Author: 1

apple on the web

Apple internet misc

No wonder the introduction of “mobileMe” was such a disaster. I, like most people, have registrations with many websites. From pointless things to online banking. Even though there is no official or firm standard for registration on websites certain practises emerged. And overall things work.

With one exception:

Apple.

Their web site registration mechanism for developers is broken. Not by one main outage or problem. More in the million paper cuts kind of way.

* passwords expire
* passwords have odd ‘security’ restrictions. Of course you have to try a password to see that the system complains about something
* loging in to one part of the system does NOT mean that you have access to another, or that you just changed password would be working there.

Apples own website is pretty dismal overall, once you go beyond the home and apple store pages: Broken links clutter the whole thing. Links that go nowhere are an inherent problem of the internet. But having them within a company website is just lame. A million paper cuts. Not fun to repeat each one of them. But the mobileMe disaster did not come not as a surprise.

Other areas of Apple are vastly ahead of the game and the competition. The internet is certainly not one of them.

“BOARD OF BUSINESS COMPLIANCE” scams don’t work while the Internet is there

internet malware

I got an officially looking letter from the “Board of Business complicance” asking $125 ‘due now’. I was about to ask my Tax people about this. But then it turned out that entering it in google already fixes the issue. Just by reading the excerpt made it cleart this is a scam. 30 seconds later I found a concise legal summary about this scam citing California Corporations Code Sec. 1500 600, 9510.

Done. Scam attempt goes in the shredder. The upside is how fast this did go. How effortless scamers can be dwarfed. Still bad that people can be in business ripping people off.

the skinny kid with the funny name

politics

Gotcha Capitalism

economy

Used a different credit card. And it turns out that the exchange rate applied is by 5% worse than that of the other cards. This is one of these things where maybe after 30 minutes I could find the rate applied on the banks website. Or maybe not. My strategy for this kind of gotcha-capitalism is different: I have a list of companies that pulled a fast one on me. I try to avoid doing business with them as much as possible.

Gotcha Capitalism dilutes the whole system that got us here in the first place. Buyers selecting the best offer were the driving force for all progress. If buyers become mere ‘confused consumers’ they will buy all sorts of crap. And things offered will quickly deteriorate in quality, since the pressure to do a good job is gone.

Over time clear decisions haves seemingly become the sole territory of spin, bias and hype. The normal and actually working concept of looking at the situation and then coming up with a clear decision and sticking to it has apparently gone out of fashion. Since people could afford not pay attention allot of things grew into big business that make no sense whatsforever in clear day light. They simply thrive on peoples ignorance. And on the fact that they could afford not to pay attention.

test post

misc

this is just a test.

glad that there are good signs

politics


Booming global demand for new business jets is expected to continue through the end of 2009

from the wsj

glad the bailout worked.

glad we bailed them out

economy politics

Goldman Sachs employs 30,522 people. On average they make $600,000 a year. Glad we bailed them out.

INTERDUBS and charging per Gigabyte

interdubs misc

INTERDUBS does not charge for storage. No matter how many Gigabytes you need, it is included in the $285 flat rate. Since there is no financial incentive to clean up, some of my customers amassed quiet a backlog of material.

Which actually was somewhat intended: Other tools were more important than the means to clean up and keep the data pool fresh. With Terrabytes stored -and much of it actually no longer needed- this situation changed. Adding tools to simplify clean up was easy. The database had already all needed information.

Getting people to use them was a different matter though. Somehow I got lucky and had what turned out to be the right idea: Between Sunday and yesterday I had a ‘cleanup drive’ in INTERDUBS. Clients with allot of old material were encouraged to delete as much as possible of it. As an incentive INTERDUBS donates to charity relative to the amount of Gigabytes cleaned up.

And it actually worked rather well: People put in allot of work to clean up their backlog of material, and they did so knowing that it was for a good cause.
In total INTERDUBS will pay for 240 vaccinations.

This little detail is also nice, since I had no idea that this solution would emerge when I decided not to charge for storage. If I can continue to run a flat rate based on the efforts like this then I will be very happy.

president palin speaks

history politics


"We have trade missions back and forth, we do" said Palin. "It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state. "

So the current one could not talk straight. But people wanted him anyway. twice. Or maybe 1.5 times. Turns out that running the country on stupidity got us in the biggest bubble ever. The US / Russian relationship is still the one with the most potential for danger. Hearing this women talk like this about it is scary. With the dumb president people thought / hoped that the VP would take care of things. He might even have. Who knows. This women could technically run the show.

That is scary.
Bush running things was scary. And we see now how much they let things slide in the wrong direction. This bubble is Bush made. It got created by turning the interest rate screw in the wrong direction for to long. Simple as that. A more intelligent administration could have avoided this problem quiet easily from building. Just don’t let the housing prices inflate that much. Interest rates are controlled by the fed. Carefully raising them would have cost a couple of fractions in growth. Maybe. But it would kept the system in the healthy zone, not where we are right now.

one in four not clued in.

politics


In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey out Monday afternoon, 47 percent of registered voters questioned said Republicans are more responsible for the problems currently facing financial institutions and the stock market; only 24 percent said Democrats are more responsible.

via http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/22/cnn.poll/

That means that 47% of all registered voters actually know which party ran the country in the last 8 years. Only one in four people is confused about that. Amazing.

I wonder how many would answer “Clinton” or “Carter” if asked who was President on September 11 2001.