Microsoft has announced that they will open their own branded retail stores in an effort to gin up publicity, sales and their public image. It’s going to be yet another in a long series of disasters for Redmond. I predict that Microsoft’s stores are going to fail (my guess: within three years). This will happen for several reasons.
Alan Mathison Turing was born June 23, 1912. He developed theories in the 1920s about a “digital computer” which would be a machine that could answer just about any mathematical problem. He helped crack the Enigma code. He is the father of computer science. He was persecuted (and prosecuted) for his homosexuality. He committed suicide just before his fifty-second birthday by eating a poisoned apple. He is the biggest single reason—more than Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates—that you are reading this very sentence.
He would have been 96 today.
Happy birthday, Dr. Turing, and thank you.
I’ve been using Google Reader for a while now and I’ve been very happy with it. However, I’ve recently started falling into the trap of feed overload. I find myself skimming stuff just to get through the massive number of feeds and I feel like I might be missing what I really like. As a result, I’ve just reorganized my feeds in Google Reader.
My feed groups (or tags, as Google Reader calls them) used to be organized by category, thusly:
Unfortunately, I was subscribed to more than a hundred feeds and it’s just not possible to keep up with that much information. Few people can, in fact, because although topical organization has benefits, the big problem is that there’s no way to differentiate between feeds in a particular topic that you follow religiously and ones you just skim through.
So I’m trying out Merlin Mann’s priority-based feed groups idea for a while. I’ve rearranged my feeds into three groups, nicknamed after the cards dealt in Texas Hold-‘em poker:
There was also a substantial culling of old feeds that hadn’t updated since mid-2007. I think I unsubscribed from thirty or forty old feeds that were just hanging around.
I’m going to be testing this new system out over the next few weeks, reading feeds and moving them up and down in priority as I realize how much I read things. It will be interesting to see how this changes my reading habits. I’m also contemplating—as per Merlin, once again—a fourth group, called “on probation” or something similar, which will be for feeds that get on my nerves (e.g., infrequently read, update once every six months, post lots of pictures of cats with funny sayings in large impact fonts, low content, etc.) and are in danger of being unsubscribed.
(P.S.: Of particular note was my subscription to Digg’s “all news” feed, which has long since become a cesspool of stupid links and people putting “BREAKING” in their headlines. I unsubscribed from that god-awful trash-feed and re-subscribed to just the Digg Technology feed in an attempt to get away from the stupidity. Time will tell how well I have succeeded in that. Digg may, in fact, end up as the first probationary feed.)
The Chicago Public Library is diving into downloadable audiobooks with the launch of its new OverDrive service. The OverDrive site says right at the top, “Download digital audio books to your personal computer anytime, day or night. All you need is a library card!”
However, there are a few big caveats.
First, the OverDrive software is based upon the horribly-designed Windows Media Player, its wildly unpopular formats and its odious DRM, so Mac and Linux users are out of luck. The help pages state that “…in order to use OverDrive Audio Book titles on a device, the device must play DRM-protected Windows Media content,” so many portable MP3 players are out of luck, too.
Second, the audiobooks are not compatible with iPods which, comprise 70% of the portable music players out there. Now, this is neither CPL’s nor OverDrive’s fault; rather, it is Apple’s, for exclusively supporting Audible audiobooks.
Third and most disappointing, these audiobooks can’t be downloaded by too many people at one time and expire automatically. According to the article, “After three weeks, the files no longer work, essentially ‘returning’ themselves. And like regular library books, only limited copies of the audiobook are available, and waits for some books aren’t unusual.” (emphasis mine) Yes, you read that right; if a book gets popular, you can’t download it until someone else’s copy is returned.
Chicago Public Library is taking a remarkably (or perhaps “unreasonably” is a better word) rosy view of a digital audiobook system which excludes so many people and makes the rest jump through so many hoops. “Who we expect [to download books] is Chicagoans of all ages…but especially commuters and joggers,” said Chicago Public Library spokeswoman Tanya King.
Sure; all of those commuters and joggers we see on the el who don’t have an iPod, who are running Windows Media Player and who are willing to subject themselves to this kind of nonsense just to listen to an audiobook. What in the world is going on when a digital download is treated as a finite resource, like a physical copy of a book, and what happens to people who haven’t listened to a whole book when the expiry date comes up?
Now, CPL has one compromise; a small portable audiobook player called a Playaway, which holds one book and which you check out and return like a normal book. That isn’t as bad (I suppose), but it’s still a silly hoop to jump through, just to hear someone read a book.