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I can’t help but wonder: do they test World Poker Tour players for xanax?

So WORD Magazine has an article about “why records DO all sound the same?“, which has this epic quote:

“Two or three times a year, a company like LA-based Music Research Consultants Inc arrive in town, hire a hotel ballroom or lecture theatre and recruit 50-100 people, carefully screened for demographic relevance (they might all be white suburban housewives aged 26-40). They’re each given $65 and a Perception Analyzer; a little black box with one red knob and an LED display. Then, they’re played 700 seven-second clips of songs. If they turn the knob up, the song gets played. If they turn it down, it doesn’t.” [emphasis mine]

Ponder that. Seven Seconds. That’s the Pepsi Challenge of Music. And we all know where that got Coca-Cola.

This sort of market research is what gets every industry in trouble. It’s like the contest to find the funniest joke in the world. You end up with a joke that’s not really funny, but “[...]the world’s blandest joke–the gag that makes everyone smile but very few laugh out loud.” It’s why software fails, why cars fail. You can’t ask people what they like. You need to observe them and see what they habitually prefer. Otherwise you end up with Windows Vista and SUVs. And Maroon 5.

Now I’m going to go off and listen to some unlistenable Legendary Pink Dots.

So Vista has had fewer security flaws in its first year than XP had in its first year. Because of UAC and IE Protected mode.

…Which is of course an almost meaningless statistic. I’d like to see a comparison of Vista with UAC and XP with LUA, both with IE7. On my computers, I run as a Limited User, in XP. And honestly, I prefer this to running with UAC, since it’s more useful to me to be able to switch to my Admin user, install things, log out, then switch back (with “fast user switching”) to my limited account. Honestly the install procedures with UAC sometimes don’t seem to operate entirely in the Administrator context, and I’ve had permissions end up wonky, and DX10 programs refuse to run.

I’d like to see another option: You get an RDP window to a limited-functionality (yet fully logged in) administrator session, with a wizard like W2k3′s “management wizard”. You pass it the file you want executed, and the wizard sets ownership, installs it, then says “thanks” and logs itself out.

Now, this may be functionally equivalent to what’s going on now, but in my experience, it’s not: There seems to be a distinction between ‘run as administrator’ and even XP’s ‘run as -> [administrative user]‘. (Which may be caused by using a Samba NT4-style domain login…)

1. ‘php-pear’ is secretly an alias for ‘php5-pear’ which, to quote Darth Vader: DO NOT WANT!
   especially since this will remove your entire php4 install
2. your install scripts in apt-get (and dpkg, I assume) expect an ‘exec’-able /tmp. FOOLS!
   real men mount /tmp ‘noexec,nosuid’

The Center of the World is a remake of 1984, except instead of Totalitarianism and class warfare, it’s about relationships and identity. Instead of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, there’s nudity. And playing the role of Big Brother is “Loneliness and Alienation”. In the end, there’s a scene showing the characters having come to love Big Brother, just like 1984….