Category: observations

ongoing · Telephony R.I.P.?

I have an iSight and a nice new Mac laptop. I also have a beat-up old Mac and a decent Canon videocam that I don’t use that much, not having (yet) developed videographer’s reflexes. Anyhow, the Canon has firewire output, so I plugged that into the old Mac and what do you know, it works just fine with iChat AV. So we put the old Mac and the Canon with a little tripod on a desk in a quiet but wired area upstairs and it’s a free videophone to anywhere in the world. Restating for emphasis: whenever I’m anywhere in the world and have an Internet connection, I can have a free videophone call home, that goes on as long as I need to and nobody’s counting minutes or running up a phone bill. Let’s see; free telephone with video, or pay-for-it telephone with no picture. Costly and voice-only, or free with a picture. I think this is what an inflexion point smells like.

Fast Company | If He’s So Smart…Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation

That Apple has been frozen out time and again suggests that its problems go far beyond individual strategic missteps. Jobs may have unwittingly put his finger on what’s wrong during his keynote speech earlier that day in Paris. “Innovate,” he bellowed from the stage. “That’s what we do.” He’s right–and that’s the trouble. For most of its existence, Apple has devoted itself single-mindedly, religiously, to innovation.

[ . . . . ]

Truth is, some of the most innovative institutions in the history of American business have been colossal failures.

From the Desk of David Pogue: Video Chats Using Microsoft Windows

Video Chats Using Microsoft Windows
By DAVID POGUE

Published: December 18, 2003

The quest goes on to find a hardware-software combination that would let Windows fans conduct full-screen, smooth, non-delayed video chats over broadband connections to the Internet. (This is in response to a recent column about Apple’s iChat AV software that, if you have a camcorder or an iSight pocket video camera, offers exactly that.)

Found via my referer log: this whole concept of genres is maddening. Some people want to be genre authors and don’t want mainstream types to crash the party, while others resent the mainstream types for writing about ideas they claim as theirs.

yix’s Friends

What is SF?
I was going to write a long and thoughtful response to this entry about science fiction and its comments in Paul’s journal, but it turns out whoever runs Daft Dystopian has alread done it, and better than I would have: draft and later version.

[Interestingly, I recognized this as something that showed up as contextually relevant, via the WayPath engine.]
Continue reading “damn genres, anyway”

Letters of Marque: Sauron: Offer and acceptance

Sauron: Offer and acceptance

Funny stuff . . . .

Textism

Dean Allen likes his iBook perhaps as much as I like mine, but we do share a common gripe . . .

UPDATE 4: Oh! Oh! I forgot the most important missing thing of all — a way to turn off the damned glowing HEY I’M REALLY ASLEEP light that, in the pitch-black rural night, can seem like a neon motel sign forever blinking vacancy.

I just lean my iPod or some other piece of dressertop detritus up against it. But yes, it is somewhat annoying and perhaps counter-intuitive . . .

Salon.com Technology | Watch out for “Old Europe”: She can bite

So what would happen if US consumers and businesses boycotted French products and services?

Even if a patriotic consumer wanted to punish cowardly, money-grubbing “frogs,” he’d have to be a committed student of mergers and acquisitions to spot tainted Gallic products.

Liquor: Stay clear of Dom Perignon, right? But what about Seagram’s, Royal Canadian, Glenlivet, Wild Turkey Bourbon, Jacobs Creek Australian wines (all owned by France’s Pernod Picard)?

Magazines: Woman’s Day, Car and Driver (France’s Hachette Group). Soft Sheen Black Hair Products, Helena Rubinstein, Giorgio Armani (L’Oreal), the Athlete’s Foot (Group Rallye). The First Hawaiian Bank (BNP Paribas), RCA TVs and DVDs (Thompson), Motel 6 , Red Roof Inns (Accor), Nissan, which just built a giant $1.4 billion plant in Mississippi (Renault), Uniroyal Tires (Michelin), Taylor Made Golf Clubs (Adidas-Saloman).

Good old American entertainment? Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Motown Records, MP3.com, Polygram, the Sundance Channel, Universal Studios (all belonged to France’s Vivendi until the flailing company recently shucked off its U.S. entertainment interests, a move that had nothing to do with politics. Vivendi, however, still runs the water system for cities like Indianapolis).

You could always hire a consultant from Ernst & Young to guide you through the tangled skein of corporate ties, but beware: Ernst & Young is also French-owned (Cap Gemini.)
[ . . . ]
The irony, however, is that in the United States itself a key customer of French subsidiaries is the U.S. government and the Pentagon. The huge French catering firm Sodexho, for instance, is paid over a hundred million dollars a year to feed U.S. Marines, at every one of their American bases. That eight-year contract was denounced last spring by a clutch of furious congressmen. They backed down when they realized that ending it would cost American, not French, jobs. Sodexho has 130,000 employees across North America.

That’s for starters. Aerospatiale provides helicopters to the U.S. military and Coast Guard, while Dassault sells Falcon 20’s to the Coast Guard. The American subsidiaries of France’s Michelin supply the Pentagon with tires for everything from advanced fighter aircraft to tactical wheeled vehicles, not to mention sales to NASA for the Space Shuttle.

So if you live in Indianapolis, don’t drink the water, and if you’re stationed on a Marine base, eat your meals off-base . . . . .

I decided I wanted to see this more easily: I wanted to know people were finding interesting, based on what Google and their own browsing turned up.

So I wrote a little script to go through the active logfile, pull out the successful page requests, tally them up, and write out hrefs and titles as links.

The actual code appears behind the [read more] link. It should work anywhere, and is reasonably configurable, based on local needs and constraints.
Continue reading “top ten most requested files displayed”

[IP] 25,000 ton spam relay, with photos of it!]

[ . . . ] doesn’t it make all Americans feel all fuzzy and secure that a Red Chinese spammer can abuse a US Naval Vessel of one of the newest designs, to relay his “business proposition”?

via BoingBoing . . . .

Hard to believe, but I try to be fair, ie, distribute punishment evenly . . . .

I had occasion to make a presentation in PowerPoint a week or so ago, and it occured to me that most, if not all, the criticism levelled at it by Edward Tufte and others (including your humble poster) are not necessarily the fault of PowerPoint.

While it’s abundantly true that PowerPoint or any slideware generator makes it easy to make content-free presentations, it doesn’t force anyone to do it. If you find yourself at the receiving end of a meaningless presentation, think twice before you blame the Usual Suspect.

Continue reading “in defense of PowerPoint”

The rules have changed . . . . and this is just the beginning . . . .

OK, not quite a year, but watch the Flash animation and see how far it’s come.

So when do we see a glyph for the two Cs in creative commons?

So I grabbed this really cool application Kung Log and while reading through the notes, I noticed the author’s name seemed familiar (well, how many people by the name “Adriaan Tijsseling” have you run across?). Turns out we had some email correspondence a couple of years ago on how to get OS X to do LPR printing properly.

Well, I was mixing with a clever crowd there: the Kung Log app is very cool, and he seems to know his way around computer science . . . .