Tag: technology

There’s gold in them thar fools:

Orbitz Worldwide Inc. has found that people who use Apple Inc.’s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see. The Orbitz effort, which is in its early stages, demonstrates how tracking people’s online activities can use even seemingly innocuous information—in this case, the fact that customers are visiting Orbitz.com from a Mac—to start predicting their tastes and spending habits.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Mac users also have more debt than Windows or Linux users. Of course, one thing that Orbitz may not have learned in their research is that Mac users spend infinitely more than Linux users on hotels, since Linux users build their own shelters whenever they travel.

True science fact: there are no homeless people in America. Did you really think it was a coincidence that the standard “homeless” look is a strung-out, bearded, middle-aged white man?

It’s almost as if Apple is determined to rub their evil in the face of their fanboys:

Apple was accused of ripping off consumers today as it emerged the next version of the iPhone could render all current accessories obsolete.

Outraged iPhone owners flocked online to complain about the reports that Apple has decided to radically alter the size of the connector in the next iPhone, which is expected to be launched in October.

Speakers, docks and other expensive accessories costing hundreds of dollars would be rendered useless by the move, along with cheaper add-ons such as chargers. Even cars with the current connector built in would need to be upgraded.

Why yes, as it happens, I do tend to be rather more amused than outraged. It’s not like any of Apple’s victimscustomers can actually be surprised or complain about this. It’s hardly a secret that the entire point of Apple’s “walled garden” strategy is to get you dependent on their technology and locked in so they can take you for as much as possible.

I’m only surprised they haven’t figured out a way to force you to store your information on their servers rather than locally, then pay to get access to it.

This is not a statement about Christianity, but rather, concerns that infernal organization known as Microsoft and one of its flagship products that has badly lost its way:

Nearly two decades and several text-handling paradigms ago, I was an editorial assistant at a weekly newspaper, where a few freelancers still submitted their work on typewritten pages. Stories would come in over the fax machine. If the printout was clear enough, and if our giant flatbed scanner was in the mood, someone would scan the pages in, a text-recognition program would decipher the letters, and we would comb the resulting electronic file for nonsense and typos. If the scanner wasn’t in the mood, we would prop up the hard copy beside a computer and retype the whole thing. Technology was changing fast, and some people were a few steps slow. You couldn’t blame them, really, but for those of us who were fully in the computer age, those dead-tree sheets meant tedious extra work.

Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word.

I switched over to OpenOffice years ago, then after Sun was acquired by Oracle, to LibreOffice. I had to use a recent version of Word a few months ago, and although I’d been using Word since it was first released, I found the latest version very difficult to use. It’s the perfect example of a software company taking a perfectly useful, if flawed, piece of software and methodically making it less and less usable with every release.

If I was in charge of the Word project, I would throw out everything and start over from scratch. The fact that a single eight-character document is automatically transformed into a 16,224-character monster is lunacy squared.

A word of warning. Because it has gotten too confusing too keep track of them, all Anonymous comments will be shot on sight from now on. If you’re going to comment and aren’t logged in with Google, make use of the Name/URL option; you don’t need to enter a URL, just a name.

We’re having some trouble with comment counts over 200 being inaccessible to the reader, so please expect some turbulence as we experiment with solutions.

UPDATE – MK has fixed the problem. Once a post is over 200 comments, one can click on NEWER to get the 201+ comments.

Thanks to the HTML master MK – who has the same initials, but is NOT Markku of the Dread Ilk – the Blogger comments now closely resemble CoComment and are much more legible. He was not, however, able to recreate CoCo’s special mashup feature, which I’m sure everyone will regret. A few things.

1. Clicking on the post title now accesses the comments, embedded below the post.

2. Anonymous commenting is technically permitted. This doesn’t mean you should use it because it’s too confusing. Pick a name and stick with it; you don’t have to register, just use the Name/URL option and leave the URL blank. Anonymous comments will generally be shot on sight.

3. To post with the embedded comments, your browser must be set to accept third-party cookies. Otherwise, you’ll see the “post comment” box, you’ll be allowed to click both Preview and Publish, but the comments will not appear. I’m not crazy about this either; it wasn’t set to embedded previously because they didn’t work with my usual setup, but just set the cookies to flush when you close your browser and you’ll be fine.

4. At the bottom of the post, you can now cycle through the comments on the individual posts using the OLDER/NEWER text.

I don’t know which is more amusing to me, the fact that some of you are actually lamenting the demise of CoComment or the idea that the world has suffered any loss from the disappearance of the comments into the great digital void. The comments are a daily conversation, and like most conversations, exist only in the moment. When they did produce one of those rare moments of enlightenment, I usually turned them into posts anyhow.

Since none of the external comment systems are either very good or play well with the old Blogger template, I’ve simply gone with the existing Blogger comments since they’ve worked fine on Alpha Game. Unfortunately, there is no quote button, so I would encourage everyone to adopt the practice of italicizing text that one is quoting in order to distinguish it from one’s own comments. I would also encourage everyone who wants to provide links to learn how hotlink a URL; it’s not difficult and it will significantly increase the chances that someone will visit the link you are recommending.

Seriously, at this point, you look downright retarded when you copy an entire URL into a comment rather than hotlinking it. If you don’t care enough to hotlink the URL, then obviously it’s not important enough to bother pasting it in there in the first place.

While I’ll permit anonymous commenting for the time being, mostly because the alternative is requiring Open ID registrations, I would prefer everyone commenting to at least enter a name using the Name/URL box. It’s even easier to Remove Content than it was with CoComment – one fell click instead of the previous 7-step process – so don’t operate under the mistaken assumption that it’s going to be any harder for me to keep the usual suspects from getting out of hand than it was before.

Anyhow, it’s a sub-optimal solution, but a functional one, and should allow the daily conversations to continue to flow freely. A few notes:

1. If you don’t want a pop-up, but prefer to see all the posts embedded below the post, click on the hotlink on the bottom of the post in the white box. On this post, it looks like this: “3/15/2012 11:24:00 AM”.

2. The blogger pop-up window is not only limited to 200 comments, but won’t give you access to comments 201 or higher. To see them, you need to make use of the method described above in point (1), then click on either Newer or Newest depending on whether there are 401+ comments or not.

3. If any HTML-head knows how to adjust the template to allow the functionality described in (1) to be utilized using the post title in addition to the time, please let me know. It works like that at Alpha Game and I think it’s more intuitive.

It’s fascinating to see how much humans hate change. The traffic here dropped 600 visits from the lowest it has been in more than thirty days on a weekday, including holidays, simply due to the change from CoComment. Who would have thought the old commenting system would have so many fans? Somewhere, on an island not so very far away, Blackblade is wiping away a single tear….

UPDATE – All right, just pick a name, any name. It’s too much trouble trying to keep track of multiple Anonymouses, so I’ll just delete comments without names. It’s a pity Blogger won’t permit Name/URL without permitting Anonymous.

LH wonders about the future of Apple:

I’ve noticed several news articles and radio broadcasts over the past week talking about a new Ipad coming out. Today I saw it’s official. Didn’t Apple do better at keeping product upgrades under wraps until the announcement prior to Jobs passing? Do you see the techno-facist facade failing?

Yes, I think the Eviler Empire is in the very early stages of collapsing. The screw-ups are small, but significant. They couldn’t even come up with a name for it? The killer new feature is a super high-resolution? I’ve worked in an industry that reached its natural limits – graphics cards – and the resolution gambit particularly is a classic sign of a product category that has peaked. Unless Apple manages to reinvent itself again, which would appear to be a very difficult trick without the evil genius that was Jobs, I think they will continue to be profitable, but cease to be dominant and they will become just another big technology company within 10 years.