Recently Flash for video delivery might look less appauling, since Adobe overhauled the codec. But it still pretty much sucks ass if it comes to playing while there is less than the required bandwidth is available. Quicktime on the other side just goes ahead and downloads the movie, until enough of is on the local computer so that it can play smoothly. From start to finish. With flash you are often just out of luck and have to sit through some ridicolous stuttering. Which is basically unbearable. Of course you can still fuck up in Quicktime by not enabling progressive download when you encode it. Why the default is not to have progressive download is always on is beyond me. There is no downside. It does work since years. Real well. Not like that Flash crapp. Maybe one day people will test their sites and movies on actual internet connections, not while they practically sit on the server that they develop it on.
Kyle Wilson wrote an interesting essay about finishing software back in August.
I am wondering why so much great software does not even get started: Since a long time I am using an EVDO modem to connect to the internet. The upside is, that I have Internet wherever I go. If there is the slightest hint of civilisation I can connect to the internet. Which is great. The hardware is smart enough not only to move bits around it also knows where it is. GPS is a rather elaborate system with satelites floating around the planet and all. It is a big commotion, and it works. Just, that the software to connect to that part of the device does not exist on a Mac. With the right amount of documentation a programmer that has done something similar before would only need a few days to program this. And they sold thousands and thousands of these the device. The benefit for my computer to know where exactly I am would be huge. Since I am also connected to the internet a website could replace a 300 US$ GPS device. Still nobody has done it.
The other day I learned that Los Angeles is not storing the traffic data it automatically collects. It is allot of work, and certainly was not cheap, to put all those sensors in place. The data flows to the right places. And then gets simply not archived.
In both cases the effort to add the extra functionality would be ridicolously small compared to the potential gain. In both cases it might never happen: There is no driving force behind it. Nobody is making a living from something similar enough to jump on these opportunities. Even though ideas might be clear and simple, they might never happen, no matter how good they are, as long there is not a similar enterprise already happening. This theory has a sad other side as well: If there is already some kind of business going in certain way, then all sorts of similar activities will be spawned. No matter if they make any sense (Sony’s Mp3 players) or if they are valid for society ( Arms dealer, Mafia, Spam).
That whole ‘think different’ campaign:
had to come out and haunt them. Once they stopped doing so, and sold their image to peddle some ringtones. Apple is just like AT&T or Exxon Mobile for that matter. They all are just trying to make as much money as they can.
“Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed,�
Now, how stupid Apple thinks people are?? Permanently damaged software? Excuse me? Yes you can paint yourself into a corner and a device might be unable start when you mess
with it’s boot software for instance. But you can not permanently damage software. That’s like suggesting the letter ‘e’ got damaged and can no longer be used. That’s just plain stupid. Or marketing via FUD. Only companies on the loosing slope resort to FUD. Nobody has ever recovered to prosperity via FUD. With AAPL trading at a stagering 150 US$ I wonder why Apple things they have to sling some bullshit like that. Probably since they always did so. Apple has always operated on ‘bended truths’. Anybody remember how the PowerPC is just so much faster than those Intel CPUs?
Callwave and EVDO are certainly my best technological friends: Getting of a plane, in the hotel room, there would be an ethernet, but why bother? EVDO works. Even here. Then there is a voicemail from somebody that called while I was on the plane. The automatic transrcipt gives me an idea, the company that called shows up, and best of all, all those call back numbers are transrcibed right there. If the iPhone could maybe read a phone number with it’s camera and then dial it, we would be in good shape.
So, my iPhone fell down. And the ‘volume up’ button got stuck. Bad luck. Then Apple lowered the price and the 4GB Version gets sold for 299 right now. So I thought I get a new one. I asked in the Apple store if I would need to renew my contract to activate the new iPhone. They said this would not be necessary. They said that I just would need to replace the SIM card from the old to the new phone.
Of course that is not the case. Calling Apple got me the answer that AT&T would be responsible for this. Well, it’s not me that did choose AT&T. It was Apple that did that for me. Calling AT&T they told me that the only way to activate the new iPhone is to restart the two year commitment with them.
By now I really hate both companies for their blatant ways of trying to rip people off. Even though they seem to win this time, I will make god damn sure that they will not come out of this on the upperhand in the long term. They neither can run nor hide, and I will get both of them. With interest, and fun-bonus. They deserve it for been taking for a ride, as they try to do it with their customers.
Suddenly the NYTimes regained her relevance again. They could have done it all the, and become really great, but the very same corpo-idiots that tried to charge for the normal page think that there is subscription revenue in the years 1922-1986. Idiots. Idiots at the NYTimes. What a funny thought.
All good ideas are simple. Like this one. You create a page or a site. Right there. Just write some text, maybe or maybe not add formating. And that’s that. Very nicely done. Now go and play with Jottit.
Google does a great job in keeping an index of those internets. Despite some obstacles. One of them being that two different things can share the same name or label. IMDB deals with it, by adding roman numerals after peoples names.
Google has done little to use it’s dominance to establish semantic additions ot the internet’s structure. Actually it should, as long as it never makes any moves to lock it’s competition (which, ahem, would be who exactly at this point?) that would be broadly welcome.
If a specific term would be used for two or more different things, then Google could allow the registration of a disambigiotion (sp?) string. An example: My name gets used for a couple of people. We really have nothing to do with each other. Mostly the case for people with the same name.
There is only one search result. If I could go and register one variation that I would ad as an invisible comment in html pages about me, then google -or any search engine for that matter- would be able to clearly seperate the indexes for all those possible results. Wikipedia deals quiet
well with this issue for instance. While search engines usually don’t.
I have no idea how I came about to find this site devoted to the Scanimate System. I did order both DVDs and am very happy to have done so: They give a very interesting peek into the technology, art etc of those times. Who knew that I would find out eventually how all those apparently not hand drawn animations I saw on Sesame Street were done.