"If real life was like Second Life..."

... it'd be something like this.

In other news:

• Q:  So, what's Facebook planning to do with all your personal data?
• A:  Targeted advertising, of course.

FCC said to support a-la-carte cable plans

Or so says PC Magazine:

"Channel choice is increasingly significant to consumers as the number of channels included in expanded basic, and the corresponding price to consumers, has continued to skyrocket," [FCC chairman Kevin] Martin wrote. "Indeed, cable rates have more than doubled in the last ten years. Cable companies often point to the increased number of channels being offered as an explanation for the increase in prices. This explanation, however, ignores the fact that most of these channels are not actually being watched."

Not to mention the minor detail that the programing on those unwatched channels is usually somewhere between one and two Sturgeons.¹  It gets even worse when one or two of the channels you want is only available in an add-on package that doesn't contain anything else you care about.  For instance, on our Comcrap er, I'm sorry, I meant Comcast service right now, we had to go up a service level and add something like an extra hundred channels to get about six channels we actually wanted.  We can't get Discovery channel in high-definition without getting all of the sports channels, which we couldn't give a rip about, in high-definition as well.  And if memory serves, if I want the Military Channel (formerly known as Wings), I have to add another hundred channels to get it, not one of which I care about.  If we could pay, say, a flat $10 to $15 a month for actual connection to the service, then buy just the channels we actually wanted at a dollar per channel per month, we'd cut our cable bill in half.  Easily.  Even at two dollars a channel, we'd still save money, and wouldn't have the channel menu filled up with five or six hundred channels we never, ever, EVER watch.

And that, of course, is why the cable companies absolutely hate the idea, and fight it tooth and nail.  (They bleat about technical difficulties keeping track of it all, but come on, people ... it takes one bit per channel per customer to track it.  The digital computer has been invented, after all.)

[1]  I use the Sturgeon as a unit of crappiness, after SF author Theodore Sturgeon's maxim that "90% of everything is crud."  It's sort of like talking about sigmas or standard deviations — two Sturgeons means 90% of the remainder, or 99% of the total, is crud; three Sturgeons is 99.9%; and so on.  I believe this is a unit of measurement that should be much more widely used.

"No redeeming merits"

According to Joel Spolsky, Windows Vista "simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes".  And apparently, neither does the Vista box:

It's a hard plastic case, sealed in two different places by plastic stickies.  It represents a complete failure of industrial design; an utter F in the school of Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things.  To be technical about it, it has no true affordances and actually has some false affordances: visual clues as to how to open it that turn out to be wrong.

This is the same box that Vista comes in.  Nick White over at Microsoft seems proud of the novel design, but from the comments on the web it seems I'm not the only one who couldn't figure out how to open it.  It seems like even rudimentary usability testing would have revealed the problem.  A box that many people can't figure out how to open without a Google search is an unusually pathetic failure of design.  As the line goes from Billy Madison: "I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."