Tag: Missing the Point

Posted on
by

A study recently determined that organically-grown food doesn’t contain more nutrients than conventional food. Um… okaaaay… I don’t think I’ve ever seen any advocates of organic farming making that claim. I’m sure there are a few, but the major themes generally seem to be:

  • More sustainable in the long term (less negative impact on the environment).
  • Less unhealthy residue from pesticides, fertilizers, etc.
  • Better taste.

And, of course, none of these points were addressed by the study.  In short, it’s a classic straw man fallacy.  Sure, I’ve got problems with the terminology used by the organic food sector (foremost: overloading the term “organic”), but this is just missing the point.

(Hat tip to Katie for pointing this one out.)

Posted on
by

Apparently the movie industry is trying to come up with an ad campaign to get people back into theaters. The LA Times doesn’t seem to take the idea terribly seriously, as they’ve suggested the slogan, “Movies: Just like DVDs, but Larger.” Meanwhile, theaters and studios are blaming each other for the decline in attendance:

Theater owners blamed Hollywood for making inferior (and overly long) movies, studios worried that theaters were turning the multiplex (with its barrage of pre-show commercials) into as much of an ordeal as an escape.

How do you figure out who’s right? Oh, wait, that’s easy: Both of them.

Make better movies, and more people will brave the long lines, high prices, 20 minutes of annoying big-screen commercials, 15 minutes of previews for movies that aren’t terribly interesting, people yakking on cell phones, people narrating the entire @%!# movie for their friends 30 seconds ahead of the action, etc.

Clean up the theater experience, and people will be willing to go for movies that look kinda interesting instead of really interesting.

It’s not just the big screen and immersive sound. Watching Serenity at home lacked the intensity of watching it in a theater full of fans (even the second time, when we knew what to expect). Neither canned laughter nor a studio audience can compare to dozens or hundreds of people laughing together in the same room. And it’s hard to match the collective “Oh, $#!7” that swept the theater in each showing of Return of the King when Shelob showed up again after Frodo thought he had escaped. The communal experience strikes a chord that you just can’t reach with a couple of people and a TV set.

People who talk through the entire movie aren’t just distracting you from the movie, they’re interfering with that communal experience. There’s only so much theater staff can do, short of kicking people out, but at least we know in the future they’ll get to inhabit a special level of Hell. 😈

Posted on
by

It looks like the media is still viewing Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in terms of 3-D computer animation vs. 2-D hand animation. I still think they’re missing the point.

Disney’s new golden age started with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and ran through The Lion King in 1994. Pixar’s unbroken string of hits started with Toy Story in 1995. Disney has continued to release at least one animated movie each year, but hasn’t had a hit on the same level. It’s tempting to say “Well, Disney’s doing 2-D animation and Pixar is doing 3-D animation, so that must be the reason.” But Disney’s own Chicken Little did only passably well at the box office.

I’ve maintained all along that the issue isn’t the animation style but the quality of the movie as a whole. Yes, Pixar is very good at 3-D animation, but they’re also very good at story. Let’s look at Disney’s recent films for a moment—just the films, not the competition, and not the box office take. Has anything from Pocahontas onward been as good as Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin? Or has the quality dropped off? I don’t mean just the animation—the animation is still top-quality in the ones I’ve seen. I mean, is the story compelling? The characters? The premise? Would the average moviegoer look at Home on the Range and say, “I have to see this!”

I think there’s plenty of life in both 2-D and 3-D animation. Disney’s in-house animated features didn’t “lose” to Pixar because they were 2-D. They lost because Disney got boring. Switching from hand animation to computer animation isn’t going to change that.

Posted on
by

Since our apartment complex was taken over by new ownership and management last year, they’ve embarked on a months-long project to “rehab” the complex. In some cases, this meant long-overdue repairs like replacing all the plumbing and water heaters, or rebuilding the balconies with less termite-laden wood. In some cases, this meant cosmetic changes like prettying up the main entrance with a trellis and new steps (still in progress).

There’ve been problems along the way. The plumbing work forced us to move everything out of our storage space for several months, and they’ve delayed things with little explanation and started up again with no notice. They tried out new color schemes in our section back in August, and still haven’t gotten around to a final paint job. They told us to move everything off our balcony just before Thanksgiving, but didn’t actually remove it until January (by which time many of our neighbors had moved things back).

Sometimes the changes themselves have been ridiculous or annoying. They’ve decided to fence off the lawn in our courtyard so that it can be attached to an expanded pool-and-picnic area. I don’t think it occurred to anyone that people liked having a lawn that wasn’t behind a locked gate.

But the most bizarre change has to be the garage doors they’re adding to the carports. They’ve widened and squared-off the posts so that they can put in standard-sized garage doors, despite the fact that this (a) makes it very hard to park in the middle spaces (I’ve already scraped the bumper once, and this is with a Sentra. I’d hate to think about parking here with an SUV or pickup. A Hummer? Forget it!) and (b) accomplishes absolutely nothing. The section is shared by five cars, and two of the doors are double-width, meaning that four of those cars have to share a door with a neighbor:

Image of open garage doors, lightened to showing more clearly that there's no separation behind them.

But what’s really annoying: There are locks on these doors – even the shared ones:

Close-up of a standard garage door lock.

Yes, your neighbor can lock your car in or out of its space by locking his own garage door. Yes, you need to buy your own lock in order to prevent someone else from making your car immobile. No, having the garage door there in the first place does nothing to protect your car – from anything.

What the heck were these people thinking?

Posted on
by

SiteFinder was a “service” Verisign offered for a few weeks in 2003 in which DNS lookups to any non-existant domain in .com or .net responded with a pointer to an ad page. Techies revolted because it broke a lot of stuff. Verisign attempted to paint opponents of Site Finder as a minority of anti-innovation “technology purists” who still resent the presence of commerce on the Internet. A shorter version of my response ran on CNet’s News.com as a letter to the editor.

Mark McLaughlin’s opinion piece, “Innovation and the Internet,” simply proves that Verisign has completely missed the point. The reason so many people objected to SiteFinder is not the service it provided, nor a rejection of innovation, but that it caused a significant number of non-web applications to fail. Verisign, a company that should know better, had forgotten that the Internet is more than just the web.

There are many applications besides the web which make use of the DNS system, and many of them take actions that depend on whether a domain exists or not. Some of the more obvious cases occur in spam blocking. For instance, mail servers often check to see whether a the sender’s domain exists before accepting email. The DNS wildcard that powered SiteFinder broke this: suddenly, all domains would appear to be valid. A spammer could claim to be sadkjfhdsaf@asdfsadfjsdf.com, and the message would be accepted.

Another issue is DNS-propagated blacklists: at least one (ORBS, if I remember correctly) had folded and allowed its domain name to expire, but many software packages still included it in their default configurations. Since people often install software without updating, they were seeing slightly slower results at first, but the SiteFinder wildcard suddenly caused all queries to return positive, and a number of servers began rejecting all mail. (Something similar happened with Osirusoft a month earlier, but that was intentional on the part of Osirusoft’s former administrator.)

Other people are concerned about the fact that misdirected email, instead of being routed to secondary servers (in the case of a bad configuration) or bounced back by the originating ISP, is being routed through Verisign. Here, it’s a matter of trust: if you trust Verisign to do the right thing and bounce it without looking at it, then you probably have no objection. But many people saw the arbitrary creation of the wildcard in the first place as a breach of trust, casting doubt on their trustworthiness in other areas.

There are ways to resolve the issue of mistyped websites that do not break other applications. Microsoft embedded this functionality in Internet Explorer some time ago. I believe AOL has done the same in their software. While there were probably some objections, in neither case did it cause other applications to stop working.

It’s not about being technology “purists,” stifling innovation, or keeping commercialism off the Internet. It’s about recognizing the fact that the Internet is a collaborative effort, not the private domain of any one company. If Verisign had submitted its idea for review, and given others a chance to point out its flaws and to make adjustments to their own software, this could all have been avoided. As it is, it is clear that Verisign neither thought through all the consequences nor is willing to recognize that there even are consequences. And that – not a desire to “hold the Internet back” – is the reason for the backlash.