Posts by Dan Hall

Battle Beyond the Stars

Worst. Movie. Evar!

Apocalypse Politics...

Is still alive and well. Just listen to ten minutes of the AGL lobby's Chicken Little predictions and you'll be disabused of the idea that it's dead. All the Himalayan glaciers will melt in ten years, the ocean level will rise three feet before next Wednesday, and the unarmored three-spined stickleback is about to become extinct! The only thing that can save us is giving AGL scientists more money! Or the "carbon offset" of having 6 billion people living in unlit, unheated grass huts so that Al Gore can fly his private jet to climate summits in Hawaii and the Caribbean.

I'm pretty sure that apocalypse politics will be with us just as long as plain old politics.

Farewell!

Sad to see the end of the program. While it never lived up to the hype (and what govt. program ever does?) of cost efficiency, extremely short turn-around times, and launches from both coasts, it was a real milestone. I remember going to see Enterprise when it was at Edwards AFB in California... Here's hoping that this isn't the end, just the end of the beginning :-)

I've said this about 100 times...

Microsoft's main problem with design is that they're usability group is focused on "statistics" rather than actual design. For instance, when they do usability testing they're interested in how long it takes a user to complete a task... this isn't an unreasonable metric, except that it forces their designs to cater to new users. Which means that in a lot of cases, they don't cater to the vast majority of software users, who are neither novices nor power users. The "ribbon" and the "hide unused menu items" are just the most egregious instances of this. The first tries to show everything a new user might want to do in a giant jumble, where the second causes interface changes (to a lot of users this change appears to be semi-random), hiding items.

A second and not unrelated problem is that Microsoft tends to have the "hammer/nail" mentality. When the "Start" button worked out on the desktop, where it really did have some utility, they crammed it into their smartphone UI, where it was a hindrance. Now that their phone UI has garnered some praise, they're moving that model over to the desktop. Whatever tool they're currently enamored of makes every problem a nail.

Ah, the N.Y. Times...

When investigative reporting leads nowhere, just making stuff up since 1851.

Barring someone who was directly involved coming out and saying "We did it" all this speculation is just... dare I say it... speculation. The N.Y. Times (as always) just collected up all the conspiracy theories and random stories about this off the net, made up facts where it had no information, and then cobbled it all together into a "hard-hitting investigative report." What's next? A timely story on the "All your base belong to us" meme? An undercover investigation into the realities of Time Cube?

Why does anybody still bother with that rag?

Ice Pirates?

So, once we're desperate for water here on earth and take to the asteroids to solve our problems, are we going to have to worry about space herpes?

SUX2BU

My all-time favorite :-)

Digital River == FAIL

Problems with Digital River? I'm shocked! Shocked!

This is a company that will basically give you the finger if you purchase something and then the download fails. They try to get customers to pay "protection money" on top of the price of the software "just in case" something bad happens. Dealing with them I've gotten the strong impression of a big guy in a bad suit saying "Youse wouldn't want nottin to happen to your download, would youse?" in a cheesy New-York accent.

Digital River and Microsoft together? A marriage made in heaven, no doubt.

Notice, no CA cities

This is because Amazon doesn't want to have to pay sales tax in California. Which they would have to do if they had a "substantial presence" here. As soon as they open a distribution center in Cali to provide this service, they have to start collecting the 9.25% sales tax from California customers for all on-line transactions. It ain't gonna happen.

Frequently I can get stuff from Amazon far cheaper than in retail stores here, because the lack of sales tax (at nearly 10%) trumps a higher cost of the item, even when I have to pay shipping costs.

Great

Now, not only will the U.S. prevent .xxx type TLDs, but Germany and France will prevent registration of Nazi-related domain names (even those that seek to bury the National Socialists, not honor them), China will block Tienanmen-square domains, Zimbabwe will block domains about white farmers being killed, and every tin-opt regime will get to have their two cents.

The point to keep in mind (but it's too late now) is not that U.S. control of ICANN was perfect, or even really that good. The point is that having one country (a democracy with a history of supporting freedom of speech) basically overseeing things was better than the mess we're likely to see going forward.

So long, Internet free speech! We hardly knew &*%$ NO CARRIER

Remote control for cats

Let me know when that's available, eh? It might be worth moving across the pond for

Why can't an eco-car look cool?

I'm not completely opposed to an electric car (though I'd need a second, petrol powered vehicle for longer trips I take several times a month). But I am NOT buying a brown, potato-shaped monstrosity like the "NuVu"

What we need to get electric cars accepted is a vehicle that costs around the same amount as a conventional car (which means not 20K and then 300-a-month for "fuel") and that looks like a car. It doesn't have to be the Tesla sportscar, it just has to not look like shite.

Interest in the freakshow

doesn't necessarily equate with interest in the music, per se.

Sure there are a lot of teenie-boppers out there who think that Spears' music (and I use that word in it's loosest sense) is cool. But a lot of this activity is based on the typical bread-and-circuses interest in a freak of nature. A lot of folks are just curious as to how her new music sounds, perhaps wondering if it's as bad as the MTV show seemed to indicate.

I wouldn't count the initial release of the first new song from the album as a "comeback" quite yet. Let's see where the numbers are in, say, 30 days when the bizzaro factor has worn off.

Is that "extensive" as in wide-spread

or "expensive" as in over-hyped and over-priced?

Luke, get that walker!

Anyone else think of the scene at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back where Luke uses a similar gizmo to disable an Imperial Walker. The only thing missing is the light saber. Sweet!

Government-run option?

You're kidding, right?

...that route put quality, reliability and privacy ahead of convenience...

Obviously written by someone who has never had to deal with the "quality and reliability" of city-run services in the Bay Area. If the City of SF is running this service, you can count on it being slower than snail-mail and about as reliable as Mayor Newsom. We'll get the customer service you'd expect from the DMV at lunchtime (motto: I'm busy filing my nails, but I'll get to that line of 500 people sometime today") combined with the efficiency of street maintenance (motto: "If we worked any slower, we'd be going backwards") and the convenience of the US postal service (motto: "We keep shorter hours than bankers")

At least Google and Earthlink are losing money if the network goes down. When a city-run network goes down, the city employees are collecting their paychecks as they lean on their shovels.