Hmmmm
I think I like this one better.
And these two, that didn't seem to make the top five:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiqB4xgF288
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7htGC9FCeM
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Friday, April 28, 2006
Fanzines, fantasies, and facts | Paul Murphy | ZDNet.com
"'Science', as Richard Feynman said, 'is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves' -and that description puts big media firmly in the anti-science camp because they spend most of their time fooling themselves first and us afterward."
Permanent SOLUTION for the WHINE issue.
Oh the discussions on Apple's "support" forums are heating up, along with those CPUs I guess:
UserA: Hey!! Delete these files and edit this system file and change some numbers and the whining stops!
UserB: Should we wait for Apple to come out with a fix?
UserC: Apple says that it is SUPPOSED to whine and is "within specs", so why would they fix it?
UserD: Well, the noise my laptop is making isn't within MY specs, if I can't get it to stop I'm selling the darned thing.
UserE: I tried it and it reduced my battery life by a third! This is no good!
UserA: Go away!
UserE: Well, after all the advantage of this new chip is longer battery life isn't it?
UserF: I tried it and it doesn't work.
UserA: You must have done something wrong.
UserC, D, G, H, I.... Well we tried it and it doesn't work for us either!
UserA: Oh.
UserX: Well I hope they can make WiFi work again, this thing is useless without wireless.
and so on.
This reminds me of course of discussions surrounding the flakiness of the iBook I got a few years ago. I finally gave up on it, although I loved the look and feel of the thing, often preferring to use it over faster machines with larger screens. I gave up waiting for Apple to do anything about it, along with a lot of other people. But I guess a few people took it to court or something, becuase last year they replaced the innards of my machine, and it has been fine ever since.
So, take heart you MacBook Pro users, in four or five years that thing will be humming like new. Maybe I could have worded that better.
UserA: Hey!! Delete these files and edit this system file and change some numbers and the whining stops!
UserB: Should we wait for Apple to come out with a fix?
UserC: Apple says that it is SUPPOSED to whine and is "within specs", so why would they fix it?
UserD: Well, the noise my laptop is making isn't within MY specs, if I can't get it to stop I'm selling the darned thing.
UserE: I tried it and it reduced my battery life by a third! This is no good!
UserA: Go away!
UserE: Well, after all the advantage of this new chip is longer battery life isn't it?
UserF: I tried it and it doesn't work.
UserA: You must have done something wrong.
UserC, D, G, H, I.... Well we tried it and it doesn't work for us either!
UserA: Oh.
UserX: Well I hope they can make WiFi work again, this thing is useless without wireless.
and so on.
This reminds me of course of discussions surrounding the flakiness of the iBook I got a few years ago. I finally gave up on it, although I loved the look and feel of the thing, often preferring to use it over faster machines with larger screens. I gave up waiting for Apple to do anything about it, along with a lot of other people. But I guess a few people took it to court or something, becuase last year they replaced the innards of my machine, and it has been fine ever since.
So, take heart you MacBook Pro users, in four or five years that thing will be humming like new. Maybe I could have worded that better.
Hubble captures the shattering of a comet
Some media outlets are so obsessed with video that they will make a "video" out of three or four stills, and make you sit through a comercial to see them. PoS CNN, PoS. And I still don't think they got that lens cleaned on the Hubble, but its fate is a hidden agenda for the anti-Bush crowd at CNN who are more into politics than science.
Intel to offer new architecture every two years | Reg Hardware
"Each new microarchitecture, he said, would be developed by separate design teams working in parallel and with specific process technology in mind. The goal: to win back the design leadership many observers and, judging by Otellini's words, Intel itself feel it has lost to AMD. "
This must be the "roadmap" that Jobs has recently been going on and on about. Great news for hardware companies that want to "churn" their customer base. What's that you say? These new "architectures" are still all compatible with all the previous architectures? Yeah, funny that. I used to think architecture meant something different (really). I guess I was wrong, it really means a faster bus and 3 new instructions that won't get into the compilers for 5 years.
Divorce courts are busy, planets are realigning, whatever metaphor you care to use. Microsoft stopped being a useful vehicle for Intel to force upgrades on their users. So they are going it alone, with a little, truly little, help from Apple. Meanwhile, Microsoft interestingly positions itself to leave Intel altogether if they can make the Xbox take off. Expect to read that as a Cringley or Dvorak prediction in a year or so.
Meanwhile, guessing that Apple might buy Adobe is not a bad way out of the predicament these companies (all of them, I'm not just picking on one) find themselves in. Who IS your daddy Adobe? You haven't really been all that loyal to Apple, preferring instead to just chase the money in the Windows empire, but now that Windows will include its own PDF style functionality they sure haven't cut you and slack have they?
Then again, Apple may abandon software altogether, or just go with software and abandon hardware, or may just sell iPods, or may go all media and merge with Disney. Who knows, who cares?
Good news is for consumers, and the Chinese of course, because us Americans can't be bothered with how all this technology works beyond the high level design, as long as they put US keyboards on the middle 20 percent or so the the gadgets they turn out we'll be happy, even if some of the "inovative" companies (see post below) here in the US of A aren't quite so happy in the long run.
This must be the "roadmap" that Jobs has recently been going on and on about. Great news for hardware companies that want to "churn" their customer base. What's that you say? These new "architectures" are still all compatible with all the previous architectures? Yeah, funny that. I used to think architecture meant something different (really). I guess I was wrong, it really means a faster bus and 3 new instructions that won't get into the compilers for 5 years.
Divorce courts are busy, planets are realigning, whatever metaphor you care to use. Microsoft stopped being a useful vehicle for Intel to force upgrades on their users. So they are going it alone, with a little, truly little, help from Apple. Meanwhile, Microsoft interestingly positions itself to leave Intel altogether if they can make the Xbox take off. Expect to read that as a Cringley or Dvorak prediction in a year or so.
Meanwhile, guessing that Apple might buy Adobe is not a bad way out of the predicament these companies (all of them, I'm not just picking on one) find themselves in. Who IS your daddy Adobe? You haven't really been all that loyal to Apple, preferring instead to just chase the money in the Windows empire, but now that Windows will include its own PDF style functionality they sure haven't cut you and slack have they?
Then again, Apple may abandon software altogether, or just go with software and abandon hardware, or may just sell iPods, or may go all media and merge with Disney. Who knows, who cares?
Good news is for consumers, and the Chinese of course, because us Americans can't be bothered with how all this technology works beyond the high level design, as long as they put US keyboards on the middle 20 percent or so the the gadgets they turn out we'll be happy, even if some of the "inovative" companies (see post below) here in the US of A aren't quite so happy in the long run.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life
"The culture of bragging about dubious innovations likely springs from the need to distinguish yourself from the pack in a reward culture that takes dog-eat-dog to another level. Either way, do me a favor. Stop calling your new features innovations. They aren't."
only this, and nothing more: More Developers != More Features
"It gets worse. At least at the time I left (6 months ago), I saw very little evidence that the management of these failed projects was getting any kind of a slap on the wrist. The problem is that in an org that large with that my dependencies, it was impossible to tell which team was actually mismanaged, and which team just was dragged down by the other mismanaged teams."
Hmmm, something which might apply to many companies, projects, and especially to governments eh BP?
Hmmm, something which might apply to many companies, projects, and especially to governments eh BP?
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Microsoft faces its Scopes moment | The Register
"But a decision by the judges to throw out the EC decision will affect regulatory interventions for years to come. Microsoft will have proved, by reductio ad absurdum, that it is impossible to effectively police a software monopoly. Microsoft will have won a permanent, government-blessed shield from the rigors of the market. Legislation designed to check an unfair monopoly will have been successfully used to protect the monopolist's business.
This is even better for Microsoft, and you can see why it's fighting so hard to achieve this outcome. It prefers to pay lawyers, and public relations bloggers, rather than give engineers the scope to innovate, because the outcome is so potentially lucrative."
This is even better for Microsoft, and you can see why it's fighting so hard to achieve this outcome. It prefers to pay lawyers, and public relations bloggers, rather than give engineers the scope to innovate, because the outcome is so potentially lucrative."
My Virtual Life
Nice article about SecondLife, who must have some of the best PR people in the business considering how often they show up in mainstream publications
The Great Microsoft Blunder
"But Microsoft buys the fear. It must have some of the lowest corporate self-esteem for any dominant company in the history of modern business. The company is like the panicky old woman wondering how she lost a penny in her purse while giving exact change in the express line at the grocery store. Hey lady, you are holding things up!"
The PC, more than ever a step in the wrong direction.
More and more lately when I go to the grocery store people are checking themselves out without the help of a cashier. RFID devices could get us to the point where we just roll our cart up to the checkout place and are immediately presented with the bill.
Here is wisdom.
When I got out of computer science school many years ago I saw my job as (among other things) putting rooms full of people with adding machines out of work. I didn't lose any sleep over this, because I knew that this wouldn't happen over night. Most of those adding machine people would find other work, some of them would retire, some of them would die. It's very hard to make a case for doing things less efficiently when the option to do them more efficiently is before us.
This progress continued, and has continued over the years so that many other things (like running cash registers) can now be done by computers and their programs.
But a lot of regression has also taken place. Computers are used for so many things now, and some of those things are of questionable value (to me). It seems more and more that we have circled the barn and now we simply have rooms full of people with PCs on their desks instead of calculators. Furthermore, those PCs are a lot more difficult to maintain than the calculators were. The calculators were "plug and play" devices, while the computers only claim to be so.
I've worked in organizations where there were rooms full of people "repairing" PCs that no longer worked and that often meant re-installing software or vacuuming dust-bunnies out of the interior, and I think to myself "have we really made things better in the long run?"
I think of the last place I worked where there are dozens of programmers, and when you add in the QA people, documentations specialists and people that coordinate their activities, we are into the hundreds. That doesn't include those "repair" people, or the network administrators, or the guys that run cables from cubicle to cubicle, or wheel replacement PCs around on carts, nor does it include the people who go into the field to install the application (which is the farthest thing in the world from "plug and play"). And what does this incredibly complex system do? It keeps track of lists of people names and addresses and various other and sundry bits of information about them. That's it. There is no accounting aspect, or banking component, no artificial intelligence, no medical diagnosis, no space shuttle launch subsystem. Thousands of people to do dead simple stuff, that if it had to be done on bits of paper using pencils and typewriters could probably be done with fewer total resources.
While "we" in the computer industry have done a great number of things to save people time and energy we have more than made up for it in the time and energy wasting infrastructure that "we" claim is needed to accomplish it all.
The computer industry is way overdue for a re-think, or maybe it's a think that should have happened in the first place but didn't in our enthusiasm to have a computer on every flat surface on the planet. Steve Ballmer says we need a $100 PC. Bill Gates says that the computer is the network. Larry Ellison said that the PCs days are numbered, and hundreds of wealthy Open Source advocates running their own businesses agree that software should be free. So where is the disconnect between what these people say and how they make their living? Is there some mysterious "invisible hand" of technology that defeats the average user's desire for simplicity as well as the best efforts of these captains of industry? Or are they just lying to us?
My observation over the years is that hardware keeps getting better and better, by leaps and bounds, but software continues to get worse. Software has gotten bigger, slower, and harder to use in many respects. We have traded simplicity and efficiency for more color schemes and options we never use or use rarely. We accept without questioning that machines take minutes, or at best many seconds just to "start", more time still to "shut down" and much more time in-between to be updated, scanned, cleaned, defragged and ultimately re-installed. While an off the shelf department store home stereo component today boasts better specs than a similar device costing thousands of dollars in the 60s, we haven't quite seen the same evolution in computing. Yes, the hardware has gotten cheaper and better by whatever detailed measurement you care to apply to it, but those improvements have been more than gobbled up by the complexity and fragility of the software running on it. For too many people, using computers has gotten harder, less rewarding and more expensive.
Which of us are part of the solution, and which are part of the problem either by participation in an industry with no clear direction or by a careless disregard for how we spend our time and money? When I see those totally automated check-out machines I get a good feeling about what technology can do. But more and more as I watch and hear about people struggling with their computers I am reluctant to admit that I ever had anything to do with their proliferation.
The solutions seem so obvious to me, but more and more I don't think people I used to work with even see a problem and people just growing up with what we have don't even have a clue what progress was being made before the "PC revolution."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_notable_computer_viruses_and_worms
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/04/problems_with_latest_round_of.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3193366.stm
http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/455.f96/disasters.html
http://whitepapers.zdnet.co.uk/0,39025945,60047613p-39000428q,00.htm
http://www.gartner.com/pages/story.php.id.9423.s.8.jsp
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid19_gci959362,00.html
Here is wisdom.
When I got out of computer science school many years ago I saw my job as (among other things) putting rooms full of people with adding machines out of work. I didn't lose any sleep over this, because I knew that this wouldn't happen over night. Most of those adding machine people would find other work, some of them would retire, some of them would die. It's very hard to make a case for doing things less efficiently when the option to do them more efficiently is before us.
This progress continued, and has continued over the years so that many other things (like running cash registers) can now be done by computers and their programs.
But a lot of regression has also taken place. Computers are used for so many things now, and some of those things are of questionable value (to me). It seems more and more that we have circled the barn and now we simply have rooms full of people with PCs on their desks instead of calculators. Furthermore, those PCs are a lot more difficult to maintain than the calculators were. The calculators were "plug and play" devices, while the computers only claim to be so.
I've worked in organizations where there were rooms full of people "repairing" PCs that no longer worked and that often meant re-installing software or vacuuming dust-bunnies out of the interior, and I think to myself "have we really made things better in the long run?"
I think of the last place I worked where there are dozens of programmers, and when you add in the QA people, documentations specialists and people that coordinate their activities, we are into the hundreds. That doesn't include those "repair" people, or the network administrators, or the guys that run cables from cubicle to cubicle, or wheel replacement PCs around on carts, nor does it include the people who go into the field to install the application (which is the farthest thing in the world from "plug and play"). And what does this incredibly complex system do? It keeps track of lists of people names and addresses and various other and sundry bits of information about them. That's it. There is no accounting aspect, or banking component, no artificial intelligence, no medical diagnosis, no space shuttle launch subsystem. Thousands of people to do dead simple stuff, that if it had to be done on bits of paper using pencils and typewriters could probably be done with fewer total resources.
While "we" in the computer industry have done a great number of things to save people time and energy we have more than made up for it in the time and energy wasting infrastructure that "we" claim is needed to accomplish it all.
The computer industry is way overdue for a re-think, or maybe it's a think that should have happened in the first place but didn't in our enthusiasm to have a computer on every flat surface on the planet. Steve Ballmer says we need a $100 PC. Bill Gates says that the computer is the network. Larry Ellison said that the PCs days are numbered, and hundreds of wealthy Open Source advocates running their own businesses agree that software should be free. So where is the disconnect between what these people say and how they make their living? Is there some mysterious "invisible hand" of technology that defeats the average user's desire for simplicity as well as the best efforts of these captains of industry? Or are they just lying to us?
My observation over the years is that hardware keeps getting better and better, by leaps and bounds, but software continues to get worse. Software has gotten bigger, slower, and harder to use in many respects. We have traded simplicity and efficiency for more color schemes and options we never use or use rarely. We accept without questioning that machines take minutes, or at best many seconds just to "start", more time still to "shut down" and much more time in-between to be updated, scanned, cleaned, defragged and ultimately re-installed. While an off the shelf department store home stereo component today boasts better specs than a similar device costing thousands of dollars in the 60s, we haven't quite seen the same evolution in computing. Yes, the hardware has gotten cheaper and better by whatever detailed measurement you care to apply to it, but those improvements have been more than gobbled up by the complexity and fragility of the software running on it. For too many people, using computers has gotten harder, less rewarding and more expensive.
Which of us are part of the solution, and which are part of the problem either by participation in an industry with no clear direction or by a careless disregard for how we spend our time and money? When I see those totally automated check-out machines I get a good feeling about what technology can do. But more and more as I watch and hear about people struggling with their computers I am reluctant to admit that I ever had anything to do with their proliferation.
The solutions seem so obvious to me, but more and more I don't think people I used to work with even see a problem and people just growing up with what we have don't even have a clue what progress was being made before the "PC revolution."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_notable_computer_viruses_and_worms
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/04/problems_with_latest_round_of.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3193366.stm
http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/455.f96/disasters.html
http://whitepapers.zdnet.co.uk/0,39025945,60047613p-39000428q,00.htm
http://www.gartner.com/pages/story.php.id.9423.s.8.jsp
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid19_gci959362,00.html
Monday, April 24, 2006
How Microsoft can shut down Mini-Microsoft
"Buying Microsoft products sucks. Sucks ass. Sucks like a sucky thing that fell out of a sucky tree, hit every sucky branch on the way down, and landed on a black hole, and was sucked in."
The comments can still be funny even if heavily censored. Has anyone on the Internet invented a Microsoft angstometer yet? It must be peging the needle these days.
The comments can still be funny even if heavily censored. Has anyone on the Internet invented a Microsoft angstometer yet? It must be peging the needle these days.
Microsoft Word's Hidden Tags Reveal Once-Anonymous Peer Reviewers
"The American Chemical Society uses a software package from ScholarOne called Manuscript Central. 'It's our understanding that they've totally solved this problem,' said Cheryl Shanks, vice president and director of editorial office operations at ACS Publications. 'We've been aware of this since we first implemented online submission.'"
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Some Mac Resellers Preinstalling Windows XP
"ExperCom is touting a $2,029 MacBook Pro with Windows XP Home pre-loaded; the price is just $35 above the Apple price for the portable. Meanwhile, ClubMac.com, MacMall.com, and OnSale.com -- all three part of Torrance, Calif.-based PC Mall -- list MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac mini machines with XP Home or XP Professional installed. Windows XP Home bumps up the usual price of the computer by $100, while XP Professional costs an additional $150."
All part of Apples "plan". Uh-huh uh-huh.
All part of Apples "plan". Uh-huh uh-huh.
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