latest D&D ruleset so that third parties can develop their own games based on the same basic framework. I don't know the details of the license; I'll try to dig up some more links on that later on. I don't know if the license allows for third-party commerical D20 games, but I suspect that a number of hobbyists are already working on various D20 rulesets and settings. [via 3e News]
National Security Council consults consortium of foxes on vital henhouse security issues.
In case any of you muggles still don't know how to pronounce "Hermione" (or any other unusual name from Harry Potter), there's an interactive pronunciation guide at the books' official site. You can even find out how to pronounce the name of "You-know-who", if you're persistent. [via MeFi]
As near as I can tell from this article, Sony thinks it's going to install Napster-blocking software on your computer.
I was afraid this might be the case. This summer's massive forest fires may owe part of their intensity to overzealous fire-fighting in the past.
What a bunch of hucklebuck.
Another part of the power of Orwell's Big Brother was that everyone learned to accept a culture of constant surveillance in the name of their own safety.
In George Orwell's 1984, Big Brother's power came not so much from constant observation of everyone, as from controlling what people could see and hear. The producers of the Big Brother "reality series" may be exercising just as much control over what viewers get to see.
Sponsor Ikea's furniture keeps falling apart on the residents. You can rely on it: CBS will never show the housemates' Ikea jokes on television. Nor has the network allowed viewers to see that some product brand names are scratched out, some are not. If you didn't pay for product placement, your product doesn't see airtime.It seems that some of the housemates are fomenting rebellion; some have even attempted to resort to a playing-card-based code (though probably not one as complex as Solitaire) in order to communicate without network eavesdropping.
Uh-oh. Another Roller Coaster Tycoon expansion is in the works.
Bummer. I didn't use it that much, but Deepleap's extensible plug-in model always sounded promising.
The online Harry Potter sorting hat put me in Slytherin with all the sneaky folks. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Since the proprietor of The Leaky Cauldron (where I found this link, of course) has a page of blogs sorted by a color survey, I wonder if he'll do a sorting hat directory.
A good roundup of the winners and losers at last week's Democratic National Convention.
CNN showed footage of demonstrators in handcuffs and black clad, bandana-masked anarchists, and then quickly returned to "the business" of covering the convention. Mainstream journalists dismissed the protests, pleading that they didn't get what the protesters were talking about. At the Shadow Convention, Newsweek's Jonathon Alter showed the corporate media's true colors when he attacked the demonstrators for not having made their message clear to the media. Apparently, media worthy events now need good enough PR to absolve journalists of any responsibility for research, interviewing, or developing understanding on their own.This article also refers to Robert Scheer's comments on the image LA presented: "You can't buy this kind of lousy publicity for a billion bucks."
I'm sure Jay will be glad to see that he isn't the only one who thinks Tom Clancy needs an editor.
Sounds of Silence.
This weekend, while failing to do any work on the new site I had mumbled about, I fought undead cats with psionically enhanced claws. I've been too reclusive for too long; getting back into Dungeons & Dragons, and gaming in general, was a blast.
Fear of a BlackPlanet.com; a prospective user named Sherril Babcock has been blocked from the African-American portal because the site's censorware rejected her name.
Yes, I do have a degree of sympathy for some of the current wave of political protesters, but very little of it is for the Black Blocs, even after reading their side of the story. [via randomWalks]
I summon the Iron Chimps!
Media news has some great stories of bizarre reader responses to reporters' stories.
One day, minutes after I had filed another story about some state's insurance department suspending the questionable insurance company's right to sell policies, I got a call from a man who said he represented the insurance company, was at the airport and wanted to talk. I suggested he come by the newspaper in the morning. He insisted that we meet at a downtown bar immediately, however, so we met at the Capitol Hotel bar. The fellow, who was a well-tanned cajun who said he had flown in from Honduras for the meeting, reached out to turn off my tape recorder and said "let me tell you a story, boy." He told me a 10-minute story about a "good cop" and a "bad cop" that ended with the good cop "sticking his nose in something that was none of his business" and "getting his head blowed off." ... "Do you know what I mean, boy?" he asked, leaning back to display something in his waistband that looked a lot like the butt of a gun. Then he turned my tape recorder back on and said "ask me anything you want."Update: Reporters are continuing to submit stories of their experiences with fans, enemies, and crackpots. Good stuff.
Robert Scheer questions the DNC's snubbing of Playboy as they seek the sponsorship of the booze biz. Why single out skin mags as a danger while ignoring the more tangible threats of alcohol?
Which is a more important cause of family violence? How many sober husbands beat their wives with copies of Playboy? You tell me whether rape on college campuses occurs because some frat kid glimpsed a Playboy centerfold, which are so tame compared to what appears in those movies Universal makes. Or is it the lubricant of alcohol that blurs the moral restraint of supposedly properly raised young men?
Veteran of the Culture Wars:
Policy wonks' aesthetic sense has become so ossified by political debate that most of them actually think that show biz exists to convey a message or promote a particular kind of behavior. It never occurs to them that a song or movie may be trying to make people dance or laugh, that entertainment experiences are impressionistic and emotional. Here's a clue -- listening to the blues doesn't make most people sad.[more MeFi]
I never watched American High, but I hate it when networks don't give a new show a chance. Two weeks in a highly-contested time slot does not seem to count as a reasonable chance; replacing it with a re-run that already has another time slot of its own seems especially lame.
Saving the world before takeoff. A Powerpuff Girls decorated airplane may seem like a good idea, but what do you do when Mojo JoJo tries to shoot it down? [via Whim & Vinegar]
Somehow I think getting harassed on the playground will be a bigger "peril" for baby Internet Underground Music Archive Dylan-Lucas than Britney Spears music will. After all, how many people will even remember Britney by the time this kid learns to talk? In ten years, I predict that there will be some sort of commune for these victims of the dot-com madness, probably in the town of half.com.
From an article on the DeCSS and Napster cases, a good quote on the effects of unwanted, unenforceable laws:
"Law is very vulnerable when it makes orders that don't get enforced," said Charles Nesson, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. "Law consists of two things, the coercive power to impose a sanction on someone who violates it and the willingness of people to obey the law without actually putting it to the test. The more you undermine the credibility of law with the people who are governed by it, the more you need sanctions to keep order."[via rebecca]
A bike messenger's protest diary provides the most coherent explanation I've seen to date of the current round of political protests.
Looks like attempts to control protests of the L. A. Democratic National Convention are going to be even more draconian than those at the RNC in Philadelphia. The Shadow Convention and the Independent Media Center were shut down over a questionable bomb threat.
"Never wear sandals to a riot."
Well, there's something you don't see every day. A guy steals a backhoe, drives it the wrong way down I-70, and attacks a truck with it. "Police said he would receive a mental health evaluation." Well, I should certainly hope so.
Ouch. You don't think anybody was out for revenge, do you?
This Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition News site may fill the niche for which I was considering a weblog. They have some nice rumors about upcoming releases. I'm may still give the new weblog a shot, especially if anyone else is interested in contributing. I'll try to put up a tentative design by the weekend. Also, I've contacted a local group, just starting a 3rd edition campaign, that had a flyer up in the local game shop, so I may get a chance to start playing soon.
Assimilate this! Self-proclaimed cyborg Kevin Warwick now claims that television boosts intelligence. Well, I doubt it could lower his, at the very least.
Consumer advocacy sites suck! Wired news has a brief summary of copyright law as it relates to websites criticizing big business.
I'd never heard of Brenda Laurel before, but I have read a bit of Neilsen, Norman, and Tognazzini. It seems that these four usability experts are now under one roof. I may not care much for usability uber alles attitudes, but do think such a "dream team" would produce some interesting ideas. [via Joel]
It's time to get back into active role-playing gaming. I dutifully picked up my copy of the new third edition of the Dungeons & Dragons Player Handbook last Thursday. Judging from the web and usenet response, people either love it or hate it. I'm tentatively in the "love it" camp, and want to play. The thing is, I've never really gotten involved with the local gaming community since I moved to St. Louis, and don't know what it's going to take to get into an active group. [reviews via randomWalks] (Just had an idea. How about a D&D weblog? Anybody have any suggestions?)
The brave Chihuahua who went into harm's way to protect kids from an attacking pit bull paid a heavy price for his heroics. He was badly injured, and narrowly avoided getting his own head bitten off.
Why is the next version of Microsoft Office supposed to work just fine on Windows 98 (which was little more than a service pack for 95), but not on Windows 95 itself? The vultures admit that it may just be a bunch of "supported platforms" mumbo-jumbo; the most likely way a program would work on one platform but not the other would be deliberate version-checking. That would be as lame as Microsoft's policy of shipping only "recovery" CD's with new OEM PC's, a policy of which my father has run afoul. When he tried to activate his USB port, Windows asked for an unavailable installation CD.
In case you were wondering where I get technology news...
Brendan the Navigator, this guy ain't. According to the radio this morning, this bozo keeps trying to navigate across the Irish Sea with a roadmap.
It takes a brave chihuhua to stand up to a pit bull, epecially in defense of its master's grandkids.
An aside from an article about high-security prison inmates being prevented from subscribing to the local community newspaper:
Two hospitals in Springfield, Ill., concerned about the risk of child abductions, said last month they would stop providing birth announcements to the local newspaper, and they urged new parents to refrain from putting wooden storks or balloons in the front yard.
Either we live in an ever more dangerous world, or we're just getting much better at scaring ourselves.I tend to believe it's more the latter than the former. [via MediaNews]
I want web servers built into my home electronics. Why? So I can program them over the net. The makers of the Replay TV digital video recorder plan to provide a service to allow users to control their devices from the company's site. Being able to add shows that you forgot to program would be nice enough, but there could be some other benefits, like being able to free up space from shows you caught on the road. My ideal technology would be a centralized home server (with decent security) to allow me to control multiple devices (entertainment, security, communications) through a central site. [via eJournal]
Ask me about my vow of silence. [via twernt]
Speaking of Jack Ryan, Barnes & Noble has an excerpt of Tom Clancy's upcoming novel, The Bear and the Dragon. I might get this one in hardcover, but I'm not as enthusiastic as I was over Clancy's earlier books; for me, the series peaked with Debt of Honor, and has begun to go downhill. I'll still read the new book eventually, and probably enjoy it, but Clancy has dropped off the (short) list of authors I'll buy as soon as they hit the shelves.
I'd probably vote for Josiah Bartlet over either of the real-world presidential candidates. But then, I could probably say the same of Jack Ryan. (Possibly even Lex Luthor, while we're at it.) I don't have any particular preference for Whitmore, and I hope I wouldn't vote for Richmond. I'm trying to compile a list of modern-era American presidents (and presidential candidates) from various works of fiction (movies, books, TV); the floor is open for nominations.
People who want to sound like they understand the internet are far too quick to slap a ".com" on the end of anything. Case in point: the title of a book on pedophilia used "katie.com" as the title; the owner of said domain (a personal site) was flooded with e-mail and is now suing the publisher.
This is sad. The Clear Landmines site appears to have lost all its sponsors.
Oh, Please. Back on the MS Gulf Coast, some holy roller is raising a stink about students being given a school holiday for Mardi Gras. He was "appalled at the behavior" at a Gautier, MS parade, calling it an outlet "for drunkenness and lewd behavior." Gimme a break; while I've never been to the Gautier parade, I'm sure it's typical of the small-town parades held throughout the area between New Orleans and Mobile, no wilder than any other small-town public celebration. I doubt that anywhere other than New Orleans (and possibly Mobile) do the parades present a threat to any but the most narrow-minded interpretation of "family values." Even most of the big-city parade routes, as wild as they may get in some parts of town, pass through more family-friendly areas. In Mississippi, I don't think I've ever seen traditional Mardi Gras celebrations get too wild for families.
Tomorrow will be cool and cloudy, with occasional showers of fish. More stories of odd things and creatures falling from the sky may be found in the works of Charles Fort.
Our new telephone system at work is going to require training. Oh joy.
Bookface is a new online publisher using a new streaming text technology to allow readers to view published books for free, but only online. No printing, no saving to disk, etc. I'm sure this is going to go over about as well as proprietary digital music formats.
The latest Salon article on Napster says all the things I'd like to say about digital music, much better than I could.
The music companies can take their resources today and spend them on lawyers and legal battles with their own customers in a futile effort to preserve their threatened profit margins. Or they can begin the hard but rewarding work of building new businesses around new technologies. It sure looks like they're choosing the former route. If they stick to the narrow turf of copyright law and cede the wider terrain of new technologies and businesses, they may eke out a short-term advantage, but they will ensure their long-term irrelevance.Of course, Salon seems to be allowing its writers to express every possible viewpoint on Napster.
Old Jedi never die, they just fade in and out.
I, Cringely on Carnivore: the saga continues. This week, he brings up a scary aspect of internet plans for the 2002 Olympics.
At the Utah games there will be a network of kiosks set up for athletes, journalists, and the public to use for e-mail and Net access. This will be the easiest way for many people to communicate in an area that will probably have its cellphone circuits maxed-out most of the time. Try making a cellphone call in Las Vegas during Comdex or the Consumer Electronics Show and you'll know what I mean. Well, the FBI has some rather specific requirements for Olympic data security, including the ability to not only COPY e-mail from these kiosks containing passwords from users' secret list, but to actually INTERCEPT e-mail and deliver it to a security office address rather than to the intended recipient. The person manning that address is supposed to make summary decisions about what to do with the reviewed email -- maybe it gets passed along as intended by its author, maybe bounced as "undeliverable" for myriad reasons, or...
Seriously, that's a technical requirement, for which a vendor has not yet been chosen. The FBI gets to read mail, steal passwords, and divert mail. By the nature of the system, they have to look at all the mail -- even yours, if you are there. Remember, given the high-roller nature of Olympic audiences, the passwords being recorded to a database will likely include America's business elite. Of course those passwords would never be used for any illegal purpose, right?This looks a bit more concrete than the wild speculation of Cringely's previous columns.
Going to school in Mississippi, I learned a lot more about the American Civil War than most Americans seem to. However, I never realized that a significant number of Confederate veterans fled the devastated post-war South and moved to Brazil.
Historians say some Confederate exiles wanted to continue slavery on foreign lands, but many simply were hungry for a new frontier or feared retribution after losing the war.I suspect that the economic devastation (from which the South took decades to recover, if it ever truly has) was the most common reason for emigration. [via Kestrel]
I may never bake another potato in the microwave again; baking potatoes the hard way takes more time, but no more effort, and turns out wonderfully fluffy. My pan-searing technique needs practice, though. Good Eats may be the most practical cooking show I've ever watched; host Alton Brown focuses more on techniques than on recipes, and covers the basics that other cooking shows assumes you already know.
Relston returns.
Some people are far too forgiving.
"Sometimes you get angry and depressed with everything. When someone runs at you with an axe or spits at you or throws stones at you ... you have to try and stay positive," he said.This guy won't get killed for his money, he'll get killed for being too bloody cheerful.
Most media coverage of the Republican National Convention is about how the media can't find anything interesting to cover. Poor babies. The best article I've seen so far on the Republican National Convention says that the real story isn't about the bland, scripted convention, but about why people don't care.
Whatever else you might think of the Seattle-style protests that have come to Philadelphia, and that will greet the Democrats in Los Angeles later this month, they are a sign of profound disengagement from the established political system. And it's no wonder people are disengaged. Yes, there are important differences between George W. Bush and Al Gore on issues such as abortion rights, full equality for lesbians and gay men, and health care. Yet there is considerable truth to the critique that they are more alike than different, especially in their fealty to corporate interests.NewsForChange also has some good (if left-leaning) writing on the convention. [via the excellent Media News]
This is frustrating. According to the official They Might Be Giants site, they're playing St. Louis this Saturday. I know where it's supposed to be (Maryland Plaza), but that's it. In particular, I don't know what time Saturday they're supposed to play, and I'd like some confirmation that the show is for real. The local newspaper sites have nothing, the radio stations that usually sponsor them have nothing, and Citysearch has nothing. I'll keep looking.
I hope Hunter S. Thompson's assistants receive hazard pay.
I was into unexplained phenomena long before The X-Files; as a child, I wanted to seek out legendary creatures like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, etc. Grown-ups laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a "monsterologist" when I grew up; would they have listened more seriously if I had known that the correct term was "cryptozoologist"? Perhaps if I had, I could have pursued my dream and eventually become part of the effort to capture a lake monster in Norway.
It's been a thorn in Microsoft's side ever since they purchased the Hotmail free e-mail service in 1997, that they haven't been able to migrate the FreeBSD/Apache-based service to a Microsoft OS. Now it appears that they're finally making the transition to Windows 2000. I suppose I still have a Hotmail account, but the flood of spam has made it effectively useless; I've switched a couple of times, but currently use Excite for a (secondary) web-mail address.
Looks like Stephen King will continue to post chapters of his online story on a voluntary-payment basis. 76% of the downloads of his first chapter have been paid for. I would not be surprised at higher purchase rates for later chapters, since I suspect many non-paying downloaders only grabbed it for novelty value. (I didn't bother; wake me when Dean Koontz posts a new Midnight Bay story.)
"It's a great way of introducing Stephen King to people who weren't aware of him," said Jamie Hodder-Williams, the company's marketing director.Internet users who've never heard of King and don't know what type of stories he writes. Yeah, there's an exploitable market segment.
Targeted ads meet headhunting. Apparently, the Scient website presents one front page to the general public and another to readers from its competitors, in an attempt to lure their employees away.
Nope, Scient isn't like the others. And because you're looking at our site, maybe you're not like them, either. Perhaps you'd like to join us instead?I suspect that the "competitors" page is customized depending upon the receiving address; the page looks (from here) like a few "fill-in-the-blanks" phrases are missing. Clever, but mildly creepy. [via SiteSherpa, which may deserve some comment of its own later on]
It's somewhat of a relief to learn that Curry appears to be a marketing ploy from someone deliberately trying to create the next Mahir. [via MeFi]
I enjoy Canada-bashing as much as the next redneck, but the vultures go for a cheap shot about a Microsoft giveaway that would require Canadian winners to solve a math problem. The American's Guide to Canada sheds a bit of light on the reason:
Contests run by anyone other than the government have "skill-testing questions" that winners must answer correctly before they can claim a prize. These are usually math problems, and are administered to get around the law that only the government can administer lotteries.But then, if I were that concerned about fairness, research, or fact-checking, I wouldn't be reading the Reg (or keeping a weblog for that matter). At least the boys on the other side of the pond can take a joke, even if some of their readers can't.