Interesting Links for 28-10-2011

[andrewducker]

• French government 'banning vegetarianism' in school canteens
  (tags: food france vegetarianism )
• Wheat is EVIL. Apparently.
  (tags: wheat gluten weight diet food health )
• Samuel L. Jackson Is the highest-grossing actor of all time.
  (tags: SamuelLJackson movies money )
• Sentencing laws: Mandatory life and public protection. A difficult balancing act
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Comments

[johncoxon]

I will move over to Dreamwidth when they give me an incentive to abandon my permanent account. Seriously, it bemuses me that they don't offer paid account trials for LiveJournal's permanent account holders. Also, I'd like to see massive and radical changes to the UX (the system is crap, it's been crap since I signed up for LiveJournal, please can we have a different one now?) and I'd like some actually decent journal styles, since all the existing ones are fugly.

Also, am I the only person in the world that thinks it'd be much easier just to tell businesses to open 8am-4pm instead of changing the time zone over? I don't get why we can't just do it that way.

[andrewducker]

A) Governments don't tell businesses when to open. Mine doesn't run 9-5 at the moment, for instance.
B) The fun of programming a calendar/appointments system that dealt with that, so that my recurring 10am meeting becomes a recurring 11am meeting when the changeover happens would be fun. But almost certainly harder than the current system was to write.

[johncoxon]

A) But if the Government says, "We're staying on GMT from here on in and if people want to get up earlier or later then they can deal with that themselves," surely businesses would adapt?
B) I'm more postulating this as an answer to the idea of staying permanently on BST, rather than as a method for going one hour forward/one hour backward. But I'm sure that it wouldn't be an insurmountable challenge - you just set the Daylight Savings flag to automatically minus 1 from every time instead of keeping the time the same but setting an offset against GMT. If iCal can change appointment times based on timezone (which it can, without any issues), then this can be implemented easily.

[andrewducker]

"We're staying on GMT from here on in and if people want to get up earlier or later then they can deal with that themselves," surely businesses would adapt?

In some ways yes. If we decide that pushing darkness back to later in the evening doesn't save lives/money then absolutely. But if we're doing that then having schools, business,etc. all doing it together is useful - because otherwise everyone's childcare arrangement go out the window (for a start). If Bobby's school changes hours, but Sheila's doesn't, and your work does, then dropping the kids off and making it to work on time becomes a nightmare.

Your suggestion now sounds like it's _actually_ doing daylight savings, but displaying the time in UTC. Which is doable - but it basically means that we're still doing DST, but everyone spends a couple of weeks being confused because all of their things are now connected to different numbers than they're used to. This strikes me as more confusing then just getting up an hour earlier/later twice a year.

[channelpenguin]

Wheat is evil. Sugar is more evil.

Apple make a decent profit on each device sold, Samsung don't, so market share as raw numbers-of-units is a little misleading.

[andrewducker]

It's misleading if you care about profits. If what you care about is units shipped then it's completely leading. And as that's what I care about, I'm very happy with it.

[johncoxon]

What's more misleading is the fact that Apple lost sales during that quarter due to persistent rumours of an imminent refresh, so the quarter isn't representative of sales (as Andrew already noted in his link description). I would be astonished if Apple does not reassert its dominance in the next quarter's results.

Although I agree that profits are a more reliable indicator of market share than units sold, I wouldn't say it's 'misleading' - it's not like the article isn't completely crystal clear about the measure it's using. It might actually be more helpful, I suppose, to discuss 'profit share' and 'user share', since those are basically the two things you're discussing.

[andrewducker]

Although I agree that profits are a more reliable indicator of market share than units sold,

Depends what you mean by "market share". If you mean "the number of phones on the market" then units sold seems to be much better than the profit made on said units. And other than Apple or Samsung shareholders, I'm not sure why people would care who is making the most cash.

[apostle_of_eris]

I still don't understand the stupidity at Google. Being sort of socially clueless is no surprise, but technically?
Real Names Only is simply impossible. It cannot be implemented. duh

[andrewducker]

I'm still not convinced by that. Knowing my habits is definitely useful to the advertisers - they have a better chance of telling which adverts will appeal to me more. I can't see what my name ads to that.

[naath]

How does the name-on-my-passport help advertisers? Sure they want to know what kinds of things I buy/read/look-at/want/need so they can try to sell me those things rather than things I hate... but other than mugs-with-my-name-on (and I'd prefer "naath" to my 'legal' name in that case) where does my "real" name come into it??

[apostle_of_eris]

WIRED had two or three good years, until they ran out of material; and then got sold a few times.
Does anyone under 30 even still care about Stranger in a Strange Land? I have no idea.

[andrewducker]

I doubt it. I enjoyed it as a teenager, but I'm not convinced it speaks to people very much any more. It was very much a reaction to its times.

Although, having said that, there's still a lot of religion and prudery around, so maybe it does.

[octopoid_horror]

It's hilariously offensive (not intentionally), incredibly dated and not in a good way. And that was a decade ago. I liked it when I was a teenager too, but it's like watching an old film where you cringe slightly at what was fine then.