Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
Calling him a serial skeptic would be too kind. In fact, calling him a skeptic at all would be wrong — he’s just a shit stirrer. Nothing more, nothing less. I wonder what he actually believes? I know what he writes, but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that he just writes what he writes to get attention.
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Andrew Sullivan on the financial crisis:
The truth is: we had this coming. We deserve it. And we deserve leaders who are able to tell us that.
Yeah, no. I’d like to see any leader in charge of a government try and tell the people that we deserve this and that we should just sit back and cop it. Good luck with that.
I’m no economist either, but I imagine if we had a total collapse of all the banks, businesses and people around the world who had done financially irresponsible things over the past couple of decades, then things would be beyond pretty bad. In fact, I imagine things would be so bad that any political leader who dared not try whatever it takes, wouldn’t have much of a future in front of him or her.
Sometimes Andrew lets a bit too much of his inner-Libertarian out of it’s cage.
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Monday, November 24th, 2008
Man, they really screwed up the ending of the season 5 finale. They should have left things unresolved with E and Vince for the next season. Showing them having a massive fight and then making nice within the space of a few minutes was bizarre and off-tempo. In fact, the last couple of minutes of the episode went against the grain of the whole season. There’s nothing unresolved for the next season — there’s no cliffhanger.
Oh well, all-in-all it was a good season — but here’s hoping they can do even better in season 6.
Monday, November 24th, 2008
Cuil has received a lot of bad press over the past few months. Unfortunately, much of it deserved. I hadn’t used Cuil since it was launched but after it’s spider visited one of my websites (and proceeded to trigger a bunch of 404’s by looking for files that are long gone — a mistake that Google, Yahoo and Live don’t make) I thought I would take another look. I didn’t have much like the second time either.
My biggest issues with Cuil at this stage are:
- Search results page layout: it’s horrible. There is way too much text shown for each entry, the images don’t match the entries (i.e. Microsoft entry; Sun Microsystems image) and they’ve decided to be different by showing the search results in three columns, instead of top to bottom like every other search engine (it would be OK if it was an improvement, but it’s not — it’s really not).
- Search results text: largely nonsensical. They’ve just cobbled together various bits of text from the website they’re indexing — what, do they think that their algorithm can describe the websites content better than the websites editor? It doesn’t flow; it doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t make me want to click on the link.
All-in-all Cuil have a ton of work to do. Having the world’s largest index doesn’t mean squat if you can’t process the information it contains and present it in a half-decent way.
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
The long saga that is Omnidrive appears to be over. For those of you who don’t know, Omndrive was an Australian startup that offered free online file storage and had some early success.
I have been a registered user of Omndrive for around three years, although I haven’t actively used it in about two years. Their demise raises a very important question about storing your files with startups and in the cloud.
The question is this: should we trust startups with our personal documents? Or more importantly, can we trust startups and the cloud at all? When you have startups that are running on nothing but the few million dollars they received from early investors, with no revenue to speak of, which will rely on a second round of investment in the future to keep them going — can we trust these companies with our personal files (which we may or may not have backups of) or personal information? As the Omnidrive saga illustrates, no we can’t.
Despite being a registered user of Omnidrive for a number of years I did not receive any communication from them by email that they were going under and that my personal files would no longer be accessible from their servers. If that was the only place I kept my personal files then I would be screwed.
So how many more Omnidrive’s are out there? How many more cloud startups will go out of business without first warning it’s users that they have x number of days to remove/backup their files? I bet quite a few.
The core problem with the cloud from the average users perspective is that you just can’t trust it. Just like a real fluffy cloud in the sky, it’s easy on the eye, but it can dissipate without warning.
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
I was excited when TechCrunch first unveiled TechCrunchIT, but not anymore. Steve Gillmor is obviously very passionate about his writing — but he doesn’t really cover the topics I imagined an IT Enterprise blog would cover. What’s more, every post is a mini-essay and he’s the only (active) writer. If the TechCrunch gang are serious about TCIT then they actually need to allocate more resources at it (and cover some real IT Enterprise news).
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
Google SearchWiki is a bad idea. Google’s regular old search engine might not be perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the competition and it’s a hell of a lot better than any human powered search engine could ever be.
My hope is that Google isn’t serious about this and that it’s simply a shot across the bows of various human powered search engines like Wikia Search and Mahalo. Warning them that God Google has its own human powered search engine ready to go if they ever gain too much attention. Or maybe people will be so scarred by their experience with Google SearchWiki that they will forever be turned off the idea of a human powered search engine.
Now how about an opt-out option?
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
A few weeks ago Microsoft unveiled a new little projected called Small Basic. The projects aim is to provide kids with a simplified environment where they can learn the basics of programming — and have some fun while doing it.
Derived from the BASIC programming language, and based on the .Net platform, Small Basic has been simplified — it has just 15 keywords and uses minimal concepts — so no prior programming experience is necessary. It’s a perfect starter for youngsters and even some adults might find it useful if they’re just starting out.
I hope elementary schools are paying attention. Everyone should have a basic idea of how computer programs are written — sort of like a lot of people have a basic idea of how cars work.
Saturday, November 15th, 2008
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
It’s easy to get carried away in the moment, to make gargantuan claims about the transformative qualities of a person, even before that person has had a chance to do anything other than get elected. Of course, being the humans, we can’t help ourselves — it seems only natural to get swept up in a moment. To believe in a cause, or a person, so strongly, that when we come across someone who has an opposing view, we shake our heads, look at them with a pitiful gaze and think: if only this person knew the truth.
It can get pretty polarizing without a little perspective. So maybe we should all play the cards a little closer to our chests; keep a lid on major assertions; and not forget that although the pudding has been baked, we need to let it cool down before we can find out what it tastes like.