pstack

People should value truth and authenticity. It's far more valuable than attributing inaccuracies to persons or events simply to manipulate the emotions and aspirations of mankind. If I discovered that the Moon landing was falsified, I wouldn't simply continue with a lie, because it makes me feel better to believe we really achieved such a feat. I also don't think that the truth is something one should belittle as "random facts".

I'm sure this is an argument that people like Nixon would solidly support and probably did.

(Note, I'm not a Moon landing conspiracist -- it was just an example.)

Sorry, my tongue was in my cheek when I said that.

Have you not encountered the endless "email is dead" and "only old people use email" articles over the last five years? Google those two phrases if you're not familiar with the discussion. Essentially, the same people telling us how fantastic Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, and other "look at me, listen to me, worship me!" services are strongly pushing this idea that only old people use email (and to a certain degree, they implicate this for IM, too in the last couple of years).

So I have to assume that much of this move to include all of these trendy new proprietary communication gimmicks are an attempt to chase the "email is dying, because young people don't use it anymore" tail. To keep the product relevant in a world where it is just accepted that nobody uses or values email communication, anymore. A sort of hedging of bets.

You'll see anecdotes like one author who asked his sister, who is in college, about how she communicates with people.

   * “Out of my hundreds of friends, only ONE does not use facebook or myspace.”
   * “I only use email to get a hold of old people like you”

Also from an Arstechnica article five years ago summarizing many other reports:

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The Chronicle of Higher Education says that in a study last year, "teenagers preferred new technology, like instant messaging or text messaging, for talking to friends and use e-mail to communicate with 'old people.'" The Mercury News says, "For those of you who have just figured out how to zap spam or manage your inbox, prepare for the bad news: E-mail is, like, so yesterday." And then there's USA Today, which makes the claim that "E-mail is so last millennium."

Those are pretty dramatic statements, and they're based in part on last year's Pew Internet & American life study on teen Internet habits. 87 percent of teenagers in the US now use the Internet, and many of them prefer instant messaging to e-mail. According the report, "Teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view e-mail as something you use to talk to 'old people,' institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups."

source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/10/7877.ars

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I don't think using these additional proprietary communication methods are about making people more reachable. You can get email on any device any time and anywhere and it's not reliant on a single systems or content owner, like Twitter or Facebook are. I don't see any other reason to include those things outside of adhering to trends. How is using Facebook messaging in your email client any sort of benefit? You have email. The person with the facebook account also has email. So use email. Facebook is no faster and no more reliable and certainly no more secure or private. But it lets you put a funky little square 'F' facebook logo on your materials when you're marketing your application, I guess.

As for the point about keyboards. I don't know how old you are, but when I was growing up, we didn't have these oversized keyboards with dozens of media buttons. You know, instead of pressing the "launch my email client" button on our keyboard, we just clicked the email client icon (or typed 'mutt/pine/whatever'). If you grew up in the last decade, instead of the 90s (or earlier), you might not remember a time when you didn't have these cheap gimmicky keyboards that somehow are still manufactured and sold almost exclusively. You are already sitting at your computer. Why do you need a special one-function button that does nothing but launch an application or load a specific webpage?

Not sure how what operating systems I use is relevant to appreciating real keyboards like the classic IBM Model M (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard) rather than the media-button crammed keyboards of the last decade that are almost all you can find. (However, I use every OS. Windows for gaming, OSX for traveling around, Solaris for work projects, and Slackware and Debian for personal projects).

If there's one thing you don't do, it's offer any criticism of Mother Theresa, no matter what information there is in the world about her outside of the perpetuated religious and media portrayal of her to the masses.

If there's a second thing you don't do, it's offer any criticism of Ghandi.

People cling so irrationally to the persona that have been drilled into their head throughout their entire life that offering any insight or raising any contradictory perspectives on certain characters draws the same response you'd get if you went up to a devout religious person and started asking about their crazy mythology. That is, you encounter a brick-wall that only spouts that you are wrong, because (instead of The Bible Says So) "she was a saint" or "he was a pacifist". And that's as far as you'll get. People who have no investment or interest in either person will be highly offended that you would dare make any assertions.

Hyped figures perpetuated by media and society are destined to be remembered this way for eternity and any contradictions -- no matter how scholarly -- will always be categorized as hateful.

Oh, if there's a third thing you don't do, it's offer any criticism of Nelson Mandela.

Oh, and if there's a fourth thing you don't do, it's offer any criticism of Che Guevara.

I don't see a problem with it. If you use twitter, then you clearly don't have a problem living your life in the open and the price of being an attention whore is getting attention. For those of us who don't need to play-by-play our every thought and action in 140 character narration throughout the day to our imagined hoards of clingy worshippers, it won't be a problem. We likely don't use twitter or we don't use the same identity as we do elsewhere. I mean, as much as I'd kind of like to have all of my identities tied together, I don't like the potential problems that may draw. Therefore, I use a different identity at HN than I do at Slashdot which is different than on LinkedIn which is different than on Amazon, which is different than on Steam, which is different than on XBOX Live.

Yeah, people like you and I are still open to having any anonymity data-mined out of us through aggregate manipulation -- but at least it's a simple layer of abstraction.

In the meantime, if someone can get rich using the wealth of public information that every vapid college girl posting a thousand twitpics a night from her cell at the club puts up online, then more power to them.

I read too many uneasy references to modern "communication" and "the web" that give me cause for concern about the future of the email utility, here.

Is this soft language hinting toward chasing the "nobody under thirty uses email" tail? I may be reading too much into the post, but the use of any word other than "email" whenever possible is unsettling.

Comments about the pending Firefox 5 already threaten my browsing experience with a dump of "social" that I simply don't wish to have, so it seems feasible that this could be a direction Thunderbird is following, too.

Personally, I want more innovative email functionality. Things that my feeble brain couldn't even conceive of until someone else puts it in front of my face. I could really do without having the client crammed full of Facebook messaging hooks and twitter and FourSquare and other things popular amount the self-indulgent attention-whore population.

Edit: Okay, the page went away for a bit and when it was back up, it was edited to include a few more comments and a bunch of links to things like F1 and Raindrop, which seems to shed some light on where their heads are at.

Am I just being old and grumpy or do others feel it's reasonable to want a light utility that performs one function superbly? Granted, Thunderbird is more than a simple email client, but those things it currently includes benefit the email experience (such as the very useful indexing and search improvements). Do I just need to be five years younger to grasp how incredibly necessary it is to have Twitter and Facebook and URL sharing services in my email client (or all the social stuff Firefox 5 may be looking to include in the browser)?

As long as these things remain extensions that you can add by choice to either Firefox or Thunderbird, it of course isn't a problem. Choices and options are a great thing. The more I hear, the more I suspect much of this will be slowly embedded over time as part of the finished product. And the more activity I see focused on these things, the more I have to wonder if there is actually a demand among the user base for this or if it's just throwing throwing things at the wall to see what sticks and hope something gives an edge over the competition?

I guess the best comparison I can make is the swarming of the market with media button keyboards. Remember how IBM mechanical keyboards were just fine? Extremely good, in fact? And then someone got the bright idea that we needed a button on the keyboard to load a home page for us. And load our email for us. And set the volume for us. And shut down our computer for us. And bring up a Google search page for us. I've never used the buttons. I've never known someone who does. Never actually seen someone use one in front of me. Ever. But they're on every keyboard. Even today. You have to go out of your way to even find a standard keyboard without all the garbage on it.

Is that what all this social crap is going to be? Sticking a bunch of superfluous limbs onto your creature in the Will Wright Spore Character Creator, just for kicks?

Here's a track I generated that should provide interesting results if you use it to fall asleep to at night:

http://naturesoundsfor.me/TooCreepy

Sorry, it's already National Cordon Bleu Day and National Hug a Newsman Day.

source: http://goo.gl/3FUci

I'm a fan of computer interfaces in film across the board. From the intentionally tongue-in-cheek 'Hackers' to the downright unintentionally awful and the occasionally vaguely bordering on something close to reality.

I haven't seen this movie, but I'm actually impressed by what I see in the article. It raises the question, however, whether it's something that actually pays dividends. That is, when you employ any sense of reality in this specific domain, does anyone who isn't intimately familiar actually notice? Is the subset of people like ourselves who notice even worth catering to in such small ways? I know my mother, sister, grandmother, and most of the other people in my life wouldn't recognize if it was accurate or not and I suspect 95% of the audience falls into that category.

On the other hand, small things can make a big difference, when you catch them. They're like seeing a loose thread on a piece of clothing that you can't unsee again. Or a stuck pixel on your LCD. For instance, I was watching a marathon of Roswell on Netflix this week (hey, shaddup -- I've never seen it before and wanted something awful to go along with feeling under the weather!). At one point, a guy says to another who is holding a revolver "you might as well just fire every bullet in your chamber!". Of course . . . a gun only has one bullet in the chamber at an time, as far as I know. Most certainly only one in a revolver. And it has bugged me ever since.

It's a feasible workaround, but it's vital that content owners start to recognize the importance of a more rational licensing scheme. Different release dates for videogames depending on which hemisphere you live in, entirely different sets of content (Pandora, Netflix, etc) because you're a couple degrees north or south. It's such an antiquated model for a modern world in which the global cultures have shrunk the distances between each other.

On the other hand, things like this make me slightly amused. It's good to see the corporations run into self-imposed problems from the same institution they otherwise typically profit from and prop up.

I've never even heard of such a thing as a degree in web-design, so I don't know if that's a real thing or not. I'd probably suggest focusing on design in general rather than "web" design. Maybe even things like product design. Things that you could apply in an artistic and aesthetic context to any career choice.

The technical aspect is something you can probably pick up on your own, though it's a bit more of a chore today than a decade ago when you could truly teach yourself 90% of what was out there in a few months.

Of course, this is all assuming you're talking about being the artistic guy. If you're talking about infrastructure -- from hardware planning to databases to writing the engine for sites on the back-end, I'd go for a more CS-flavored education.

I think the big problem today remains what it was ten years ago, however. And the same problem fields like the video game industry suffer. Everyone wants to get into them. That drops your marketability and power of negotiation. Unless you're a truly top-tier individual who has something to bring that almost nobody else in the industry can and you can really make a niche for yourself.

It can't be that much of a public persona. I've never heard of him. Then again, I've never watched Jimmy Fallon (I know it's a late night show, but that's it). How much traction is that going to have with a general public? Not much, I suspect. I don't argue that some sites have a very distinct personality behind the content, but from the little I could tolerate of Engadget's very repetitive and unoriginal content was that the personalities were largely irrelevant. Maybe that's a misread on my part, but that's the impression I've come away with.

The traffic isn't all that relevant. It's what you can do with that traffic. GiantBomb is where the content is. Sort of like Digg may have the traffic, but places like HN have the conversation.

For example, GiantBomb has something like 6,000 (at least) members willing to pay $50-$60/yr to subscribe to the site. That's fairly significant for a two year old site.

One of the biggest problems with AOL content sites (other than the crappy content) is the discussion system. It's a step up from using something like Facebook Connect/Chat stuff, but it's still miserable. I never post to their sites (even on the MMO and the Joystiq sites that I even give a slight damn about), because I'm never sure exactly who it is going to say that I am.

A couple years ago, I made a post on one of their sites and was surprised to see it use my real name. I'm not sure how it did that (no, I've never had an AOL account). It disturbed me and I've never touched it, since.

I know the content creators have always despised the forum system, too. It supposedly was completely redone this year, but when I looked at it, it seemed exactly the same to me.