-
Viewing all posts tagged "culture"
-
”Here’s my point: businesses don’t get to pick the timetable for when their preferred model takes a permanent dirt nap. It’s insane to me that these business’s fans see this so much more clearly than the actual stakeholders do. The fans want desperately to see these places stay alive and many, like me, pay tons of actual cash every month or year to support that.
kung fu grippe: Entitled to Care
Bullshit.
Most people don’t give a crap about where they get their laughs or information, so long as it’s free. “Because so many things on the Internet are free, everything else should be free.” They don’t want to see ads, don’t want to donate, won’t subscribe, don’t want to click something to magically generate a free penny that goes into a tip jar. In fact, there seems to be a growing collective distaste for the idea of you making money at all.
I admire Mr. Mann for spending tons of cash on the things that he loves. I often do the same. Most people don’t and—thanks to the current culture of the Internet—won’t.
This isn’t about some brave new world of change, and it’s not a revolutionary new business model that “old media” is trying to kick, scream, and blindly run away from. It’s pure, nihilistic, fucking entitlement.
Some people get to make great stuff on the Internet and make a name for themselves. Someone in a position of power gets a glint in their eye, and then these people get offers to speak around the country or get a job at an established company doing what they did in their garage for free. That’s awesome for them. Truly.
But what works for some people, or some companies, doesn’t work for others. The only revolution here is that people are turning a blinder eye in greater masses than ever to this essential fact of life.
It’s entitlement, and it’s bullshit.
-
Plans for .xxx top-level domain pop up again - Ars Technica
I really hope ICANN doesn’t cave to a bunch of misguided religious nuts again. The .xxx TLD would make it easier for parents, schools, and businesses who want to avoid or filter porn to do exactly that, while not impeding folks who want to find it. It’s a win-win for everyone.
-
”I don’t really have an opinion on @ArsTechnica vs Ad-blockers but many of the pro-blockers sure do come off as pompous, entitled dickbags.
-
Family Values GOPer Was At Gay Club Before Drunk Driving Arrest - Talking Points Memo
Society needs to cure its schizophrenia.
-
Rush Limbaugh equates Nancy “Bin” Pelosi to terrorist leaders - Media Matters for America
This is a man who, in 2008, signed a deal for $50 million per year for the next eight years:
Mullah Nancy bin Pelosi. She’s no different than these mullahs and these imams who convince all these people to put bombs on their kids and send them out there to blow up.
Despicable.
-
HTC: Don't Carry Your Nexus One In Your Pocket - Gizmodo
Yea, this is going to go over well.
-
”
In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not. The canvas of the iPad must be considered in a way that acknowledge the physical boundaries of the device, while also embracing the effective limitlessness of space just beyond those edges.
We’re going to see new forms of storytelling emerge from this canvas. This is an opportunity to redefine modes of conversation between reader and content. And that’s one hell of an opportunity if making content is your thing.
Books in the Age of the iPad - Craig Mod
-
Same-sex marriage leads Catholic Charities in Washington, D.C. to drop benefits for spouses altogether - Washington Post
Very upstanding. Once again, a Catholic organization serves as a shining example of how to treat your fellow human beings like human beings.
-
Stand Up While You Read This! - NYTimes.com
Olivia Judson brakes down some of the physiological reasons why sitting down for a living is literally bad for humans, and why being a regular at the gym isn’t enough.
via Lifehacker
-
”We’re not as money driven. When we have enough to have our nice cars, and our nice houses, and summer house, and can go on vacation, it kind of stops there. For us, it’s not a game as to who has the most when he dies, he wins.
Per Gullestrup, executive of a shipping company in Denmark, speaking to NPR’s Planet Money about taxes and life in his country
-
President Obama vs. Scott Brown in Hoops Showdown? | Politics Daily
I’d watch it:
“I think it would be fun,” Brown told The Associated Press. “It’s not the Olympics, but I think it would be a good way to kind of break the ice and show the camaraderie that he’s talking about. So, we can have our meeting on the basketball court instead of the caucus room.”
-
This “piracy versus paying” image is making the rounds, accurately depicting the massive, in-no-way-majestic Grand User Experience Canyon that lies between obtaining a film illegally and purchasing it like a good consumer. It’s true. There is an unmistakable rift here, and even in 2010, the studios are still using terrorism to discourage paying customers from ever not paying. It’s sick.
But this image missed a third element at play here: entitlement. Pirates, no matter how righteous their self-righteousness may actually be, assume that they have some kind of right to view this content. We do not. In The Real World, when something that we want does not fit our needs, our personal creeds, or our budgets, we simply do not use or buy it. I can’t afford a BMW, so I’m not buying one. Bioshock 2 on Windows requires that you log in with Microsoft Windows Live Experience for Games and Other Experiences Extreme With a Cherry On Top just so that you can save your progress, which I believe is insane. So I have chosen to either not buy it for Windows or, perhaps next week, look into whether it is encumbered in the same way on PS3. If it is not, I will buy it and vote with my wallet.
But when the “vote with your wallet” tagline is used in the piracy conversation, it’s bullshit. By pirating content, we’re just voting to tell the studios that there is still a demand for it, so they try harder at terrorizing paying customers. This is not a victory for democracy in capitalism, it’s just a victory for screwing other people.
If you want to place a vote that actually hurts the studios where it matters, don’t use their content at all. You don’t have to watch these films and TV shows; life, believe it or not, will continue. The only way the studios will learn anything is if demand—in the form of sales and piracy—actually dries up. Only then will they be forced to improve the user experience, drop DRM, and start treating customers with respect.
-
Macworld Expo 2010, day 1
Well, it’s Macworld Expo. The showroom floor is a little smaller this year, only taking up the Moscone North Hall when it used to be in South Hall as well. There was no Jobs keynote, so there was none of the mounting buzz and 3-am-gotta-get-a-good-spot-in-line craziness that you always knew was crazy, but you always just accepted because it was Apple.
But it’s a full Macworld Expo. The floor is literally packed, and there were plenty of times where I found it tough to get around a booth swarming with people. Developers who shed blood, sweat, and tears over their apps are masking fatigue with a genuine smile at the opportunity to talk and shake hands directly with their users. I dig it.
I don’t have official attendee numbers, but I bet vendors who wussed out of Macworld Expo 2010 prematurely are regretting it. Victor Agreda at TUAW made a great point when I saw him today: Apple’s faithful kept the company alive through some of its darkest years. Now Apple is at the top of its game, on the tip of every tech site’s tongue, selling all sorts of products like mad, and a major player (and threat) in a number of industries, some of which didn’t even exist a decade ago.
Apple Stores are all over the place now, and you can see their stuff anytime you want; it doesn’t need a gargantuan booth in the center of the Macworld Expo anymore. We all know why we’re here. This is the perfect time for Macworld Expo to flourish and the Mac community to thrive on its own. Long live Macworld Expo San Francisco.
-
”The personal computer of 2010 is hard to understand for novices and people who struggle with abstract concepts. Macs, PCs, all of them. Folks, it’s us, the freaks who understand drive partitioning, regular expressions, virtual disk images, task switching, and shell scripting — we’re the exception. So while we trump up our skills at designing “easy to use” interfaces for our applications, millions of people are still trying to figure out how to get our beautifully designed application out of its zip file or disk image. Or where in fact the Downloads folder is. Or what, exactly, a folder is.
Steven Frank, rightly calling bullshit on iPad parody coverage like this which takes pride in labeling the typical computer user—who does not (and should not need to) understand the complexities in modern OSes like Windows and even Mac OS X—as “mentally retarded.”
©2010. Postage by Greg Cooper. Icons by P.J. Onori. Thanks to Jamie Cassidy & Panic.
*Unlikely to find your lost post using this but you can try...
Comments