Business: June 2004 Archive Page

Most Americans claim they don't believe what they read in newspapers or see on TV -- only a third say news organizations generally get the facts straight -- yet their opinions continue to be influenced by the media. Multiply this curious effect by the dozens of cable TV news shows, the hundreds of newspapers and perhaps thousands of websites and millions of blogs dedicated to disseminating news, and it offers great bounty for any media columnist. --Adam L. Penenberg --New Media's Age of Anxiety (Wired)

The reason most pre-1940 musicals are unrevivable is that their books tend to be both slapdash in literary quality and fanciful to the point of absurdity. It was only in the late 30’s that the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart began to emphasize dramatic plausibility, most notably in Pal Joey (1940). And it was not until Rodgers joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II in 1943 to write Oklahoma! that the "book show," whose songs are integrated into a more or less realistic plot, became the norm. --Terry Teachout --Is the Musical Comedy Dead?  (Commentary Magazine)

I'd make a comment, but I can hear the pit orchestra is gearing up for a big dance number, so I'd better go.

Those who complain loudly about how many jobs have been “exported” to other countries because of international free trade totally ignore all the jobs that have been imported to the American economy because of that same free trade. Siemens alone employs tens of thousands of American workers, and Toyota has already produced its ten millionth car in the United States. --Thomas Sowell --Low Taxes Do What? (Hoover Digest)

I'd never considered this perspective before. Here's another fascinating quote, an attempt to counter the meme that Regan cut taxes for the rich and soaked the poor, leading to defecit spending:

What Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” actually cut were the tax rates per dollar of income. Out of rising incomes, the country as a whole—including the rich—paid more total taxes than ever before.

As Sowell puts it, "Simple stuff like this is not very exciting for economists, and there is no payoff in one’s professional career for clarifying such things for the general public." That kind of explanation won't fit on a bumper sticker as easily as something designed to get you in the gut, like "AIDS: The Reagan Vietnam."

Sadly, I think that regardless of their political persuasion, this topic would probably put the average freshman comp student to sleep, so I won't bother Googling for a good counter-opinion to present as a pair of readings. Someday maybe I'll teach an upper-level rhetoric course...

U.S. investigators said on Wednesday they had arrested an America Online employee and a Las Vegas marketer for stealing the Internet provider's customer list and selling it to a purveyor of "spam" e-mail. --Andy Sullivan --US Charges AOL Worker Sold Customer List for Spam (AP|MyWay)

blind users are finding that they are spending disproportionately more time sorting through their junk e-mail than their sighted colleagues. That's because sighted users can simply scan large batches of messages for that one important piece of mail, whereas blind users must listen to the subject line of each message before they know whether it's spam or not.

It's a process that has become so unbearable that some blind users say they are giving up on e-mail altogether. --Amit Asaravala --Blind Get Earful of Spam Daily  (Wired)

Chappelle's harshest words were addressed to those audience members who worship entertainers and athletes.

"Stop listening to celebrities," he said. "They do what they do for money - that's all. I don't even know why you're listening to me. I've done commercials for both Coke and Pepsi. Truth is, I can't even taste the difference, but Pepsi paid me last, so there it is."

Celebrity worship harms the object of affection as well, Chappelle said. "One day people love you more than they've ever loved anything in the world. And the next, you're in front of a courthouse dancing on top of a car." --Jim Carnes --Chappelle lets rude crowd have it  (Tribnet)

Flying a foam composite rocket ship powered by laughing gas and burning rubber, Mike Melvill took off faster than a bullet over a ramshackle airport in the desert Monday and overcame serious malfunctions to become the first astronaut to reach space in a mission entirely funded by private entrepreneurs. --William Booth --Starship Private Enterprise: Rocket Plane Becomes First Civilian Craft to Reach Space  (WashPost (registration, will expire))

I don't like linking to The Washington Post anymore, since the site requires registrations and the links expire, but this is good writing, from the headline on.

Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.

Meanwhile, the affected bloggers cannot access their work, a situation that angers many, who said they believed they should have been given advance notice that the Weblogs service would be terminated before their sites became inaccessible. --Michelle Delio --Thousands of Blogs Fall Silent  (Wired)

I noticed this as it was happening, and had planned to investigate and post a followup, but Clancy beat me to it.

I applaud those bloggers who remembered to thank Winer for the years of free service he provided, but I also sympathize with the bloggers who suddenly found themselves without access to an important part of their lives.

While hardcore online gaming remains the preserve of young men, research firm Screen Digest found that "bored housewives" are fuelling the growth of other games offered on the net. --Net games lure 'bored housewives' (BBC)

It's not clear from the article whether the term "bored housewife" is used in the report, or whether it was just a joke made by report co-author Nick Gibson.

See a good reflection from Ian Bogost on Water Cooler Games:

This is a very dangerous kind of thing to say, and it suggests that even researchers who seek to expose the viability of online games don't take them seriously. As I have argued before here on WCG (1, 2, 3) the reasons women play casual games seem complex, deliberate, and worthy of both serious study and respect. Joking about "bored housewives" is a pretty dismissive and derogatory way of treating both the players and the market. What a foolish thing to do.

The bad words we removed, meaning that "The meteor is going to be pissed" was changed to "The meteor is going to be mad." Howie Rubin of Jaleco (the company that was going to publish the game under license) advised us the that the baddest bad word is Kill. The central activity in most Nintendo games is killing things. The image and the act are good, but the word is bad, even if the word does not suggest the image or the act. --Douglas Crockford --Now You're Really Playing with Power: The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System (Crockford.com)

A bizarre story. Quotable quote: "Nintendo is a jealous god."

Microsoft, amid an IP spree that has won the company patent protection for everything from XML dialects to video game storage methods, mistakenly received a patent on Tuesday for a new variety of apple tree. --Microsoft patents an apple (ZD Net)

Hooray for ZDNet for not using the alarmist headline, "Microsoft Receives Patent for Apple". This is apparently a story about a clerical error.

Now, I'm really not interested in just complaining about the fact that LeapFrog hasn't made this move. It's a massive strategic issue for them, and they do have shareholders to answer to. At the same time, I refuse to accept one justification I heard at the conference, namely that shelf space pressure was one reason to shrink from third party development -- LeapFrog products get a full aisle of shelf space in Target and Wal-Mart. Rather, I think the good folks at LeapFrog just need an outside perspective on the matter. And why shouldn't that perspective be a public one? --Ian Bogost --The Truth about Third Party Development on the LeapFrog Leapster (Water Cooler Games)

I've exchanged a few comments with Ian, who asked me, "What kinds of games might change your mind about the value of the Leapster as a supervised computer activity?"

The Amazon reviews of Leapster praised the concept and quality of the software, but there were more than enough problems with durability to make me pass on the hardware. Since I'm not really comfortable (yet) with the idea of letting my son have unlimited access to his games, I'd rather buy 3 or 4 edu-games for the PC we already have than risk a Leapster.

My son is not that picky about graphics, so he's happily playing some old (mid 1990s) games, and he prefers the 1994 (or so) Star Wars X Wing vs Tie Fighter to the more recent X Wing Alliance... So the fact that I can share with him games that I enjoyed means something to me.

In terms of content, what would it take to get me to change my mind? I don't know... I'll know it when I see it. We don't get cable TV, so he doesn't know who Spongebob or Dora the Explorer are, so the branded content is actually a liability in my eyes.

Some educational games make a funny blooping noise when you make a mistake or get a wrong answer. My son enjoyed trying to knock Curious George unconscious so much that he never paid attention to the letter-recognition game, and besides, he already knew his alphabet. So he got stuck on a level -- by his own choice -- for several days.

I would love to have been able to tweak the level of encouragement the game provides.

I know my son prefers games that feature a plot with an opponent to overcome... For several years he has been enthralled by Lego Stunt Rally, which has completely captured his imagination (to the point that we have to limit his access to that game, or he will make car brake squealing noises for hours at a time, re-playing races in his mind).

Sometimes I'd like to see the "plot" suffer an extreme setback if the kid is careless...

Oh wait -- I just thought of a game that might make me buy Leapster.

My son needs some work with penmanship... I had, and still have, terrible handwriting, so I'm senstitive on this issue.

If there were a game where you played... I don't know... a construction foreman, and you traced out shapes on a blueprint, and then construction teams built the roads according to the layout you designed, and then you had to drive on the roads, wrecking your nice cars if the wobbly lines drawn on the blueprint were too far from the norm. A game like that might also include map reading, simulation, basic math, and abstract thinking. Oh, and of course there would need to be random citizens with fruit stands to be smashed.

Throw in a villain with a handlebar moustache and a cool car that can spew smoke screens and drop oil slicks, and I'd buy it.

Planes, ants, Chewbacca making the calculations for a jump to hyperspace -- anything that moves in a boundary would work. It's drawing on the touch screen that would make the difference. But it's that touch screen that seems to be the source of a lot of frustration from consumers.

Some interviewers have been known to call job seekers at home and pose as telemarketers to gauge how those candidates react. Are they rude? Do they yell? Or are they polite but insistent that they don't want to purchase anything?

How a candidate deals with an annoying telemarketing call tells the company something about how you would deal with an annoying client.

One of Lance's favorite behavior tests is to drop her pen at some point during the interview and see how the candidate reacts. She makes sure to drop it an equal distance from herself and the job seeker.

"When they are telling you that they are customer-oriented and you drop your pen and they don't notice or they don't pick it up, it's a disconnect between how they are and what they are saying," she said. --J. D. Burrough --Interview twists, turns (AZ Central)

Interesting... in Death of a Salesman, when Willy is coaching his son Biff about what he imagines will be a life-changing business appointment, Willy says if something drops off the boss's desk, don't pick it up -- they have office boys for that sort of thing. Willy probably would have failed many other tests, too.

Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3  (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

A few weeks ago, I was comparing PDA's with Josh Sasmor (a Seton Hill math professor), when Josh noticed that one of the four tiny screws on the lower body of my Tungsten T3 was missing. I forgot to bring the charger home one weekend, and took the following week off, so my PDA's batteries died and I didn't use it for more than a week. When I picked it up again, I noticed that now, three of the four tiny screws were missing.

I hit the Internet, and found that I am not alone. Palm does not sell replacement screws, and in fact will not replace them at all unless you send in your PDA for servicing -- which costs $125, plus shipping and the time you have to spend without a PDA -- and that you might get somebody else's used PDA back instead of yours. A few posters in online forums mentioned finding replacements in out of the way places, so I was hopeful (though Finn never replied to my e-mail). One online poster said a railroad hobbyist eyeballed the screw, said "Looks like a #80," opened up a drawer, and presto -- problem solved.

After checking Wal-Mart, Lowe's (a hardware chain), three eyeglass stores, two jewelry stores and a Radio Shack, I was feeling pretty discouraged. The culture here in Pennsylvania is small-town friendly, so I didn't get the idea people were blowing me off; but nobody had a drawer full of odd screws, and nobody knew how to get in touch with a supplier who might stock such parts. "The parts I'm supposed to need just arrive from the warehouse," said one employee.

Today I was in downtown Greensburg, and found screws that fit at Bortz Hardware. They had about twenty in a little drawer; The part number: 0-80X 1/8, flat head Phillips, 64084. I bought seven. When I told employee Peggy Felton about the Tungsten problem, she looked in her drawer and said, "I'll order more."

Update, June 25 (photo added): The replacement screw, on the right, sticks out ever so slightly on the downslope edge, but it seems to fit tightly.

If you're looking for replacement Tungsten T3 screws, you might want to give Bortz Hardware a call at 724 834 3770. (I have no financial stake in the transaction... I'm just hoping I might be of some service to somebody whom Google throws my way.)

According to the chatter on user forums and an online petition, Palm's position is that the screws were lost due to user error, and thus the replacement is not covered by warranty. Many unhappy consumers note that they have owned countless electronic devices with tiny screws that do not need to be tightened regularly, and feel it is a design flaw.

Oh... the price Bortz Hardware charged for the screws? Eighteen cents each. That sure beats $125.

A history of videogames, just as a history of any software "type" or "genre," will reveal an open-source origin and a legacy of "borrowers" and "derivers" hoping to capitalize on what was originally free, whether through buying up copyrights or creating enhanced commercial versions. With an increase in the size of a software corporation comes a decrease in the level of innovation one finds there, until finally, in 2004, gamers are confronted at the videogame store with hordes of cloned videogames and programmers are threatened at the courtroom by battalions of lawyers frantically protecting someone's "intellectual property." The protection that intellectual property law affords software developers is possible only by seizing the rights of the users of that software, even those who legitimately purchase it. As corporate lawyers, CEOs, and investors further entrench themselves in the software market, gamers and programmers will find themselves in the same dismal position as the ship in a game of Space Invaders. --Matt Barton
--The Videogame in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Armchair Arcade)

I left a few (unrelated) comments on Tetris, Galileo, and the open source philosophy on the Armchair Arcade site.

To paraphrase Matt Barton's hyperbolic words playfully, let's remove our lips from the poisoned suckbottle of proprietary software and switch to the wholesome breast of open source. --Clancy Ratliff
--Taking Copyfighters to Task (CultureCat)

Beware, open-source activists, if your praxis is not as pure as your theory!

In the theater world, it turned out that the Marxist ideology was pretty much incompatible with modern theater -- the Marxist protagonist has to be spotless, blameless, and involved in no personal struggles or inner conflicts that cannot be resolved by the embracement of socialist doctrine.

The attention that Marxist purists spent keeping Marxist-friendly dramatists in line alienated some of the best playwrights, since even the ones that were most interested in Marxism were also interested in creating viable theatre, rather than pamphlets.

At any rate, my analogy isn't meant to be taken too far. I think "poisoned suckbottle" is a meme worth repeating. Well done, Clancy!

Writers are supposed to be on TV to tell people what to read or to explain how to clean up television, period. When a writer is a regular on television, his or her writing craft has to suffer because you're in make-up when you should have been trying out sentences. Pretty soon, your writing starts to read like what you say on the tube, your writing reads as though it had been dictated. --Jay Cronley --There's a reason they're called 'writers' (ESPN)

I have no clue about the sports controversy being discussed here, but I found it fascinating to read a sporting perspective on a more general media issue.

As an example of the new pricing plan, suppose you posted an entry to your blog reading, ?I had a cheese sandwich for lunch today. Then, I got behind the slowest woman in the grocery-store line! Grrrr!? By my count (TypeKey will handle the sentence diagramming automatically in MT3.0014d), this entry contains 6 adjectives/adverbs, 4 nouns, 3 articles, 2 passive verbs, 2 pronouns, 2 prepositions, and 1 interjection. Therefore, under the new license, your entry would cost a grand total of 84¢ ? no matter how many blogs or authors you have! Now, that?s not so bad, is it? --Six Apart announces more changes to Movable Type license (Apropos of Something)

Don't worry, it's just a joke.

THE world's newspapers enjoyed buoyant advertising sales in 2003 but overall reader numbers were in marginal decline, according to a report on the state of the industry delivered at the 57th annual World Newspaper Congress today. --Christine Pouget --Newspaper advertising up (Daily Telegraph)

An interesting detail buried in this story: "The distribution of free newspapers - not reflected in the overall figures - grew spectacularly in 2003, rising by 16 per cent."