Simon Willison blogs his experience with getting to know OS X.
Archive | 2004
Cringely: A new business model for WiFi
Cringely posted his weekly column on PBS.org with a proposal for a new business plan for WiFi. The column was pretty firmly trashed by WiFi Networking News in “Cringely Builds Cloud Castles” and denounced and defended on Slashdot in Cringely Proposes New WiFi Plan.
My take? I’m no visionary (evidence: Amigas, FoxPro, disco), but I don’t see the huge attraction of “TCP/IP Everywhere.” As a business traveler, I’ve occasionally dipped into free or per-pay WiFi when in a rush to get something done, but I much prefer the hotel with 10 Mbps Ethernet. I’m not convinced you’ve got to have WiFi everywhere. If your local coffeeshop is a favorite hangout and they charge for access, you’ll probably pay for something there, but for the majority of us, I’m just not convinced this is something we’ll pay for over and above the connectivity we’ve got.
Outlook 2003 Spam Filter: pretty limited.
MAPILab documents the Outlook 2003 built-in spam filter. The supposed “state-of-the-art” technology seems to come up short on a number of fronts. Guess I’ll stick with SpamBayes.
Microsoft – The Path Ahead
Microsoft – the path ahead [OSNews]
Another intriguing post from the fellow at aaxnet.com – a presentation with a lot of citations, although I think the conclusions are sometimes a stretch. Interesting prognostications, nonetheless.
Microsoft ad: Linux is a competitor worth evaluating
CNET News.com – Front Door reports Microsoft ad campaign digs at Linux. “The software giant launches a marketing assault on Linux, in a sign that the open-source solution may be a mounting threat to its server system sales.”
The Register responds with its usual ascerbic Microsoft ad push cranks up the ‘get Linux’ volume. “Would you buy a used fact from this company?”
I think it is great for Microsoft to name names and make it clear what alternatives their customers should be considering. As a vendor, it’s only reasonable that they highlight those facts that bolster their case. While the Microsoft studies do show some advantages in some situations for their solutions, I hope this encourages customers to do their homework and consider the many other information sources out there, too.
The Twit Filter and Absolute Power
I belong to many forums online and participate at a spectrum of activity levels, from lurker (never posted) to the most active poster. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend that disturbed me.
There was a poster who invariably cried for help like the world was ending, but would never supply enough information in the post to allow a solution to the problem.
Follow-up questions, sometimes in a series of messages, would inevitable result in the discovery that he was wrong about the initial problem, the answer was right in front of him, or the maddening and uninformative “Never mind” posting that left those who came to his aid no better off than before.
I twit-filtered him. And therein lay my downfall.
Live was peaceful without the twit. No more chasing wild geese. No more wasting my time answering questions irrelevant to the problem. No more setting up test cases to prove what I already knew, yet he insisted was false. Life was good.
Then came the next twit.
A professional in another line of work, he assumed that his superior intellect could compensate for his lack of knowledge in the fundamentals of what he was trying to do. Plunging into a difficult task, he was ensnared in difficulties; none, in his opinion, of his causing. The software should have known what he wanted to do. The hardware was insufficient. It didn’t work on the first attempt. He couldn’t make sense of the error messages, which was the fault of the software.
Flick. The switch on the twit filter flies again. Peace returns.
Next came the droning pessimist. For years, he was always able to see the glass as half-empty, and probably dirty, too. Flick.
The eternal optimist was next, sure that monopolies had our best interests at heart, that their policies and maneuvers are not what they seem. Flick.
Peace and quiet. No more twits.
Peace.
Quiet.
Flick.
And then there were none. Few if any postings make it through the filters. The occasional newbie post, an FAQ quickly answered by one of the regulars. An occasional interesting post by one of the regulars who actually finds something interesting. Ah, the peace and quiet of a well-regulated community.
Stallman: State of Free Software
Seems like this is the month for 20th anniversaries: OSNews posts Stallman: State of Free Software Address: “Richard Stallman wrote a short editorial on the 20th anniversary of GNU. It’s a summary of what he considers needs to be done now.” Slashdot follows up.
Dan Gillmor: Mac and AT&T break-up, 20 years old this month
Dan Gillmor’s eJournal: How the Mac and AT&T Breakup Ultimately Converged. “They were seemingly unconnected events, two decades ago this month: the launch of the Apple Macintosh computer and the formal breakup of communications giant AT&T. As it turned out, they were Big Bangs in universes that have ended up converging — computing and communications — and their impact still reverberates today.”
If Apple ceased to exist, the technology world would be poorer in ways that mere money can’t measure… Sadly, in a way, the same can no longer be said for AT&T.
The anniversary of the Mac might be best observed on January 24, the date of the incredible ‘1984’ Super Bowl commercial, described and viewable here.
First Mars Images
Dan Gillmor’s eJournal blogs Fabulous Mars Images. “The Mars photos from the Spirit rover are remarkable. It’s wonderful to see humanity exploring the cosmos again….”
I’ll second that. There’s an infinitesimally small chance that the human race will colonize other worlds before we manage to exterminate ourselves. I think that, despite mankind’s many shortcomings, we’re a race worth perpetuating.
So, would you call the combined company FedKo or KinkEx?
FedEx announced plans to acquire Kinko’s last week. FedEx to use Kinko’s stores to offer e-services to enterprise customers. “FedEx views its $2.4 billion acquisition of Kinko’s as a way for it to provide Internet access, videoconferencing and document management services to enterprise customers. ” Article from Computerworld News