Callwave and EVDO are certainly my best technological friends: Getting of a plane, in the hotel room, there would be an ethernet, but why bother? EVDO works. Even here. Then there is a voicemail from somebody that called while I was on the plane. The automatic transrcipt gives me an idea, the company that called shows up, and best of all, all those call back numbers are transrcibed right there. If the iPhone could maybe read a phone number with it’s camera and then dial it, we would be in good shape.
So, my iPhone fell down. And the ‘volume up’ button got stuck. Bad luck. Then Apple lowered the price and the 4GB Version gets sold for 299 right now. So I thought I get a new one. I asked in the Apple store if I would need to renew my contract to activate the new iPhone. They said this would not be necessary. They said that I just would need to replace the SIM card from the old to the new phone.
Of course that is not the case. Calling Apple got me the answer that AT&T would be responsible for this. Well, it’s not me that did choose AT&T. It was Apple that did that for me. Calling AT&T they told me that the only way to activate the new iPhone is to restart the two year commitment with them.
By now I really hate both companies for their blatant ways of trying to rip people off. Even though they seem to win this time, I will make god damn sure that they will not come out of this on the upperhand in the long term. They neither can run nor hide, and I will get both of them. With interest, and fun-bonus. They deserve it for been taking for a ride, as they try to do it with their customers.
Suddenly the NYTimes regained her relevance again. They could have done it all the, and become really great, but the very same corpo-idiots that tried to charge for the normal page think that there is subscription revenue in the years 1922-1986. Idiots. Idiots at the NYTimes. What a funny thought.
All good ideas are simple. Like this one. You create a page or a site. Right there. Just write some text, maybe or maybe not add formating. And that’s that. Very nicely done. Now go and play with Jottit.
Google does a great job in keeping an index of those internets. Despite some obstacles. One of them being that two different things can share the same name or label. IMDB deals with it, by adding roman numerals after peoples names.
Google has done little to use it’s dominance to establish semantic additions ot the internet’s structure. Actually it should, as long as it never makes any moves to lock it’s competition (which, ahem, would be who exactly at this point?) that would be broadly welcome.
If a specific term would be used for two or more different things, then Google could allow the registration of a disambigiotion (sp?) string. An example: My name gets used for a couple of people. We really have nothing to do with each other. Mostly the case for people with the same name.
There is only one search result. If I could go and register one variation that I would ad as an invisible comment in html pages about me, then google -or any search engine for that matter- would be able to clearly seperate the indexes for all those possible results. Wikipedia deals quiet
well with this issue for instance. While search engines usually don’t.
I have no idea how I came about to find this site devoted to the Scanimate System. I did order both DVDs and am very happy to have done so: They give a very interesting peek into the technology, art etc of those times. Who knew that I would find out eventually how all those apparently not hand drawn animations I saw on Sesame Street were done.
So, my MacBook Pro has one and a half Gigabyte. Plenty, so I thought. After all I have been crusing those internets -and thats pretty much what I am doing with the machine- happily with 640MB a couple of years back.
Still, it started swapping. You can always tell: things get really slow, specially when switching back to firefox for instance. Activity monitor sure enough showed that dreaded almost all yellow circle with just a token line of green left.
Then I realised what had changed: I had re-enabled spotlight in /etc/hostconfig. Spotlight is a waste of many things: screen real estate, hope, memory, CPU cycles and mind space. I have never ever seen somebody use it happily in real life, or telling me: “I found my stuff again, thanks to Spotlight”. Good idea, ill implemented. To say the least. But wait, Apple can not make bad software. That’s impossible.
Lot’s of blog rave about thiscomputer animation right now.
I think it is horrible. Smetana is easy to abuse and misunderstand. Dragging Fallingwater into this is just horrible. The first couple of seconds of this Quicktime from hell are nice enough. Although the font choice and especially the animated glow should have been a clear sign of trouble. Fallingwater is one of the more important things that have been made in the last century. Seing it disolved to death is pure horror. The tasteless low point was certainly the eschereseque pan away from that mirror ball.
Not much more to say than this
This ‘news’ about generating energy from burning saltwater is ridicolous bullshit.
Here we are, using those internets, which are run on computers (just ask Homer) and other products of science to mock it’s very contents and basic laws.
Of course it is an extreme example. But the same principle seem to apply frequently: Those creationists should be consequent and stop using the products and merits of science. All of them. If they don’t like what science has discovered.
Two hundred years ago when people even in the more developed countries were dying left right and center on odd diseases and epidemics there simply was no question: Science was good. Now, that we are reaping all those benefits and so many of us have these careless existences some people think, that the current state of society and wellfare would just be ‘normal’, or god given.Well, it is not. The default is much much more grim. Over the last four hundred years people worked really really hard to make all this possible. It was not easy to harvest all this knowledge our econimies and factories run on. All these efforts were based on the absence of stupity. Now it seems as if some people start to take stupid stuff serious. Since it seems that they can afford to. People living in Rome two thousand years ago were in a similar position. Why would they care? Of all Shakespear plays I liked Coriolanus the least. Now that’s starting to change. Somehow I think that it’s message is not that off after all.
How to hide an Airplane factory
I have this creeping feeling that -although everything seems to be more advanced than ever- certain things that people did back in the day seem to be impossible now.
Now on an more upbeat note: Check out the urban myth in the bottom of the images. As funny as it is, it actually links to a book. And that is really really exciting to me!
So, now people can reference passages in Books via links. There is quiet a bit of information in those things, called Books. Being able to reference this information is
huge. The average book has certainly more content, meaning, honesty and relevance than the average web page.