PR isn’t marketing. PR is marketing’s evil stealthy brother. It loves to masquerade as news, science studies, etc. Marketing plants the seeds, but PR ploughs your mind first.

Comment by Moraelin on “Mathematician Theorizes a Crystal As Beautiful As A Diamond” on Slashdot

Marco remarked that the kids of the future won’t know what the phrase “a stopped clock is right twice a day” means. I responded that kids would say instead:

A flashing clock is right twice a day.

I once worked in a bank, making loans to small business start-ups. Our rule of thumb was that 90% of new businesses fail. The exceptions were franchisees and pizza places. But we saw no shortage of people willing to mortgage their homes to start their own sporting good stores and boutique dress shops, despite the 90% chance of failure. Without clueless optimists, the economy would grind to a halt. My own career has been a long string of failures and a few notable successes.

I understand the math of capitalism, and how the few successes are so large they pay for all the failures and then some. But at any given moment, the majority of resources in a capitalist system are being pushed over a cliff by morons. This fascinates me. And it’s clearly the reason that humans rule the earth. We found a system to harness the power of stupid.

From The Dilbert Blog

I am not planing on seeing Transformers in the theaters, and I probably won’t bother with the DVD either. What sealed it for me was the complete lack of robot dialog in the trailers… despite there being plenty of speaking clips from the humans. The Transformers of the 80s wasn’t just about robots and explosions; there were actual characters involved.

So, Transformers is on my not-worth-the-bother list… however this quote was good enough that I figured I’d post.

The robots had the predictable and tiresome “but humans are so violent” philosophical debate. At this point we’re pretty much used to sanctimonious aliens showing up and tut-tutting at us in movies, although it was pretty irritating to hear it coming from a bunch of robots who’d had a war that destroyed their entire homeworld, to the point of making it uninhabitable for robots.

That pretty much sums it up. From everything I’ve heard so far Transformers is just more Bay/Bruckheimer silliness. I’ll catch the South Park parody instead.

From: Trak3r
Subject: Self-answering question

Just read a thread on GameFAQs with the subject line, “What is the
dumbest question you can ask?”

From the blog of Scott Adams, the guy who made it rich poking fun at the repression of free will.

Before the whining begins, allow me to answer the question so many of you have on your mind: Why do I continue to blog on this same worn-out topic of free will?

The real answer is that I have no choice.

Here’s your bit of meta for today:

I’ve come to rely on other people rather than RSS feeds to point out the really important stuff to me.

From I Need Smart RSS by Bruce Eckel

Work is on the “down” part of the roller-coaster again.

Craig: it’s amazing how quickly a culture of getting things done right can be undone
Ted: yup, i was just envisioning the line chart in my head of [their] productivity slowly sloping upwards and [ours] dropping like a rock
Craig: yeah
Craig: are they actually getting their act together?
Ted: relatively
Craig: minor progress is still progress
Ted: i have restored order to the chaos, but order is a six pack away from being beautiful

In my experience, the default state of any organization is to be screwed-up. It doesn’t have to be that way. Most people don’t realize that.

IM conversation between my boss (who recently got a new MacBook Pro) and myself:

Ted: gah!
Ted: eclipse is NOT a happy camper on OSX — crashes a LOT on stupid stuff like “refresh”
Craig: hrm
Craigo: good thing you don’t do any programming any more
Ted: ah ha ha
Craigo: “I’m a PC”
“And I’m a Mac”
“Hey PC, get your damn work done, I’ve got to go to a meeting”

It’s been a long, sad story that the Powers That Be generally didn’t give a rat’s ass about any other browser than Internet Explorer on Windows. If they were enlightened, they might say “make it work in ‘both browsers’”, which meant Netscape 4.0 (which was such a crappy and divergent browser that you are better off not worrying about it).

Times have changed. The combined efforts of FireFox, Opera, Apple, Google, and mobile devices mean that you can’t just target IE/Win any more; you have to consider all user agents. This quote sums it up nicely:

Things are easier now that we no longer have to appeal to companies to be “better Web citizens,” which was like asking Nestle to promote fruit as a healthy alternative. Now we simply point out that over 90 million people don’t use Internet Explorer, and some of them just might have money to spend on your services.

From Interview with Firefox Founder and Creator Blake Ros, via Cafe con Leche.

It’s the “money” that’s the key here. PTB’s typically won’t listen to “this is better for all of us in the long run” but they will listen to “you’ll lose money directly if you do this”.

The irony of this is that making your site IE-only is typically more difficult than it is to make it standards-compliant. It’s quite easy to make a site that is workable (although not necessarily visually perfect) in all major browsers. The reason many sites intentionally lock out non IE/Windows users is that they want their site to perfectly match what the Graphic Designers cooked up for them in Photoshop. A lot of times, you can’t do that without resorting to IE-only hacks. If you show them how bad it looks in any other browser, at best you’ll get “we don’t care”, and at worst you’ll get “then let’s block them from seeing it”. Either way, you’ll get “they’re only 0.1% of the market, they don’t matter.”

Until now, that is.