DISQUS

Hey everyone. THere used to be a bunch of comments here. But we were hacked. We're working to reload the database, but that could take a while. In the meantime, please keep arguing. :)

Fazal, could you kindly repost your reply to Chas... It got caught in my spam filter, and accidentally deleted. My apologies

Chas man, I'm glad you like it. I have to agree, this thing rocks. It's funny that an ad campaign could be this much fun.

Andrew... you didn't just say you didn't want to watch Transformers, did you? My goodness, writing for me has rendered you coldhearted and senseless... what have I done? Lol, Andrew, I promise not you beat you with that stick anymore.... Leave the dark side. Leave it now!

I bet there are. There's enough people in America with that kind of money But the point is: what will you DO with this at home? When all the applications that are on it, at first, will be for commercial use... I guess you can use it to place your dinner orders for your wife to cook...

That's true, but that thing is not HD. It only outputs with composite cables, so it wont work. I want to do all this:
1. Upscale DVDs up to 1080i
2. Plays Divx, Xvid, upscaled
3. I dont want to burn every movie

Guys, this isn't an ad. Every now and then, Ian comes in and writes an article for us. It's always a little teaser for the longer review article that sits on his own site. I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Yeah, really, guys, we could have just pressed a button, and no one would have been the wiser. We let you in on these things for a variety of reasons. One, a few thousand of you testing things for us is definitely better than three of us looking around to make sure nothing's broken. Two, we think you might benefit from our mistakes, and not have to go through the same hassles yourselves.

When we got the Dedicated Virtual package at Media Temple, it seemed like a no-brainer. We were coming from a $8 a month(or something like that) shared hosting from Bluehost (before that, it was the unmentionable Dreamhost), and we thought that $75 a month was definitely, without question give us more horsepower. Well, it turns out we were wrong, and there was no way to test this before doing the switch: the problem only occurred once traffic started coming into the new server.

The DV server is nice, but it's a (virtual) box with limited resources, and getting more resources cost a lot more. The Grid, on the other hand, should in theory be better able to handle our traffic, since it scales and distributes the computing power over hundreds of servers when needed. But that's in theory, and we've heard a few horror stories from Media Temple. So, let me say here, there's a decent chance we'll be moving again.

But, maybe this time we won't tell anyone. :)

Here's me testing comments

Holy crap dude, that comment made me pee myself

I'm on a VPS. And yeah, it does make a huge difference. Being with a VPS is like being in a box, with no room for scaling. Basically my traffic exceeds my resources, I'm screwed. So... I'll be moving. Again, but this time I'll try The Grid. Though cheaper, it should technically be better since there's room to grow. At least, that's the theory. But this is ridiculous.

Hi Ketyung. It's been about a week, and so far so good. Can't vouch for them in the future, but no complaints for me yet,

Hi. I'm one of John Battelle's authors, part of Federated Media. We've been blogging for a good two years now. The site's ohgizmo.com. Even though we may seem like "yet another gadget blog", if you do give the site a quick visit, you'll see there's more to it than regular, mainstream gadgets.

Thanks for the opportunity.

That's quite enough of that, you freaks!

Lol... well, uh, just Google "goatse"... and you should be on your way to understanding. It's a net geek thing... which we all are. ;)

um, guys, Chase and Tommy especially, I hate to break it to you, but you're the ones that are missing the point. It's physically impossible to get more out of a system, than what you put in. That sort of claim is called Free Energy, and it goes against the most fundamental laws of the universe.

I sure as hell hope so.

ya, you're right. I fixed it.

MM, you're totally right. No more TB for a LOONG time. Though, for the record, we're not sucking up to them to get free bags. Hell, I think we can get a "free bag" without sucking up now. But, this article IS sucking up to the guys at GearLive. Simply because we think they do a kickass job with their Bleeding Edge TV vlog, and this seemed like an appropriate way to show that.

So... I officially declare a mention ban on all things Tom Bihn for at least... well, at least a long while.

@ Sleepybluekitty. But, like deBeers likes to remind everyone, diamonds last forever. Doesn't it make more sense to drop $6k on something that isn't going to be obsolete in five year's time?

Yes, just another headphone. The thing is, Jensen's not just another product designer. Stuff he comes out with is usually very slick. My point was that if you're going to get a headset, why not get one that actually looks cool, as opposed to a mechanical ear tumor.

engrish

It's beggining to sound like "some guy" was on to something. The notion that people don't want all of these features is looking more and more (at least, from our small statistically insignificant sample) like an expression of the frustration at the poor implementation that many feel.

So, could we sum it up by saying that we'd rather have a simple phone that works well, than a fancy phone that doesn't?

Fixed. Thanks a lot, man!

I don't answer all comments, Shari. A lot of trolls around, and there's no point feeding them.

But to address what you're saying, the truth is that you've put your finger on a pretty gray area of blogging ethics. I mean, just WHO do you credit? The site you found the story on? Or the site that did the research, and originated the story? Or the site that cleaned up a crappy JPEG to make us enjoy the news item more?

To make things worse, as you pointed out with Uncrate, sometimes if you find a story, the site doesn't provide you with a direction to go to. In these cases, unless you've stumbled across the news item elsewhere before, there's really no way for you to know who to credit aside from the site you first found it on.

Also, as Bruce pointed out, there IS the faraway possibility that the person did originate the story on their own, though, as you've pointed out through your research, this doesn't seem to be the case with Uncrate. Sadly.

So, the question becomes: do you simply ignore the story, because it comes from a site you've branded as unethical? In my opinion, it depends. It depends on just what site it is. Some sites, smaller ones, have less of a responsibility to be ethical in my eyes (of course, in theory, everyone does, but in my reality, I ask myself "Who cares?" Obviously, you do, and maybe I should re-evaluate my standards.)

Nevertheless, you're left with a situation where you have to weigh the "loss" you incur from refraining to write an article about something, against the somewhat less tangible moral benefit you gain from avoiding sending traffic to a site that you've decided didn't deserve it.

In the end (and it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise), we're really all in it for the money. Sure, we love entertaining others, and being read, but we put enormous amounts of time and effort in doing this, and most of us don't expect to do it for free.

Don't get me wrong, there certainly are exceptions, and I'd be curious to know just what proportion of bloggers do this for fun, and what proportion do it for financial gain.

In any case, Shari, thank you for pointing this out to me. To be honest, I hadn't even noticed. I can't promise you that I'll change anything, but I'm open to the idea.