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“Featuritis, creeping featurism, or the spoonerism feeping creaturism is a term used to describe software which over-emphasizes new features to the detriment of other design goals, such as simplicity, compactness, stability, or bug reduction.”
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_featurism
Large parts of the tech world have been in a heavy discussion over which media format should be the next high definition format for home video. Some also refer to it as a “format war”, making it sound like huge masses of consumers, movie studios and tech names are fighting it out. As it stands, the chart below gives an idea of market penetration.
Credit to Dennis Forbes for that one. Another good point from his article:
“[T]o most consumers, DVD is more than adequate for their movie viewing needs. Not only is DVD adequate, it’s generally the high-point of their visual experience. An experience that is dominated by pixelated overcompressed online videos and cable companies that hyper-compress hundreds of channels onto too thin of a pipe (…)”
Looking at the news headlines from yesterday, it seems 1 April arrived a bit too early, however, nobody has called the bluff just yet. Others reported on flying pigs and cold weather in hell.
Of the most puzzling news, was probably the one about Microsoft setting up an Open Source project on SourceForge to create a free parser for their old binary Office formats. As expected, Slashdot readers were slightly critical, comparing the free gift with a certain horse in Troy, and commenting on the two way firewalls between microsoft.com and sourceforge.org.
Here’s the headlines at Slashdot:
Microsoft Releases Specs for Binary Formats
Trial Set To Determine What SCO Owes Novell
Class Action Suit Against RIAA Can Proceed
| Media type | Product | Capacity | Price Euros | Euros / GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DVD-R | Verbatim 16x DVD-R 100 @ 4,7GB | 470 GB | 37.00 | 0.08 |
| Harddisk | Western Digital Caviar GP 1TB SATA2 | 1000 GB | 259.00 | 0.26 |
| DVD+R DL | Verbatim 2,4x DVD+R Double Layer 25 @ 8,5GB | 212.5 GB | 69.00 | 0.32 |
| Harddisk | Western Digital Caviar RE2 750GB SATA2 | 750 GB | 249.00 | 0.33 |
| CD-R | Verbatim CD-R 100 @ 700MB | 70 GB | 25.64 | 0.37 |
| Blu-ray | Verbatim BD-R 5 @ 25GB | 125 GB | 100.53 | 0.80 |
| HD-DVD | Verbatim HD-DVD 5 @ 30GB | 150 GB | 132.34 | 0.88 |
| Compact Flash | Sandisk Compact Flash Card 16GB Extreme III | 16 GB | 229.00 | 14.31 |
| Compact Flash | Sandisk Compact Flash Card 4GB Extreme III | 4 GB | 89.00 | 22.25 |
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classics-Week-Chocolate-Covered-SQL-.aspx
The sign reads:
Municipality of Barcelona
Vigilance Zone
in a 500m radius
George Orwell Square
Abstract:
In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the “nothing to hide” argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the “nothing to hide” argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The “nothing to hide” argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the “nothing to hide” argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565#PaperDownload
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