Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

If you've been frustrated by the perpetual beta software on the web, or the poor quality of software that has clearly been shipped before its time, then you'll identify with my latest article at The Industry Standard, Thou Shalt Ship No Software Before Its Time:

Today, betas are instantly available to everyone worldwide; there are rarely limits. They are used to attract free publicity, or to drive user demand through "invite only"-style launches. And a beta is not a one-time event. The software changes frequently; new features are added constantly. If problems occur the answer is often not to fix them, but to state that "the product is only in beta". But people use the product as if it were final. At best, the service might not work exactly as advertised. At worst, your data could be lost, destroyed, or leaked.

Read the whole thing here. And while you're at it, take a look around. Make a bet on the current predictions. You'll rarely find so much information, and so many viewpoints, all in one place.

Yes I'm one of those people that has to use every new thing, like Twitter for example. And I often find myself in a room full of people where nobody has heard of the thing, and I find myself having to explain why I use it.

Which is usually greeted by blank stares and comments like "Why would anyone want to do that?"

Then a few months later I meet people and they ask me if I've heard of this thing called Twitter, or whatever the new thing is. Happens every time.

Update: Robert Scoblesays it doesn't matter if Kara Swisher's friends aren't on Twitter, because plenty of people are. But Kara didn't ask her friends; she basically asked 100 random people at a wedding in Washington, DC. You'd probably get the same response pretty much anywhere else. I on the other hand typically find myself in a room full of technology folks and get the same response.

My latest column at The Industry Standard is up:

“Free” is disruptive. It can create value. User generated content, in the form of videos provided for free by users to YouTube, created a valuation of $1.65 billion when they were purchased by Google. Or it can destroy value. The easy availability of free music, though not always legal, has decimated the music business.

You can read the whole thing here.

I wouldn't want to be this guy:

“Space and time are tangled together in a sort of a four-dimensional fabric called space-time,” said Charles Liu, an astrophysicist with the City University of New York, College of Staten Island and co-author of the book “One Universe: At Home In The Cosmos.”

[...]

Mathematically, you can certainly say something is traveling to the past, Liu said. “But it is not possible for you and me to travel backward in time,” he said. [emphasis mine]

It's a bit dangerous to make judgements on what is or isn't possible based on the knowledge you have today. It's this kind of statement that gets quoted and remembered forever.

It was once impossible that the earth revolved around the sun. Cars were impossible. Space travel used to be impossible.Computers smaller than room-sized were impossible.

He's going to seem a bit dumb when we're all travelling backward and forward in time.

My latest column over at The Industry Standard talks about software upgrades in the Windows world:

It's not just a lack of compelling features that are keeping people from buying new software. It's also a fear of change. Customers are forced to abandon old processes and relearn new software as it changes substantially from version to version -- for instance, Office 2007 users were presented with a distracting "ribbon" interface for commonly used commands, instead of the tried-and-true drop-down menus at the top of an open window. Consumers buying new software also have to worry about unknown bugs and performance issues.

Are you rushing to upgrade your software to the latest and greatest? Or are you just fine with what you have right now?

...of closing your Twitter account.

Or you could just stop using it. Same end result, right?

You can now get FriendFeed updates streamed to you constantly with AlertThingy. So if for some reason the constant stream of 140 character updates from your friends wasn't enough, you can now get a constant stream of virtually everything they do online.

Even more tidbits of information to occupy you.

I'm following the debate on Shyftr taking the RSS feeds of others, summarized nicely in this post by Robert Scoble.

Here's a company that is building a business around taking entire RSS feeds without any kind of consent (yes, you might call that stealing) and republishing them, building a business around them and potentially profiting from them, and they have this paragraph in their terms of use:

You may not duplicate nor profit from any part or portion of the Shyftr.com web site, which includes: content from any feeds, the Shyftr.com logo or likeness, or any additional content appearing on the Shyftr.com web site. You may use the Shyftr.com buttons that are provided as links back to the Shyftr.com web site, but they may not be modified in any way.

I wonder just how many bloggers would choose to offer up their feed if asked?

I agree with Michael Arrington. Ethan Kaplan's post about valuing art, possibly by government intervention, is a bit self-serving.

Simply put, not everyone values art. And among those who do, their is great disagreement on what constitutes art. That's why there are famous painters and writers, and there are those that we never hear about. It isn't even quality either; sometimes it is quite arbitrary. Ethan skirts this point; he defines even bad music as art:

Music in the end is a form of art. It is polemic, but I stand by the fact that the worst to the best music is art without any regard to its inherent quality. Bad music is art in the way that we deem the music bad.

But isn't bad art just worthless art?Should we be happy to drive Edsels, because even a bad car is still a car?

Ethan clearly wants to make a case for a guaranteed living for artists, regardless of the quality of their work. He says that some countries do this:

Within Europe, it is actually pretty easy (relatively) to make a living as an artist, depending on the country. I have friends in certain countries who are Artists by trade, supported through government programs. Canada supports art through liberal granting. In those areas, the value of the artifact of art is less of a concern than the value of the process of creating.

Government bureaucrats deciding what art is. Is that what we really want? Aren't artists supposed to suffer for their art?

I think that there should be a guaranteed living for software developers too. After all, isn't bad software still software too? Software is an art as well, isn't it? Or is art limited to certain forms of expression?

This is just a roundabout way of justifying a tax to download music, and perhaps pictures and writing later. Tellingly, these people don't want the tax to go to the artists. They want it to go to the record companies, who will take their share and dole out the leftover portion to the artists.

The music industry has failed to prove their value, and now they are making a last ditch effort to put a tax in place to save them. Like many others, I don't download music so I would get nothing of value for this money. And nobody had noted that this is essentially taxation without representation, the kind of thing that would have caused a revolution a couple hundred years ago.

Back in Nashua, NH, my 24 hour Home Depot has eight or ten checkouts with cashiers, along with a couple of self-serve checkouts. The self-serve checkouts were rarely used.

The Home Depot near me in Waterloo, Canada, has six checkouts with cashiers, and four or six self-serve checkouts. Yesterday I went there to buy something only to find long lines for the only two cashiers, and only one or two people at the self-serve stations.

Instead, as usually happens, other cashiers offer to help you self checkout. They end up scanning the items, bagging them, and swiping my debit card, leaving me only to enter my PIN number. Just like I would at a checkout with a cash register.

Now I'm sure that the use of self-checkout by the cashier is being tallied by some bean counter as successful self-serve use. But if the marketing people from Home Depot took the time to actually watch what customers do they might actually get a dose of reality.

These stores want you to think that self-serve checkouts are there for the convenience of the customers, when in reality they are intended to reduce staffing costs for the store. Why would a customer want to do more work themselves when the price is the same either way? The cost of the service is included in the price.

And in the end they do neither. Customer satisfaction is decreased because they don't want to checkout themselves, and are forced to wait longer for service, and cashiers still do the work in the end.

Merely spending an hour at Home Depot on a Saturday afternoon is all the research you need to know that. And in the end I just left my purchase and walked out.

When climate change activist Jo Abbess didn't like the fact that a BBC story suggested that global temperatures this year would be lower than in 2007 (based on a statement from the World Meteorological Organization), she decided she wanted it changed. She didn't discuss it, she just threatened the analyst that wrote it:

It would be better if you did not quote the skeptics. Their voice is heard everywhere, on every channel. They are deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth.

I would ask : Please reserve the main BBC Online channel for emerging truth.

Otherwise, I would have to conclude that you are insufficiently educated to be able to know when you have been psychologically manipulated. And that would make you an unreliable reporter.

I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the skeptics.

I can almost hear Mugsy saying "We wouldn't want to see you get hurt, because accidents happen."

The BBC changed the story, proving of course that simple threats beat science anyday.And I guess he proved that he actually was insufficiently educated to be able to know when he had been psychologically manipulated.

When I was a kid I was taught that part of science was questioning your conclusions. Doesn't that make all good scientists skeptics by definition?

Finally, about two years after shaving off my moustache, I finally have a new photo on my blog, courtesy of my friend. Apparently I look younger, and will no longer have to endure people saying "shouldn't you get a new picture?".

...without politicians to protect us?

Ontario is facing a “serious problem” with overweight children and must do more to protect them by banning advertising directed at kids, NDP critic Rosario Marchese said.

He plans to introduce a bill Monday amending the Consumer Protection Act to prohibit commercial television advertising for food or drink that is directed at a child under the age of 13.

[...]

Research shows that one in four Canadian children between the ages of four and 17 is obese, and it's no wonder when children are being bombarded by television ads promoting sugar-packed soft drinks and other products, Mr. Marchese said.

“What kids see on television is high in calories and low in nutrients,” he added. “That's generally what kids watch on television.”

The same ads on television twenty years ago didn't force me to buy food to make me obese.I had the willpower to not eat all of that stuff. And oddly enough, my parents had some say in what I ate too, given that when I was under 13 they pretty much told me what I could and couldn't have. Of course we no longer trust parents to do that:

“The general point is that children are very vulnerable and it's very difficult for them to make intellectual distinctions between... good and bad,” he said.

It used to be that parents taught kids to distinguish between good and bad, but now we need the government to do that for us.

We've let the government take care of us for so long that we've become a society of far too many rules. Time was kids would just go out to play. They used up all their energy and didn't become obese in the first place. Now we have to protect them from everything, even advertising.

If we protect children from everything how will they learn to deal with the real world?

And speaking of protecting people, shouldn't we be protecting adults from beer commercials so that they don't become obese?

I mentioned the other day that I was reading 1984, and noticing disturbing parallels with the whole concept of Earth Hour, particularly when I've seen accounts of people walking by houses with lights on and assuming that they are not environmentally friendly, or worse.

I thought I might be the only one who saw that, until I read Peter Foster's article in the National Post entitled Lightcrime:

On Saturday night, the awful possibility of "lightcrime" appeared on the deliberately dimmed horizon. Who among those who knew about Earth Hour did not feel an internal compulsion to turn down the lights for fear of public disapprobation, even if they believed that the whole thing was either a pointless or subversive stunt?

Among letters to the Toronto Star -- which devoted hectares of newsprint to the event -- was one from a woman miffed at a neighbour for leaving on his porch light. "Was he afraid of a break-in or was he just sticking it to Mother Nature?" she asked. "At least my son and I talked about the stupid selfishness that has brought the world to the state she is in -- a subject not just for Earth Hour, but for a lifetime."

[...]

Meanwhile, the young and naive were trotted out on Saturday night to demonstrate that they were being terrified into conformity either at home or at school. "Earth Hour is important to me because my kids and grandkids will be living on this Earth," declared Morgan Baskin, aged 12, at an event at Holy Trinity Church in downtown Toronto. "I don't want my kids to be around for the end of the Earth."

The end of the Earth. That's what 12-year-olds are being taught. It sure beats monsters in the closet, since the prospect will terrify them by day as well as by night. This is child abuse. But this is also what environmental morality looks like. Nobody is safe from the pressure. Indeed, just as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is the young who are the first to be targeted, so that they can become "spies." Educators freely admit that they tell children to pressure their parents. Fortunately, they don't yet have to report them.

Read the whole thing.And keep it in mind the next time you see this Powerwise commercial with Daviz Suzuki:

I wanted to reference an article that I had read in the print edition of yesterday's National Post, so I entered the title - "Lightcrime" - into the search box on the main page. I got these results:

None of these stories are the one I was looking for, though I had to check every one because the title information was useless, and obviously not the actual title of the story. Only one of the articles even contained a link to the Lightcrime store at the bottom, though the article was no longer available.

Contrast that with my one word Google search for the word "lightcrime" that yielded the following:

Google finds the exact article I was looking for. In fact, the top five hits are the right article. And keep in mind, this is yesterday's paper.

I really, really want to read the National Post, but what am I to do when they can't even find the article on their own site? And the National Post has one of the better searches from what I've seen. I don't even bother trying to search my local paper, The Record, because there is really no point.It's actually easier to go to the public library and leaf through past print issues to find anything.

We all know by now that search isn't that difficult. So why is this so hard?

My friend is starting an Interior Decoration company and I was helping her with her website. Based on what I've heard, I had recommended A Small Orange as a hosting provider for her.

Last Sunday we opened an account and paid the fee for the year by credit card. When 24 hours went by and we hadn't received an email about the account setup, I apologized to my friend and opened a support ticket.

I'm used to getting the automatic email that says they have received my ticket, but I was astounded to get an email not even two minutes later from Amanda. I won't mention her last name here, but the folks at A Small Orange should be very happy with her. She said that the email had been sent, but frequently they showed up as spam, so my friend should check her junk mail folder. She also resent the email.

Within a short time my friend forwarded the email to me and I continued setting up the web page.

Now that's just about the best service I can recall receiving on the internet, or anywhere frankly. And you can bet I'll be recommending A Small Orange for web hosting. In fact I have twice already.