Mathew Ingram has already said this but I’ll say it again: Mattel and Hasbro are making a mistake by giving in to the knee-jerk impulse to think “infringement!” and calling in the legal team. All that will do is generate ill will towards them. A far more profitable approach would be for them to simply buy the application from its creators — which they could easily do for a few hundred thousand dollars, mere pin money to them — and use it as a marketing tool for Scrabble as well as other games in their stable.
I’ve been quite impressed by the “Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby” series of books (I’ve got The Ruby Way and RailsSpace) as well as the work of series editor Obie Fernandez, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at RailsConf 2006. That — along with glowing reviews for both books plus my serious immersion into Ruby and Rails at TSOT — is why I’ve got Design Patterns in Ruby and The Rails Way on order. I’m looking forward to getting my paws on these books, and I’ll post reviews shortly afterwards.
(I’m normally pretty conservative when it comes to spending on computer programming books for the past little while, but that’s because evangelism rather than programming has paid the rent. That situation has changed somewhat.)
Both Design Patterns in Ruby and The Rails Way are in Antonio Cangiano’s set of recommended Ruby and Rails books. If you’re looking to get into either Ruby or Rails (or if you’re already into either and just looking for related reading material), check out his list.
By now, you’ve probably read about the gadget blog Gizmodo’s prank at CES, in which they used TV-B-Gone devices — universal remotes designed to shut off any TVs in their range — to shut off display models of TVs on the showroom floor and even to shut off TVs that were being used in live presentations. Here’s a YouTube video of their pranks:
But bloggers and trade journalists, so desperate for a seat at the table with big mainstream publications have it completely backwards: You don’t get more access by selling out for press credentials first chance you get, kowtowing to corporations and tradeshows and playing nice; you earn your respect by fact finding, reporting, having untouchable integrity, provocative coverage and gaining readers through your reputation for those things. Our prank pays homage to the notion of independence and independent reporting. And no matter how much access the companies give us, we won’t ever stop being irreverent. That’s what this prank was about and what the press should understand.
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Many of our harshest critics have done far worse than clicking off a few TVs. I’m talking about ethical lapses such as accepting paid junkets to Japan by Nikon, or free trips to Korea by Samsung. Turning a blind eye to Apple’s mistakes when they didn’t make an iPhone SDK and sought to lock down the handset. Stock prices torn downward by publishing incorrect leaked info. Writing about companies that also pay you for advertorial podcast work. All of these examples are offenses from the last year. And I consider those offenses far worse than our prank, because it ultimately it puts the perpetrators on the wrong team. As one reporter put it while chiding me, “Journalists are guests in the houses of these companies.” Not first and foremost! We are the auditors of companies and their gadgets on behalf of the readers. In this job, integrity and independence is far more important than civil or corporate obedience. Every tech journalist has to decide whether or not he’s writing for companies or for readers. When they start writing for the companies, covering all their press releases and regurgitating marketing jargon, you do no one any favors (not even the companies, which already hire press release machines).
To borrow a quote from Tom Waits: Get off the cross; we could use the wood. There’s a difference between “civil disobedience” and “asshole”.
The “I’m keepin’ it real” defense is the resort of idiot rappers and performance artists who’ve come under fire for going too far; it’s the mark of a mind that lacks the will or the wherewithal to get past those unresolved “rebelling against Mommy and Daddy” issues. As far Lam’s implication that if you’re not rude to “the companies”, you’re kowtowing to them, that’s a lame high school debating tactic called a false dichotomy.
Mitch Altman is an asshole. And not just any asshole, but one of those snotty holier-than-thou types who has nothing better to do with the money he made as a founder of 3ware than to develop a device with the sole purpose of imposing his viewpoint on others. See, Altman hates the television and its encroachment into public space. Rather than just doing what most everybody else has done—which is either not really caring or, failing that, getting the fuck over it — Altman has invented a device called the ‘TV-B-Gone’ (obviously having expended every last vapor of his creative ability developing the product, he was left to co-opt the most obvious name schtick ever). Essentially a universal remote that cycles through every possible code, the TV-B-Gone has a single purpose: to power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick.
Read the Wired News profile, where Altman wanders through a city, turning off other peoples’ televisions, peppering his behavior with such gems as, “We just saved him several minutes of his life.” Maybe after making his tens of dozens of dollars on the TV-B-Gone, Altman can invent a gadget that transports self-important cocks who think they’re waging a subversive culture war to a log cabin coffee shop where they can reassure each other how awesome they are for hating television. Free berets for the first 100 pricks to use the word “Sheeple!”
“Power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick”? “Self-important cocks who think they’re waging a subversive culture war”? How eerily prescient, yet unaware!
Toward the end of today’s post, Lam mentions his blog’s interview with Bill Gates. “We got the guy to open up and talk about Windows and its shortcomings like he never has before, not even on 60 minutes,” Lam says. “If that’s not journalism, I don’t know what is. If we had been in the pocket of this industry, we never would have asked such a risky question.”
That is the sort of thing that makes you a journalist. And what’s wrong with letting the questions you ask prove your independent spirit? No amount of silly pranks will ever do so much to prove your integrity as will the actual reporting you do. That’s something that any blogger who wants to be taken seriously as a journalist must learn. Actions might speak louder than words, but not if your actions are juvenile stunts that obscure your reporting.
In the Simpsons episode titled The Canine Mutiny, Bart uses his newly-acquired credit card to buy presents for his family. One of the presents he gives to Marge is a frying pan with a radio built into the handle.
In the blog posting titled Judging Programming Languages by the Results, Alexander Rødseth comes to the conclusion that he should use Pascal for Linux desktop application development. My favourite part is in the comments, where a reader sums up the flaw in Rødseth ‘s thesis with a single hypothetical quote: “This book is great! I know — if I want to replicate its success, I’ll just use the same font!”
