Tag: Wired

Apple C&D’s Wired — But People Who Talk About Radical Transparency . . .

John Brownlee over at Gadgets.BoingBoing.net (about the only BB property worth reading these days) has a basic overview of Apple sending a cease-and-desist to Wired Gadget Lab over a piece there showing how to install OS X on an MSI Wind. Yeah, newsflash — Apple sucks. They’re just Microsoft with a much smaller market share.

However, this part of Brownlee’s post had me snorting diet Coke through my nose,

Ars Technica’s Clint Ecker then asks if Chen (and other Conde Nast writers) are allowed to discuss it publicly, or cover it as news.

Chen’s Twitter response (since deleted):

Probably. We’re supposed to favor radical transparency here, right?

It certainly doesn’t look like it. The video to the guide in question has already been pulled and replaced with a random stream of CES 2009 videos. The YouTube mirror has been pulled as well.

Okay, if I were writing about Boing! Boing! the last thing I’d want to bring up is other sites’ lack of transparency given the whole Violet Blue episode and the more recent efforts by the ongoing efforts of Boing! Boing! comment moderators like Teresa Nielsen Hayden to insult and disemvowel anyone who dares show up with a different point of view.

Wired’s Tired Article on Digital Distribution of Comic Books

I opened up the May 2006 issue of Wired Magazine to see an odd article by products editor Mark McClusky arguing in favor of digital distribution of comic books. McClusky writes,

The two biggest comics publishers, Marvel and DC, control huge back catalogs — as in 70 years of content. But if you want to read old issues of a venerable franchise like Spider-Man, your choices are either to hunt down expensive original copies or to buy costly paperback compilations. . . .

But imagine what these publishers — and smaller imprints — could do in the digital realm. Last year, thousands of readers snapped up The Complete New Yorker, a $100 DVD set containing scans of every issue of the magazine . . . If DC were to release The Complete Batman, fans wouldn’t just be excited — there would be mass hysteria. Comics lovers aren’t averse to spending money; it’s easy to imagine them happily paying $300 for such a compilation. I would. And while it might cannibalize sales of the trades, the radically lower production costs of a DVD set would offset the difference.

Yeah, imagine if instead of having to buy an expensive trade paperback to read all those early Spider-Man comics, you could buy a CD or DVD set that had the entire 40 year run of the book?

It’s such a good idea, Marvel did just that in 2004. It followed that up with DVD collections of the entire run of The Fantastic Four and X-Men with an Avengers DVD-ROM on the way (and for about $50 rather than $300; sadly, there was no mass hysteria or UFO sightings accompanying the release of any of these products).

Here’s an article idea for Wired — what if companies would create programs that would scan incoming e-mail and files for viruses and notify the user or automatically delete them before a user’s computer became infected? Wouldn’t that be a great idea? Probably worth a cover story, even.