Category: internet

Rupert ends the free phase of the Internet

history internet media

I often wondered what would be wrong with Rupert Murdoch. And I don’t mean that fact that the mother of his 6 year old youngest kid is ten years younger than his firstborn. I wonder why somebody who is worth billions can not think of anything better than to go to work.

Running an almost proverbial media empire is probably not a smooth way to spend a day. News Corp announced their ‘numbers’ a couple of days ago.
They had to correct a couple of billions in ‘Good Will’ that they had previously on the books.

Following suit is now the plan to charge for content. It does not take sybillic powers to see that this will fail royally. Allot of News Corps page views are based on content that is -let’s say- somewhat shallow. There is no shortage of that on the net. I doubt people ever will pay for that.

And content that might be worth paying for is already non-free. The problem with that is that I rather pick up the WSJ in paper and enjoy the resolution, large display size and fast and easy navigation than to sign up for some thing with an existing media company. Not that paying for content would be bad. The problem is that so far no media company has managed to create a system that works well enough for me to pay for.

I don’t think that Rupert Murdoch will try his pay systems himself and enter his credit into the form that his IT mignons will drum up for this.

sugar water 21st century edition

internet media

once you are that good

google internet

if you are a really good company then you can also outsave everybody. Just because you can, not because you need to.

Google had net profits of $1,480 million and spent not even 10% of that in Capex. Not bad.

when marketing turns into propaganda

internet M$ malware marketing

I am developing some exciting new features for INTERDUBS. I made the mistake of not testing the code I wrote for 3 days in Internet Explorer. When I check it again I realize that this cock-sucker of a browser just quits. So I had to roll through three days of changes to find out what exactly made this piece of shit simply quit. No warning, no indication. Nothing. Just fucking ended displaying the page. 6 other browsers were fine, and had been during those three days of development. There were no warnings, no hints of something causing a problem. Nothing. Turns out that a simple

made the ‘thing’ puke. This wasn’t the first time that working around Internet Explorer took almost as long as doing the actual work. Internet Explorer is just horrible and bad. Later version might be better. But overall Internet Explorer is a waste of time.

This would not be worth the ramble. It has been like this for a long time. But Microsoft has the audacity to put out a page like
this. Here it feels that IE8 is just awesome. Indeed it is much better than Firefox.

Which is pointing to a bigger problem: Somehow people started to believe that in marketing everything goes. They believe that it is OK to blatantly lie about things. The bigger the better. I don’t know where that comes from. But it is rampant. A competing company to INTERDUBS inflates the client count by roughly 200% on their public site. They don’t deliver the slightest proof for that number. Their web site looks very pretty. But it is still emitting something that is outside of the truth. And somehow that is supposed to be OK.

I think it is a problem. Not so much on their end. I can understand that they try to get away with as much exaggeration than possible. The problem is us: We let an administration get away with getting into a war over weapons of mass destruction. When there were not any, somehow nobody ever cared to follow up on that. So if nobody gets in trouble for sending the country into war for the wrong reasons, what could be so wrong in tripling your client count? What is so wrong on Microsofts end to claim that IE8 is more secure than Firefox? I personally think it is a miss-conception that something really great can be built on skewed facts. Maybe that competitor hopes to reach that claimed count one day and therefor make their lie less wrong. Problem is, that during the process they lost all credibility. Internally and externally.

Truth is a tricky thing. It will show up. Always did, and always will. Everything else is just a detour. Microsoft will learn that too.

Time Warner Unable

internet technology

Finally I canceled my TWC cable modem connection. About the only thing that is good about Time Warner Cable is that you can cancel it at any time. When the connection worked it was pretty decent. Problem was, that I had regularly a ping loss of 10-20% during the evening and on the weekend. Which makes the connecion useless. In the last weeks I went along with everything that TWC suggested. They swapped the cable modem. Which was pointless since the packages were were dropped inside of their network. Basically they were unable to address the issue within 6 weeks. Their support knows a couple of routines and motions they can go through. Anything that falls outside of that will not be addressed it seems. No escallation. Overall their “Level 3” support gave me the impression, and the evidence of the problem not getting addresses within 6 weeks supports that, that they do not understand the network that they are responsible for. Getting rid of the connection was the only option. Too bad, since during the 20 hours a day that it usually worked it was actually fine.

in case you care

internet

where the two biggest commerical airlines are right now: there is a website for that as well

visualisation

history internet

This is a nice visualisation of how the world developed.

list of people with more servers than INTERDUBS

interdubs internet technology

An interesting collection of more or less vague ‘cloud sizes’. My guess is that most of these machines are no longer specialized hardware or workstations. Explains why Sun -for instance- is having such a hard time. Once you scale well in software and do handle hardware failures in that layer too there is really no need for expensive irons. I wonder how many of those large footprint installs run Windows like operating systems.

everybody has the tools

history internet media

Tools for people to create content of any kind are widely available since a long time. Still it feels rare when there is something like this.

vsftpd 500 OOPS error

internet linux

If your ftp client reports

500 OOPS: bad bool value in config file for: config_name_here

then that might mean that you have a “YES ” or “NO ” with a trailing space in your config file. Easy enough to fix. I got lucky and found it quickly. Just in case somebody needs to google for this.