Category: internet

Poor yahoo. They have a great idea. Get great reviews, and then the darn thing breaks:


Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!


is all you see when you click on Yahoo’s pipe project

It does not really matter though: Now the idea is out. The idea is great. There will be 20 other implementations, and some of them will even be working. Should I add one? Nah, busy with other things. I think that ‘pipes’ is one of these things that everybody wants but then gets rarely used. I imagine that 80% of all mechanical tools get sold to the idea of “oh with this I could do that”, but then the urgent need to actually do “that” never arises.

It is kind of sad for Yahoo: The one moment they launch something that people actually care about and it breaks. Good engineering does matter. Even if it looks sometimes as if people could buy their way out of that. In the end they can not.

The dutch are very nice people. They telco “kpn” however sucks. Sucks. As, to be precise. They have hotspots. That would be cool. They ride on this craze that you have to pay money for wifi. OK. That usually is a bad idea, as long as companies want this privilige exclusively. The KPN login screen is the most obscure login form I have encountered. Keys are being remapped. Worst of all: In Firefox on OS X you are prompted with a blank screen when you credit card info is supposed to go through. Nothing happened. For minutes. I then tried Safari, which was pretending to work. Of course new windows popped up and all that other javascript nonsense was still there. After fifteen minutes KPN then charged the firefox trans action it seemed, even though the firfox window never showed a page. So now I spend twice as much for a crappy connection.

I hope that we get quickly to the phase where there will be competitng systems for wifi access everywhere. That would take care of a cheap and stupid hack like KPNs wifi access within weeks.

Update:
A little bit later I at least could use the KPN hot spot extra minutes that they shoved down my throat and took my money for while waiting for the 747 to get ready. I thought I keep some minutes for later. But they managed for they pop up that allows you to logout not to show up when you use the wifi at the airport. Worked in the hotel. Once you have a bunch of looser code something it really all starts to suck. What a poor showing. I simple have to use up the extra KPN minutes now. It’s only a couple of Euros. But still a rip off. It’s a rip by stupidity, not even intended. KPN is clueless about what they are offering. They fell for a moron coder, and they have no way of telling, since they never use their own product and ignore customer feedback.