A series of rants.
Jan. 16th, 2005 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unbibiumKevin Rose is pretty much the only hacker left on TV that I'm aware of.
In his favor, he brought gray-area hacking to cable television when he joined the Screen Savers. And according to his blog, he's bringing back thebroken, his public-access-style video hacking magazine, even though I suspect the new G4 network is evil enough that they'll take offense to it if it starts to get any good.
But, he takes a big credibility hit by believing in the latest variation on pyramid schemes.
You may remember getting sick of freeipod.com last year. Well, Kevin Rose and co-host-for-a-month Alex Albrecht not only got their free iPods, but plugged the site on the show. Of course it worked for them; they have a TV show and high-traffic blogs; out of hundreds of daily hits, ten are bound to fall for it. But you'd think they'd have wised up before the "free mac mini" site showed up.
It just might work for me if I had stupider friends. I could get in early and get all my friends to sign up as my referral. But, then a week later, they would all realize that everyone else had already signed up under either me, or my quickest friend. It wouldn't be long before people just couldn't find anyone else to sign up under them, and they'd be reduced to spamming the comments section of Kevin Rose's blog, describing what a poor college student they are.
From a quick read of the Terms and Conditions, it doesn't look like it's optimized to reduce the pyramid-shaped expansion much. While my referrals would only need to refer five people, instead of ten, it's possible for anyone to get more referrals than they need, and impossible for anyone to give their referrals to someone who needs them. It's not clear whether it's possible to help out two of your friends by signing up for two of the sponsored services -- that's the one thing that might make this a little less mathematically suspect.
You know what might help people out in cases like this? If there were a TV channel dedicated to technology. They'd call it TechTV, and it would have shows dedicated to helping its viewers understand the many issues of technology today, especially in the days of phishing scams and free-gadget schemes. There'd also be a show where people could call for help with their computers. There'd be another show about the seedy underbelly of Internet culture, full of camgirls and Usenet kooks. There'd be a show about tech news, and a show about fresh gear. Man, that would be such a cool network, I'd probably get the third tier of digital cable just to have it handy. But since there's no such network, I can save big bucks on my cable bill.
In his favor, he brought gray-area hacking to cable television when he joined the Screen Savers. And according to his blog, he's bringing back thebroken, his public-access-style video hacking magazine, even though I suspect the new G4 network is evil enough that they'll take offense to it if it starts to get any good.
But, he takes a big credibility hit by believing in the latest variation on pyramid schemes.
You may remember getting sick of freeipod.com last year. Well, Kevin Rose and co-host-for-a-month Alex Albrecht not only got their free iPods, but plugged the site on the show. Of course it worked for them; they have a TV show and high-traffic blogs; out of hundreds of daily hits, ten are bound to fall for it. But you'd think they'd have wised up before the "free mac mini" site showed up.
It just might work for me if I had stupider friends. I could get in early and get all my friends to sign up as my referral. But, then a week later, they would all realize that everyone else had already signed up under either me, or my quickest friend. It wouldn't be long before people just couldn't find anyone else to sign up under them, and they'd be reduced to spamming the comments section of Kevin Rose's blog, describing what a poor college student they are.
From a quick read of the Terms and Conditions, it doesn't look like it's optimized to reduce the pyramid-shaped expansion much. While my referrals would only need to refer five people, instead of ten, it's possible for anyone to get more referrals than they need, and impossible for anyone to give their referrals to someone who needs them. It's not clear whether it's possible to help out two of your friends by signing up for two of the sponsored services -- that's the one thing that might make this a little less mathematically suspect.
You know what might help people out in cases like this? If there were a TV channel dedicated to technology. They'd call it TechTV, and it would have shows dedicated to helping its viewers understand the many issues of technology today, especially in the days of phishing scams and free-gadget schemes. There'd also be a show where people could call for help with their computers. There'd be another show about the seedy underbelly of Internet culture, full of camgirls and Usenet kooks. There'd be a show about tech news, and a show about fresh gear. Man, that would be such a cool network, I'd probably get the third tier of digital cable just to have it handy. But since there's no such network, I can save big bucks on my cable bill.
