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

eight, nine or ten?

technology

“Do you run OS 8, 9 or 10?”

Original quote from Timewarner Cable support yesterday after trying to troubleshoot a connection issue for 40 minutes.

Bonus points when dealing with an institution as stupid as that: Figuring out the pattern of the special “access PIN” numbers for the Level 3 phone support after having received a couple of those. Let me know if you need one. And make sure to know if you run that OS that is obsolete since 1999.

cupholders?

economy history technology

In 2007 GM lost $4,589 on each car they sold, in 2008 $4,670. Imagine any GM car, then remove things from it that cost four and a half grand*. This is the car you would get when would try not to loose money on making them. What do you care? Well you should, since next week you will probably own GM. And their losses will (continue to) come out of our (tax) pocket.

* OK, I got those numbers from the Internet and did the division myself, so all sorts of things could be wrong here. And you can also put back about one thousand dollar worth of parts into your imaginary Escalade: That’s what gets spend on marketing to convince you to buy the thing. How about a spare tire, seatbelts, a radio and a fan on the passenger side?

visualisation

history internet

This is a nice visualisation of how the world developed.

insomnia – the movies

daily life media

A while back I watched Insomnia, I think I found it by some lateral IMDB connection of its director Chris Nolan. It was not bad for most parts. Watching the DVD extras I found out ,that this was actually a remake of a swedish movie with the same title. Since that was the only choice I got the stupidly overpriced criterion disc.

Watching the US remake and original revealed some american movie codes that -looking at them in the light of these films- are just plain stupid. Essential story points got bent. It was not that horrible to watch Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank act in the 2002 version. The original rarely reveals the thesping. People, surroundings and the issues suggested simply feel more reel. All the style, sound design, fog, acting and writing in serpentines to avoid a dog being shot make the US version feel dense, crafted and inept compared to the original.

The swedish film is certainly not without its flaws. But Insomnia is a remake that makes you wonder why there is such as thing a remake.

5.6

M$

five point six appears to be a good guess for the number of Cheops pyramids that could have been built in the time that people spent trying to work around Internet Explorer.

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.

the beauty of the API

interdubs technology

The main purpose of the API for INTERDUBS was to let my clients use it programmatically. Their system control INTERDUBS in a way that fits best into their workflow. That is what the API was made for, and it works. Every day.

Interestingly there are other, somewhat more surprisingly, benefits to having an Application Programmable Interface to a system too. This week I had a discussion with a client where they outlined specific needs in respect to their data that they have in INTERDUBS. They could have updated things manually, but that would have taken a very long time. By using the API myself it actually took me not that long to implement their needs. I spent only slightly more time on it than the actual discussion took that we had about their needs. This was very nice to see. And actually quiet unexpected. If the next client needs something similar I will be able to solve this in five minutes.