Are we in trouble when the Onion has a point?
Category: history
Readwrite web wrote about Facebook login
Which happened to bring them high in the google search results for “facebook login”.
Then facebook did a re design. I didn’t notice much difference. But some people got confused and looked for the “facebook login” on google. And as we all know
clicking on the first result is what one should do (not). Enough people were so convinced that what they actually saw was facebook they got very mad and left comments in this direction.
Two things become apparent:
Everybody has computers now. And I mean everybody.
And many people delegate everything (including their thinking) to google.
No wonder adsense scams are so profitable.
A boarding pass design
I really like this. Also because it gets to show that we take too much junk in the -after all- man made environment around us for granted.
Boarding passes right now have a format that looks like a computer punch card, which came into being in that size since dollar bills in the days of Mr. Hollerith where that big.
So your boarding pass does not fit anywhere because people used to pay with paper money of that size more than 120 years ago …
While we are at it: The airlines could get an image from me, since I am frequent flier. Then they could super impose it over a QR Code and add a check sum.
An optical scan would reveal instantly if that boarding pass would actually BE for me. Quick: Go and patent that. It might be worth your time. I am busy with other
stuff and would just be happy to see better boarding passes. Among a couple of other things.
via Eric Alba, who referenced passfail where Davin Yoon’s design can be found in the bottom of the page.
As we are running slowly out of IP addresses addresses are being used that were deemed to be reserved. This wouldn’t be the internet if this would go smooth. See pollutions in 1/8 for the details (thanks David for the hint).
Turns that out that 1.1.1.1 and 1.2.3.4 and not so awesome choices for an IP. Others thought so before.
And they keep doing them:
Very nice visualization by the times
Back in the day an electron beam was running across the TV screen. NTSC was running with 30 and PAL with 25 frames a second. If the beam would go line by line the screen would flicker. The solution was, to let it run twice over the screen for each frame: Once for all odd lines (1,3,5 etc) and then again for all the even ones (2,4,6). That looked better. It is called ‘interlaced’. Each of these passes is a ‘field’.
Film cameras liked to run at 24 frames per second. Cinema does not flicker since each frames is shown twice, but that is not the point here.
When you have 24 fps footage and your TV runs at 30fps, what do you do? The solution was to insert a so called 3:2 pulldown to make 30 frames out of 24. This was done based on 60 fields to make it look smooth.
Interlacing is dead. There are no electron beams going over glass tubes to make images to speak of.
If you like to compress an NTSC spot that was shot on film, and that has the 3:2 pulldown in it, then you should go back to the 24fps version first. Since I could not find anything that worked I developed this. In 1998. Then, in 2008, I needed it again, and so I looked again. Much to my surprise, nothing really worked the way it should be. Many tools have the button to do an ‘inverse telecine’. But none detect cuts and deal with changing cadence patterns. So, I wrote it again. This time based on quicktime.
I decided to give it away: 32none is a free tool now.
Enjoy.
I would guess this clip is about ten years old :
The compute power you see here can be replaced by one or two racks today. For maybe a tenth of the price. I used to know my way around SGI hardware, Irix, OpenGL a little bit. I think it was patch number 1508 that brought me over to the US. Or was it 1805?
None of that matters in the slightest bit any longer. The 7 billion Dollars that SGI had in market cap at one point completely evaporated. The glorious campus they built is still in use today: Google picked it up.
just wrote:
$r .= substr($str, int (rand(scalar split // , $str)), 1);
and even though it does what I want and I wrote it down the way I write this it simply feels wrong. Not out of this century.
Dennis Baron’s book “A Better Pencil” does not only has a nice title, but going by this Salon Interview it seems to well worth the read.
I tend to disagree with him when he proclaims:
And the funny thing is that you could put anything out there, and somebody is going to read it.
I think there is an awful lot of things that get written today and that will never be read. And not only on Twitter. We tend to apply the existing rules, concepts and understandings for way to long. Cars looked as if you were to put a horse in front of them for way to long. In the past if something got written then it indeed got read. Varying audience. But since publication cost was significant filters on many levels made sure that it was recoverable.
Now publication cost is zero. Yet, we still assume that we publish it and they will view it. This does no longer apply, since their is simply not enough readership to go around.
The corpus of unread things we cared to write is not a bad thing in itself. If we were aware then it would regulate itself.
The error of an assumed audience becomes expensive when you pour resources into something that will never find an audience that justifies the efforts that went into it. That video that you crafted so nicely for your company was not worth it when only a couple hundred people will ever watch it. Company websites cost sometimes 5 dollars or more per visitor. A visitor that most of the time will have forgotten about it after 2 seconds.