Category: technology

I’d kill him

free of any reason technology

If I ever find that engineer that told the users that the way computers worked could be changed I’d kill him. He had it coming. He probably told those proto-users also that it would be complicated etc etc. But he had already lost them. All they remember is that they can change their mind. The how and why they don’t care about. “you can make that work, right”. No more planning. No more thought. Just charge ahead wherever your mind and dreams might guide you.

All goes to hell, since nobody thought about anything? No big deal. Can be changed. It’s easy, right?

Next profession I choose involves a chisel, a hammer and preferably rocks. Also handy to have something to throw on the floor at all times.

eCloud and trailblazers

art technology

I will try to fly through or to San Jose and have a look at the eCloud

Maybe I should go to Munich as well.

I am looking forward to see what artists will come up with in the future in respect to public sculptures: Since the people controlling funds for these concepts have not exactly been bestowed with imagination it is great to see that more contemporary concepts are a reality.

I am sure we have seen nothing yet.

lots of HD TVs – very few showing HD

daily life technology

Nielsen numbers suggest that about one third of HD TV sets actually display HD. I wonder how many sets are still set to the store default mode: It is set as bright and vibrant as possible to make the units “look good”. But it kills the picture.

It is a tragedy: Back in the day of analog TVs it was allot of work and engineering needed to get that electron beam create a pretty and truthful picture. Today it would be easy. The whole pipeline is digital. A majority of households could enjoy unprecedented image quality. LCD and Plasma panels are impressively stable and predictable. But -no surprise there- people don’t care enough. Neither do the makers of the sets.

In a better world the sets could inform viewers about the input resolution. They could ship with a little set up tutorial (all acted out, and understandable) playing from a couple MB of memory somewhere in the set. The store mode would mention that it is active during power up. Remote controls would make sense. A Bluray player would come with a demo / promo / set up Disc that shows how wonderful the format can be. What you can do with it, and why Samsung,Sony,LG,insert-maker-name-here is awesome.

the right interface

Apple technology


While holding the Home button, press and release the Lock Sleep/Wake button. Your screen will flash letting you know that the screen shot was taken.

I had no idea that it was that easy to take a screen shot on the iPhone. The way this works is just perfect. It is easy to remember since it references the ‘you push the button we do the rest’ habit of taking a picture. It works and gives proper feedback. Sometimes Apple gets it right. Sometimes they manage to get beyond the thinking of engineering and make things really work. Technology companies get often stuck on the technology level. Nice to see when it gets transcended occasionally.

what do you do after you invented gmail …

communication internet technology

… and a couple of other things? Whatever it is that Paul Buchheit is doing today, luckily blogging is among it. Specially since he seems to think about what he writes.

It’s the technology, stupid

economy history technology

I like this graph. It is a wonderful example how a theory can be conveyed.

I have trouble following the underlying assumptions though. Plotting the potential output as a straight line going up is a nice illusion. Last time I checked things don’t automatically get better. Thanks to entropy the opposite is true. It takes a certain effort to maintain the status quo and even more energy is needed to improve matters. The past certainly saw advancements in GDP. Over and over again. But assuming that this will therefor continue is equally foolish as to predict the future reign of the Pharaohs in Egypt just because they did so in the last thousands of years.

The Dow is climbing, but unemployment does not decline. It might be that a conventional analysis is under estimating the impact of structural changes that happened in the last two decades. A tempting simplification of what is going on could look like this: Progress in computers and communication technology is creating huge values without creating the jobs as it was usual in previous eras. Facebook employs one engineer per 1.2 Million users.

Quantum leaps in efficiency ( workers vs output ) did happen before. But never as radical and rapid as seems now to be the case. Since this is unprecedented nobody has the faintest idea what this actually means.

For a couple of years the housing bubble masked the effects of this technological revolution on the job market. But eventually we will have to cope with the fact that nobody needs to file TPS reports any longer. That’s done by some computer somewhere.

Is Wiredrive using Isilon news?

internet marketing technology

Wiredrive is a system that operates in a similar space as INTERDUBS. Naturally their press releases get my attention.

The last one announces that
Wiredrive recently dumped its open source, clustered storage system in favor of Isilon.

I don’t think that it would be appropriate to go into detail here why INTERDUBS uses a different storage solution. Or why I think that such details do not matter for the clients, as long their data is 100% protected. Isilon works, I would not exactly title it meaner and leaner myself, but people can feel about what they do in any way they want and express it accordingly. Would not be worth the blog entry.

The question that is worth being raised is how Wiredrive using Isilon is newsworhty at all. This Wiredrive document outlines how Isilon is in use. While it itself is not dated it references the 2006 Olympics and 250GB hard drives.

datacenter fumes

technology

Bringing decommissioned hardware from the data center in the office in order to break it down. Turning the machines on it is amazing what kind of stench gets emitted from the machines. Not the disaster forbearing smell of burnt wire. Just that pure ‘cheap electronic factory’ odor.

Cisco srw 2024 only works with IE7 or worse

technology

The Cisco / Linksys srw 2024 is not really a bad switch. What is really sad that the web interface will only work in IE7 or before. It will fail in any modern browser. There is nothing fancy about a web interface for a network switch. No need to use anything IE specific at all. No need to seemingly do it in a way that IE8 simply stops working. I think Cisco should either stop selling the device, update it, or at the very least put a note in the box that it requires IE7 or below to operate. If they would care that is.

1 sided communication

communication history technology

Leo Laporte realized that he was communicating into /dev/null. It is not surprising that nobody noticed it.

In the pre Internet age dentists with a literary ambition not no corresponding talent could ‘publish’ the book themselves. They dropped a nice amount of cash on a couple of palette of dead trees. Now, in the digital age they just can blog, tweet, update their facebook page. The googlebot might care.

Social media always has been a Ponzi scheme. Much like you run out of fresh suckers in the money ‘making’ enterprises you run out of audience. The difference is that the internet is able to give you the illusion of an audience. It seem that things are working. Everybody in the world COULD find that tweet you just made that is so brilliant.

People and companies alike often fail to look clearly at the actual effort and time that they put into the creation of the content and put it into relation of the size of the actual audience. Luckily failed virals have the built in effect that nobody notices them. But they still exist, and so do millions of tweets that nobody cares about.

The signal to noise ratio of the overall Internet keeps collapsing. People complained about the “Summer of AOL” last century. It is a blessing that we had no idea what was coming our way …