what could go wrong if Siemens and the BBC team up? everything
I am sure there are lots of projects where people try really hard to push a rope. Instead of pulling on it. If the structures involved are big enough they will try. What a waste of everybodies time!
Annie Leonard talks about stuff Whoever she is.
I am with her. To a point. The breastmilk part is a bit much, and on technology she is just plain wrong. Which discredits the whole piece somewhat. And that is a real shame. Since the whole consumerism / consumption stuff weighted against diminishing returns in respect to happyness is a very important point. And there are others in this presentation that are pretty obvious and get equally ignored. Still worth the link, and maybe even worth watching.
Computerworld looks at internet market share data for different devices / operating systems. The headline reads ‘iPhones closing in on 0.1%’. That does sound like laughable little. The author paints a different picture, but I have no interest repainting that here.
I looked at the iPhone user share on Interdubs, and found the following numbers:
November 0.22
October 0.54
September 0.35
August 0.74
July 0.45
Not surprisingly they are by small magnitudes bigger than the general ones found by Net Applications. I had thought that they would be even higher. The iPhone has a nice display. It’s fully supported by Interdubs. Was it a mistake to invest into the iPhone mode? Absolutely not. It is very interesting to see those numbers. With already having iPhone support there is no second guessing ‘what if there were a special iPhone browsing mode’. There is, and that’s what the numbers look like. Right now.
Matt Cutts , the google quality czsar, explains why they reduced the importance of weblogs participating in pay per post programs. I feel the same way and block them since May in BlogsNow.
Interestingly, and extremely simplified, I admit, it seems to be the business model of Google to sell the truth. Which makes it valuable. They steer most of the internet traffic. But if they would fail, people would notice. As long as Yahoo and MSN still exist and could in theory kinda half ass a hypothetical un-ethical google if it came to it, it’s good busyness for for Google to stick to the truth.
Which is not what usually is going on:
A question asked, and no answer:
Same pattern here:
So, my simple reaction is, if people like politicians and Apple-PR are not answering questions, then I will not listen to what they are trying to say. Why should I?
Once in while my OS 10.4.11 machine goes stupid, and has trouble resolving specific host names.
Opening a terminal window and entering:
sudo killall -HUP lookupd
fixes this. Lookupd is one of these more stupid Apple ideas. But since Cupertino has inherited the infallible attribute from the Roman Catholic Church it is pointless to tell them about it. Apple is so shiny and perfect to the outside. Inside it just looks like the Roman Catholic Church on the peak of it’s power.
So, I needed an 1-800 number. There are lots of vendors. I picked AT&T. They were not the cheapest, but in telco services there are lots of odd offers and services. And it’s not crucial that number. Just something you also need to have. Getting the number itself was alright. They sent an email that it would take a nebolous amount of time (“several weeks”) before they were able to execute my order.
Months passed. No word from Ma Bell. Diving into voice-system-hell. Finally I got somebody that was the right division etc. He simply proclaimed that the number already worked. Which is great, and it actually did ever since. But they could have let me know.
Then I got an email telling me that I had not logged in their Buisness Website for a while, and that they would disable my login should I not do so within 30 days. So I logged in. A question that is innocent enough came up. AT&T would like to know which state I am. Not that they could deduct that from my address. But hey. Of course entering the info brings me right back to the same screen. Oh, Firefox quirk. Can happen.
Safari: Same result. So, do I have to buy a PC to tell them that I am in California? Of course, there are no links where you could contact that division of AT&T and let them know that they website is simply broken.
Neither is there a way to get in touch with AT&T mentioned in that email announcing me to lock me out of the website unless I would log in in the next thirty. Sure, I could spend an hour on the phone tomorrow with AT&T. Like everywhere, once you reach a human things are not even that bad. There are often ways to fix things.
But the problem is deeper than that: AT&T used to be a technology company. They invented the transistor and a couple of other important things. But in 2007 they can not even run a simple website. It fits in the picture that they spend billions, yes, billions not millions, for rebranding. Making them look to good to the outside. While everybody knows that internally it’s just barely good enough. Since they other telco’s suck equally bad they even get away with it. Time for a company like Apple to get into the cellphone Business. No, wait. Ok, nevermind.
A client of mine has a shoot supervisor in Paris. He takes stills for an upcoming job and is posting them on his own ftp site. My client asked if he could use Interdubs instead. He could. There is the public upload function that can be enabled for a login. But right now it does not support creation of folders. And he shot thousands of images. That’s where unix comes in real handy: He had given us the access paramaters for his ftp site where he stores those images. Using wget it was a breeze to write a little script that works as a conduit it and puts those images on to the interdubs server. Now whatever he creates on his ftp server in Europe will be mapped automatically into Interdubs. So people can use the comment feature, see thumbnails, can copy content.
All those nice features that Interdubs has, but ftp naturally lacks. ftp is a great work horse. Kinda. It’s so simple (actually it isn’t even), let’s say it’s so widely in use that it will not go away to soon. So it’s only natural to support it, and work with it. Instead of forcing people to use something more advanced. And with solutions like todays hack they can have the best of both worlds: They don’t need to change the way that they work. And in the same time everybody can have the benefit of working with the best tools available.
But wait, wget stores unix files and interdubs keeps files in a database. Did I recompile wget with Interdubs support? Well, that would be possible, but would take a day. Nobody has a day on a shoot for a commercial. At some point a couple prospective clients said that they could only use Interdubs if they could upload content via ftp. So I wrote an ftp gateway. Same deal: I did not change the ftp source (yet). I just wrote a general filesystem to Interdubs Database mapping tool. Not many people use ftp to upload content into Interdubs: The web interface is way to nice for that purpose it seems. But have this conduit is still a great way to get any data quickly and consistently into Interdubs.
17 years ago Germany got reunited. Yet, CNN did not get around to reflect this change on the maps they use for their weather. Actually, that map was acurate before 1990. What kind of computers that can deal with map images did people have back then? I would guess you would have actually real trouble to find a file from back then.
No wonder some people have strange ideas about Europe:
Still can not get a Wii for Christmas? It’s actually Bush fault. Sounds crazy, still true, and just the tip of some horrible iceberg. Nintendo makes those Wii’s as fast as they can. Then they like to make as much money with them as possible. If they sell them in Europe for 250 Euro they get 40,721 Yen. For the ones they ship to the US they get 27,630 Yen. That’s 47% more profit for them. No wonder there is ample supply of Wii’s in Europe.
But that’s currencies, what has Bush to do with it? Well, he makes the fiscal policy. Before he became President you needed to pay 0.9 US dollars for each Euro. Now it 1.47. That’s a sixty three percent decline in value. That’s just great. YellowCake disciples will be quick to point out that this low rate would help the economy since US exports would become cheaper. This is true, but only 16% of the US enconomy is based on exports. Most of the country is depending on the inflow of capital. Or should I say ‘was’? How attractive is it to invest Euros into dollar when you get less and less back out?
So not getting your sweaty little hands on a Wiimote in the foreseeable future might actually not be your biggest problem.