DISQUS

What follows my statement is what really pisses me off: I haven’t had many people disagree with me. Admittedly small sample size, but now more than 100 people.

Are you saying this in a personal opinion or making a statement of fact? Could be that people are agreeing with you in a general way (same as if you were saying ' a divorced man cannot get elected president') or .. maybe they're just being polite.

Or perhaps they're going .. well DAMN I didn't know Scoble was a racist but they're not saying that to your face ... (smile).

You gotta provide an RSS feed. With an icon. With automatic subscription for the popular readers.

Right. I"m slowly catching up to RSS-fying content.

Feeds I can make using SQL and wrappers around content. How does one get the browser to display the icon and do the auto subscription bit?

From the tech industry’s perspective, who do you think we should support?

I'm not sure if I'm in the tech industry or not but Newt Gingrich is very much pro-business, pro-tech and pro-space.

But Craig would rather focus on the user. Brilliant? Or deluded?

It's working for them, so 'brilliant'. If they were going under and the model was not working then 'deluded'.

I have Parallels on my Mac - it's pretty nifty. Sadly it does not task switch from Mac to the guest OS very quickly - it feels a lot like changing gears on a large truck. There is a shift, a lot of metal groaning as the gears clank and crash down below, your speed drops and then mmm-rrrrrrrrrRRRRR your speed picks up.

I'm sure a great deal of this is attributed to my 'only' having 1 GB of RAM.

I think Rob has a point. The OS killer a few years ago was the web browser - ask George Gilder! He wrote an entire BOOK about the telecosm and Microsoft's imminent irrelevance.

A stock market or any kind of internal means to let the citizens determine what happens inside the company would be very cool indeed. Google PM? They seem to have enough brainpower to put something like that in motion, and enough computing resources to make it go giddyap.

Half-baked thought - Google is embracing the free-market.

No, internally. It's remarked that many organizatinos participate in the free market but internally the resemble command-driven economies.

Five-year plans, top-down resource allocation you know what I mean.

It didn't work for Russia, and it frequently doesn't work if your company needs to be agile in the market. As you noted Microsoft missed the internet. The only problem is it's the only system we know.

So maybe Google has found a way to let the folks on the inside unlcok themselves from the internal command-style economy.

If so (and I could be all wrong) I'd bet on Google over the competition.

"They aren’t the friendly giant they’d like you to believe."

Well they are in business. On the face of it, it sounds like 'just business' from a sour grapes point of view.

Just saying.

http://www.liftport.com/progress/wp/

Because we're the only space elevator company in the world that bothers to blog.

Okay, we're the only organization dedicated to building a space elevator but still. Worth reading and keeping in your RSS feed for novelty' sake. News blogs and entertainment blogs and funny krep blogs are everywhere. Liftport's blog is unique.

That full month of problems were nothing but excuses, i also host in Mediatemple and they are located in the same facilities… Why did MT went down just 12 seconds in the last 3 weeks?

They explained that - it was a power problems PLUS a raft of internal issues on their network that brought them low.

Yes, i love their honesty, the pricing and the features… but sometimes i love reliability and uptime.

Agreed but . . . you get what you pay for.

Liftport has been a Dreamhost customer for a little over three years now. Uptime has been superb, customer service is great and I love the transparency.

Qualifier - uptime has been superb for the price. We don't pay that much, and we get more from them than we could elsewhere for the captial we outlay. I don't have stats ready to hand but the downtime we've had isn't as much as reported above. YMMV.

We'll be leaving soon but not because we're miffed - we're simply outgrowing DreamHost and we can get a colo server cheaper than they can provide.

Why they are not using power generators. Or at leasta kind of a batteries…

Cosmo the answer to your question is in the linked article.

Sometimes I think you people aren’t quite human, just cylons in a homosapien-conceptual-framework, programmed to be wholly unaware.

Something deeply odd about a humanist (is there a better term?) who lumps a diverse collection of people under the heading 'cylon' and calls it a day.

As if there aren't as many diverse opinions and legitimate thinking going on here as you'd find in his favorite co-op coffee shop.

As if he's not participating inthe cylon-ing (his term I'm sure) of the culture. Tune out, brother before you become one with the Borg!

One other thing. I didn’t link to Fred Wilson’s blog. Why? Cause if you really cared you’d have read it by now, right? I assume my readers know how to use Google and TechMeme. Cause you’re smarter than me and I can find Fred in both places right now.

I'm not sure - this seems to have struck a chord, maybe you can expand? Sure, I can Google Fred. But I might not - that's extra work and I might get led astray and never get there.

Unless not linking is a way to filter out the people who don't care so your traffic reflects people who are really interested from the goats.

Example - we get slashdotted once in a while. Large traffic spikes. The last slashdot mentioned our name and what we were doing and a link to the news story - but not us. Traffic was low low low - more of a (small) speed bump and not a spike.

Maybe a slashdot is diff'd from a Scoble?

Is there a super-duper secret backhannel method for communicating directly to Bill Gates?

Note: I'm kidding, kind of. But not really.

The meta-thought behind this question is how do guys at the top of the leadership chain get information they need, but would not see in the course of ordinary business.

It's a big problem in that good news migrates up the chain of command rather quickly but bad news not so quickly, if at all. An entirely human trait; and excaberated the larger an organization gets and the longer it's in place.

How does Microsoft handle this problem

nortypig
sorry brian, my bad :(

i misread what you were saying…

No worries. Text is good and it's cool that we can have a conversation between my kitchen table in Wisconsin and whereever-the-heck you are but it takes a skilled writer to get nuance and tone across. Skilled I ain't.

Scoble
It’s very interesting to see the points of view here so far. It demonstrates exactly what I was saying. We don’t yet see a problem. There isn’t consensus on even that. So, talking about solutions will always be controversial.

Wake me up when everyone here sees that there’s a problem.

You want agreement between millions of Americans when we all can't agree on 'tastes great' or 'less filling'? Ya good luck with that.

I guess it’ll take mass breakdown of society before we get to that point. That’s cool.

Even then it won't happen. Lucky the odds are good we'll muddle through by the seat of our pants. Nessecity may be the mother of invention but she's a lazy bitch - we only do the barest minimum we need to do to get by. This seems to be the way of things.

i don’t know about scobes but i actually contribute to the green movement with my time on occasion… so just saying ‘anyone who isn’t happy leave the room’ isn’t really a valid debating angle.

That isn't what I said, nor what I meant. If you took it that way, I apologize.

very few people are ingenious - many are actually illiterate and live in third world conditions in the third world.

Being illiterate and/or in the third world does not mean you can't cobble up a better mouse trap or find a better way to do things. To reach for a bad example Abe the water carrier might be inclinded to think of a better way to get water from the river to his hut. Brian the computer geek simply has to go to the tap and draw water. I don't need to be ingenious about water, Abe does.

I need to be ingenious about better ways to run computer networks ..

should we all just ignore the issues and wear happy smiles? really? i think its a good thing to have healthy discussion on both sides of the political / environmental debate.

You're still ... asusming your replying to my comment ... reading things into what I didn't say. Yes, discussion is good. Pointless kvetching - which Scoble wasn't doing, but it was a near thing - is not.

Our society is doomed and we aren’t able to come up with real solutions.

Despair is a sin.

It's easy to pull a long face moan about how doomed we are and that we're leaving our kids a horrible world. It's a little tougher to get out there and do something about it all.

People are ingenious - given a smidge of incentive we can clever our way out of the current set of problems. This will generate more problems that the next generation can wail about. Such is the way of the world.

So - Scoble. Aside from blogging about how awful it is and turning off a few lights - what are _you_ doing about it all?

Speaking of 'one person at a time' - yow. You're probably not speaking directly of the email I sent you last night, but let me address it anyway.

I have been reading - in near realtime thanks to RSS - about what's been going on in your life this past week.

I started to address it in the email - then discarded that paragraph. Why ditch the human touch? It felt phony.

I am sorry for your troubles, I really am. Been there with my father. I don't know you, and commiserating on such a deep personal topic felt tacky. Insincere.

So that's why. At least in my case. Which you probably haven't read.

If you want to be treated as journalists in some sense, that includes dealing with the risk of libel and defamation lawsuits.

I am not sure but it's my impresssion the majority of bloggers don't want to be journalists but rather they simply want to speak their mind.

That said I'm more than willing to be responsible for libel, copyright infringement and etc - the same as anyone else. In return I don't expect to be singled out just because I have a blog. That might be wishful thinking.

There does seem to be a strong case of perception over reality at work in the (now withdrawn) lawsuit. A journalist who commits egregious libel is in trouble professionally - or so I assume. A blogger whose day job is down at the mill? You can't threaten a man like that by the old rules.

Coffee and WIFI. You can dispense with one or the other but having either is a nice touch.

I agree that PPT is over rated. Last presentation I gave I had a set of PPT slides ready but .. they were talking points for the talk. Which is a _good_ thing because the overhead was missing so I made do without.

The talk degenerated (or evolved) into a nice bull session. We would have been there for hours (fen will talk anything to death) but the room was booked after our session.

Of course you should have opinions. However .. from the point of view of a consumer not a producer of news it's not the public who holds journalists to standards of impossible objectivity but you guys.

That is - y'all say "we're objective and repot only the facts" and news consumers are like all 'ya right" and you guys are like "no really" and we're like "okay what-E-ver but what about this and that clear example of bias" and round and round it goes.

We're _all_ victims of a glass society where information propagates at light speed and nothing is going to remain hidden. This time it's John Green next time it might be someone finding an obscure post I made to a listserv back in the day. Not that I am anyone of note (aside from my job with an odd company) but still.

The real fun comes when people figure out how to apply this to other industries.

Granted other industries Are Different. Capital costs alone will keep people from Craiglisting (say) Boeing or Airbus. Of course I'm sure the conventional wisdom in the publishing industry said this twenty years ago as well.

Your mother dresses you funny.

No sense dressing up fourth grade-level insults with adult language ..

Plenty of companies do that and no one complains.

Good to hear. We release stuff 'the old fashioned way' but a great deal of 'stuff' we do is simply not worth the time and energy it takes to do a PR right, but we do want people to know about it. Thus, the blog.

Oh you wanted something usable. There is just no pleasing some people (grin).