Embarrassing iPhone article from CNN, and Flash musings

The iPhone is on everybody's mind right now, or at least on the minds of all us obsessive Apple followers. It seems fairly certain that a new version, probably 3G, will be released tomorrow.

Here's CNN's take (on the speculative patent-based third-generation iPhone, which they think is the fourth-generation one because the second-generation one due out tomorrow has '3G' in it, you see...). Besides the talk of noted always-just-round-the-corner vapourware Wi-MAX, there's this gem:

Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple's standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that's kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos.

Apple has said that Adobe's flash media player, which is on hundreds of other phones, doesn't perform up to Apple's standards for the iPhone.

Erm. Right. Having more Flash memory makes Macromedia/Adobe Flash faster, you see. The fourth-generation (fifth, or possibly nineteenth in CNN land) will have Java memory to make Sun's Java faster, and possibly Office 2009 memory to make Exchange faster.

Honestly, I realise that they're not a technology writer, but could they at least have someone proofread this crap?

Also, what is going on with that Flash thing, I wonder? The iPhone isn't dramatically slow, and most non-video Flash apps aren't that demanding. If I had to guess, I would say that it was more of a manifestation of Adobe's slowness to port to new platforms (no x86-64 version, yet, remember), and possibly a bit of payback for Apple's cruelly grabbing the Carbon rug from beneath their feet; the next version of Photoshop for MacOS will only be 32bit, allegedly, because Carbon (Apple's old, creaky, SDK, used by Photoshop, MS Office, MCL, various others, and for that matter, I believe, Flash) never made it into the 64bit world; they'll have to switch to Cocoa for that.

Could that be the issue with Flash-on-iPhone? iPhones don't do Carbon at all, I don't think; it's entirely possible that Adobe just didn't have a suitable plugin in time.

Words of wisdom from Fathers for Justice

Apparently the plight of fathers in the UK currently is 'the biggest breach of human rights since the Holocaust'. So sayeth madman on roof of MP's house wearing Superman costume. And they're offended that no-one takes them seriously?

The education system in action

Take a look at this. Apparently, the teacher insisted that a kilometer was longer than a mile, and a kid corrected him/her. Result; kid gets detention, and the teacher says that even though the kid turned out to be right, he shouldn't have corrected the teacher.

Erm. That makes perfect sense, right? Respect for stupid people in authority is more important than actual facts, you see.

Are you mad?

Then you'll love Intel's absurdly-named SkullTrail platform!

Basically, it's a dual-socket Xeon system for the lunatic gamer market. With 10 USB ports. Ten!

I'd be impressed if a computer based on this came in at less than 10,000, and it's clearly aimed at mad gamers, rather than anyone else. Some people have far more money than sense...

"And if you spit at Bush, we'll EXECUTE you"

Apparently, a man has been jailed for 35 years spitting at a policeman in Texas. Yes, really.

Why?

Oh, because he was HIV positive, so it was assault with a deadly weapon. Of course, there's no evidence that HIV has ever been spread through saliva, but the Texas justice system has a well-known tradition of brain-dead-ness, anyway. People are arguing that the man thought that his spit would be infectious, but that doesn't seem to have been reported, and even if it was it should be sort of beside the point. If you pray to some god or other that (say) George Bush gets eaten by a tiger, that isn't assault with a deadly weapon, even if you believe that it might come true.

So, remember, if you have any dangerous disease, don't visit Texas. They're entirely likely to decide that you can die of being looked at someone with breast cancer, or something.

Question for Texan lawyers; if a shop unknowingly sells someone salmonella-infected spinach, and they die, can the owner be done for involuntary manslaughter? Because that would make WAY more sense than killer AIDS-spit.

I'm sure it will be overturned on appeal, but really, at this point, the US needs to invest in a press department for its justice system. It's all very well for the justice system to be entirely unjust, as in this case, but if it makes you look insane in front of the rest of the world, it's a problem.

The Apprentice more embarrassingly stupid than usual

So, I'm watching the Apprentice; it's a guilty pleasure of mine. It's a show where people who incorrectly think that they are good businesspeople compete to win the approval of Sir Alan Sugar, the man who repeatedly tried to introduce overpriced, underspecced email consoles to Britain, at a time when people could buy a perfectly good personal computer for the same price. So, really, the person who makes the most absurd decisions should win.

The task was to buy a list of items in a Marrakesh souk; one of them a Kosher chicken. So... one team bought a dead chicken, then tried to have it blessed in a mosque. Because that's what Kosher means, obviously. I mean, there's stupid, and then there's, well, this.

Update: Alan Sugar was just as horrified as I was at their horrendous stupidity. The best bit; one of the members of the offending team was Jewish, and had put on the first paragraph of his CV that he was 'a good Jewish boy'. Now, I'm a not very good Atheist (of nominally Catholic background) boy, and I seem to have a better idea of what Kosher means than him. Admittedly, I do collect random information about nonsense, but still.

Yahoo(!) Fail(!)

A bit of advice for all the giant web companies out there; don't allow this to happen to your major, popular, high-profile services:
Been like that for the past 20 minutes or so. I mean, do they want to lose their userbase?

Irony...

Wordpress.com has introduced one of those lovely 'Possibly Related' things, on all users' posts by default. Ah, but there's a twist; instead of showing your visitors what is possibly related on your own blog, it shows them what is possibly related on all blogs!

By the way, from what I've seen, 'possibly related' means, in this context 'post written by 12 year old neo-Nazi which includes similar words to those that you used in your post. Like "a". Or "the".'

Anyway, on to the irony!

The top comment is one which seems to have been copied and pasted over lots of entries mentioning the whole thing. The bottom is one recognising the possibility (nay, certainty!) of this features being misused by naughty spammers. The top one, of course, is a form of spam, albeit spam which is liable to wear out your CTRL and V keys. Note that it is also written more or less in the style that one expects spam blogs to be.

Automattic really should realise that when testing a new and almost certainly annoying feature, it is probably a good idea to make it opt-in, not opt-out. There seem to be a lot of irritated users talking about it.

Oh, some bonus extra irony for you:
That's from Matt's blog; Matt is the founder of Automattic, which operates Wordpress.com. Sphere is the company which provides the absurd link spam possibly related items; Matt is an advisor to it.

Anyway, I'm sorry, but AOL? Prescient? AOL? Whatever he's on, I want some.

Crazy, crazy comments

I received the following lovely comment today (on this totally unrelated post):

Hey, what's up. I think I can help you with your fugly problem.

See, it's not that you're just fugly as hell. You could still get laid, if you fucking actually wanted to and weren't so obsessed with feeling bad all the time.

Here's the problem with you: you're motherfucking boring as hell, and unbelieveably self-absorbed. Every fucking time I talk to you, you never ever even remotely give a shit. You come wish bullshit like "I'm busy", which you never fucking are, because you spend all your time on your fat ass reading shitty blogs about shit that doesn't matter.

You don't need an SSRI, you need a motherfucking carbon monoxide overdose. Try it, and witness for a brief moment the wonder of Darwinism.

First, I have no idea who this is. No idea at all. I can't, offhand, think of anyone who I routinely tell that I'm busy. Sure, I'm often busy when I'm at work, but in my off-time, no so much. I will admit that I'm a bad conversationalist over MSN, AIM, Jabber, fax machine and so forth, but that's just one of my little quirks. Never been too comfortable with them (especially the fax machines; I'm at least fairly sure that it's not someone I know in real life.

Right. I shall address their points, because I am in that sort of mood.

"See, it's not that you're just fugly as hell. You could still get laid, if you fucking actually wanted to and weren't so obsessed with feeling bad all the time." - Funnily enough, I have recently come to the same conclusion. The getting laid thing, I mean; I beg leave to suggest that the 'fugly' bit is subjective. But yes, getting laid; not that difficult (surprisingly; I used to think that it was the most difficult thing in the world).

The thing is, I've never been that much into the whole random sex thing. Relationships are more of a problem, because, you know, the majority of people out there are painfully stupid. I realise that this may come across as arrogant, but I'm tired and irritated and inclined to speak my mind. And, as my lovely commenter so rightly points out, I am not the best-looking in the world. My chances of meeting someone who is (a) gay, (b) reasonably intelligent, (c) nice, (d) unattached, and (e) not horrified by the sight of me aren't so good.

"Here's the problem with you: you're motherfucking boring as hell, and unbelieveably self-absorbed. Every fucking time I talk to you, you never ever even remotely give a shit. You come wish bullshit like "I'm busy", which you never fucking are, because you spend all your time on your fat ass reading shitty blogs about shit that doesn't matter." - Oh, dear. Well, again, the boring thing is subjective. About 150 people subscribe to this blog, but I've always wondered about that, I must confess; I suspect that something is wrong with their brains. Self-absorbed - erm, well, yep, maybe. I mean, this is a blog, right? I'm supposed to be. Look at Michael Arrington. He's clueless and revoltingly naive, and yet he thinks he's the king of the world. That's how blogging works.

As to the busy thing, well, I am sometimes, you know, dear. And on fat asses, well, really, I can't win, can I? My friends are telling me that I'm too thin, you are telling me that I'm too fat (as did a Wii tonight; in fairness to it, I had told it that I was 160cm tall, which turns out to be a little under 5'3; oops...) Quiver quiver wobble wobble, and so on.

The post that the person is question left a comment on, of course, was nothing to do with shitty blog posts; it was about shitty blog platforms operated by slightly scary people (yes, it was the Wordpress.com thing).

I resent the allegation, by the way, that I spend all my time reading shitty blog posts about shit that doesn't matter. I don't know about you, but I only read highly important blog posts about nuclear energy, stupid Web 2.0 companies, the implosion of the economy, and so on. Oh, and this, of course, but it's got pictures of cute cats, so is acceptable regardless of the importance of the content.

You don't need an SSRI, you need a motherfucking carbon monoxide overdose. Try it, and witness for a brief moment the wonder of Darwinism.

Now, say what you want about SSRIs, SNRIs and so forth, but if not for them, I wouldn't be here today spewing out crap on the Internet to literally twos of people. Direct all complaints to Wyeth, Pfizer et al., thanks. Carbon monoxide... well, dear, there are really far more convenient ways of killing oneself. Why, even Hitler had to give up on it rather quickly for his mass-murder (Zyklon B is rather cheaper, I hear). Try harder next time. Where on earth would one get a fatal level of CO these days, anyway?

Of course, as you can see by this absurdly long post, this random person's complaint has bothered me, to an extent. I'm sensitive like that. Bad habit; it makes me vulnerable to attack by really very pointless people. If they have an issue, though, contacting me personally, or at least signing off, would surely be more effective?

They call me Mr. Spamtastic...

Remember I mentioned Wordpress.com the other day? They've just added a fabulous new feature, whereby they show links to other (Wordpress.com) posts under your post, which their computers imagine to be related. Oh, goodness, I can't wait. You see, the fundamental problem with Automattic's whole strategy of leading readers towards other Wordpress.com blog posts is that the vast majority of blogs are written by really stupid people. I don't want to read those ones, and neither do you. Well, maybe you do; you're reading this crap, after all. I, quite frankly, have higher standards.

The one saving grace is that you are allowed disable it, at least for the moment. It's on by default, though. And here, actually, we have hit upon the greatest weakness of the free hosted blogging platforms; they can do what they want, no matter how annoying, because it is so bloody difficult to switch provider.

If Automattic would only give up on the whole 'keep all viewers within Wordpress.com forever' thing, and scrap the bloody stupid, revolting, horrible Snap things, they wouldn't be so bad. Of course, those things make them money, and the majority of their users don't seem to care. Truly the MySpace of blogging platforms. It says a lot that Blogger, one of ailing Google's worst and least maintained properties, is miles ahead of them.

Worse is Better - the Wordpress.com Conundrum

Wordpress.com is a popular blogging hosted blogging platform operated by Automattic. For some reason, people tend to have the idea that it is very good, and, especially, better than Blogger.

The three big free hosted blogging platforms are Blogger (owned by Google), Wordpress.com, and Livejournal, owned by a weird Russian company. Let's have a look at them under categories which might be interesting to someone starting a blog, shall we?

Advertising

Wordpress:
Wordpress had mandatory advertising, but most users don't know about it. How can this be? Well, they don't go to great lengths to tell you about it, it's not visible to logged-in users or regular visitors, and it's hidden in a few other ways (browser-dependent etc.)

Now, that's all very well, but, really, do you want your visitors seeing ads like this (from a real, non-mail-order-bride-related, Wordpress.com blog)?
Probably not. Users can't place their own ads, and though the Automattic founder did refer to providing a paid option to do so in an interview last year, nothing has happened on it so far. This is perhaps not surprising; those dodgy ads probably make them a lot of money on high-traffic sites.

Blogger:
No mandatory ads. You can place your own ads and get paid for them.

Livejournal:
Ads on free version.

Theme customisation

Wordpress:
You can't customise the template at all, but for $15 a year you can customise the CSS applied to it. Don't expect to see template customisation any time soon; Wordpress templates are written in PHP, and can't really be safely taken from users. There's a large library of themes you can use.

Blogger:
You can customise your template and/or CSS. There are a few default themes available.

Using your own domain

Wordpress:
It costs $10 a year, or $15 if you want to buy a domain through them as well.

Blogger:
Free. Some sort of ordinary domain registration charge if you want to use Google as registrar.

Widgets

Wordpress:
A few, generally branded.

Blogger:
Lots.

Speed

Wordpress:
Generally rather slow. Occasionally unusably slow.

Blogger:
From very fast to somewhat slow, depending on the phase of the moon.

Import

Wordpress:
Pretty comprehensive.

Blogger:
Not really; they don't seem to believe in it.

Interface

Wordpress:
Well, just look for yourself:
Some people seem to like it, but it terrifies me.


Blogger:
Dowdy and weird.

Reliability

Wordpress:
Used to go down a lot; this seems to be improving.

Blogger:
Generally fine; one major outage last year. Seemingly random obscure features occasionally die for a few hours.

Misc.

Wordpress:

By default, 'Snapz Web Shots' (an abomination in the eye of God) are enabled. It's not too clear how to disable them. Ooh, I hate them. These things, the ones that pop up if your cursor strays over a link:
Classy, eh? I assume they make money from them; they really destroy user experience.

Tags at the bottom of posts link not to a list of the posts you've made with the relevant tag, but to a list of the posts everyone else on Wordpress.com has made with the relevant tag. If you ask me, this is absurd and broken. Why do they do it? Well, for a while, those (ad-laden) tag pages appeared very high in Google searches for just about everything. Then Google tweaked something, and they vanished. They still use them, though, in the sure and joyful hope of their resurrection.

Owner

Wordpress:
Automattic, a company led by Matt Mullenweg, noted for his complete inability to tolerate criticism. Support forums are currently falling apart, with banning of critics rife. Previous feats have included really dodgy link-farming on Wordpress.org, and herding IE users towards a Google affiliate link to download Firefox with the Google toolbar.

Blogger:
Google, the new evil empire. Support forums? Hah, don't be silly. There's only minimal evidence that Google has touched the thing in the last few years, never mind support!

Spam filtering

Wordpress:
Akismet seems to get a worrying number of false positives.

Blogger:
Seems to work well.

Conclusion

Sounds like an obvious choice, doesn't it? And yet, more and more people move to Wordpress.com every day. It's bizarre. People think that Blogger still has mandatory ads, and that Wordpress doesn't. I suppose part of the reason is the implied link with the popular Wordpress.org blogging platform, but still, at this point I'm amazed people put up with the situation.

Alarmingly poor design from Twitter

I occasionally use Twitter, a service which sends updates that friends have made with their mobile phones or IM clients to you. Besides various client applications, there are three major ways to use it; just view updates on the web, get them sent to your IM address, or get them sent to your phone.

Now, I don't like it when it text messages me constantly, so I always have it set to my IM address or web. The problem is that if you leave it on IM, then log out of your IM client, it starts sending SMS messages instead. Why? I have no idea. It seems like ridiculous behaviour to me, and it's terribly annoying.

It is, of course, also easily fixed. Just don't tell it your phone number. That's what I've done now. Why it does it in the first place, though, is a mystery to me.

Yahoo(!?% et al.) treading a dangerous path...

So, apparently, Yahoo is messing with its ad pricing algorithm, increasing the minimum price for some keywords. This is the same Yahoo which is trying to do whatever it can to ward off Microsoft.

If Google was doing this, it would be interesting, and might have some potential. For Yahoo, it is horribly stupid. The thing is, in this day and age, why is someone using Yahoo for advertising? In most cases, probably the same reason they're using Yahoo for anything else; they are used to it. If Yahoo makes confusing changes to any of its generally rather inferior services, people will flee. I'd be amazed if this ad thing isn't catastrophic for them; people who are confused or worried by the changes will just jump ship to Google.

The Apprentice

The Apprentice is a fascinating show. You see, Sir Alan Sugar, the one who founded Amstrad and then drove it into the ground based on silly email systems and no real products but satellite decoders, gets to pretend that he's good at business, and shout at people! Hilarious.

The people themselves are as bad, if not worse. Most of them are unpleasant idiots, so you tend to find yourself rooting for the hot ones. On the last show, a fat loud tedious guy who wouldn't stop going on about he had an IQ of 170 got kicked off. Oh, I am glad!

Every week, they have an absurd assignment, which they fuck up in the most ludicrous ways. For instance, if you had to use a piece of software you'd never used before for your mad business, you'd try it beforehand, right? Yes, so would I. That's because we're sane, and thus not suitable to go on dodgy reality TV shows.

Activate the particle accelerator of doom!

In a couple of months, CERN, the European body which collects large particle accelerators and invents the Internet, will be turning on the rather un-inspiringly named Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The purpose, I believe, is to poke at some elementary particle or other, with, before now, hasn't been adequately poked.

So far, so boring. However, a mad American botanist (MAB) has decided to sue said European body in an American court (SSEBIAA) to prevent it switching on aforementioned giant particle accelerator, because he thinks that it will destroy the universe. He did the same thing last year when some similarly, though not quite as, large accelerator was switched on in the US. The universe stubbornly went on existing, of course, but people with wacky beliefs are rarely put off by the universe not exploding the first time they predict it.

The worst of it is that none of the vaguely plausible hideous disaster scenarios associated with the LHC involve the destruction of the universe, only the destruction of the Earth. It might make create strangelets, a form of hypothetical evil matter which eats people, or it might make ikkle black holes; I gather that Stephen Hawking is expected to save the world if this happens. CERN scientists say that both are rather unlikely.

In any case, please do remember to celebrate Possible End of the World (but not Universe) day, sometime in June. At the appointed hour, glare suspiciously in the direction of Switzerland, and watch out for killer strangelets and/or Stephen Hawking leaping into action.

Google scraping the bottom of the barrel with AdSense

The problem with being a monopoly is that you don't really have much of an opportunity to increase your market share. Realistically, there are only so many people who want to push their absurd ads on the Internet.

And so it is for Google. For the last few years they've seen stellar growth. As a result they've a stranglehold on online advertising. This is all very nice, but it means that they're not going to be able to maintain the growth rates that their shareholders have come to effect.

Well, it comes down to this. Next and previous buttons on ads. Stupid, and no-one will ever use them, but they have to grab at anything they have. In the past year, the Google AdSense blog has been full of this sort of nonsense. Ads on everything, none of them really making the same splash as AdSense for Content. When it comes to it, who wants ads on their phone, or their cat, or whatever?

It's sad, but what can be done? The way Google is going, someone else may soon have the opportunity to take over.

Weirdly specific website requirements

From some random crap website:

No further comment, m'lud.

Interesting AdWords

After I received a gmail message with the subject 'test':

I wonder who is paying for those, and why? Learning experience gone wrong? Surely an expensive one, if so; there are plenty of legit items for 'test'...

On Loony Nationalists

Nationalism, in a strictly Irish context, tends to refer to the belief that Northern Ireland should be part of the Republic of Ireland. This would be fine, except that the majority of Northern Irish people don't want to be part of the Republic of Ireland.

A friend recently wrote a post which was rather disparaging of an, in fairness, pretty crap (in my opinion, naturally) Nationalist blog.

Today, he got a comment from a person claiming to be the author:

Sharon here , from the blog you described as " This one..." , in comparison to the full title and link you gave to the "excellent"Unionist blog 'A Pint of Unionist Lite' . I notice wee things like that !
Still - it's good to know from which direction the belittling is coming from , and you have left no doubt about that : "It's probably the case that unionism - at least at this moment in time - will always appear more rational, as it reflects the will of the people. As it is, republicanism cannot but be "in poor taste" as it does the very opposite..."
Do you not know that 'Unionism' is in the minority on this isle ? The "will of the people" , indeed lol!
You mention the "tumultuous history we've had in the last 30 years..." , as if this issue has only been with us for that short a time . Another unionist trait ! 
And would you not agree that having over 200,000 'hits' and been nominated three times by our readers as 'Best (Irish) Political Blog' is good going for someone who "doesn't seem to have a clue " ?
Anyway - glad you like the photo's we publish : perhaps in future you could confine yourself to simply looking at the images on our blog , as the text is obviously wayyyy too heavy for you .
Thanks!

The blog of the offended party is really a bit of a laugh; mad use of bold and punctuation, and blatant terrorist-worship.

Right, a few points. First, on Unionism being in a minority on this isle, well, that's rather irrelevant, really, isn't it? What's relevant is the opinions of the citizens of the foreign nation which you wish to assimilate into the Republic; that world be Northern Ireland. I certainly have my doubts that extremist Nationalism is in the majority in the Republic, incidentally; just how many seats does Sinn Fein have, again?

Then there's the silly drawing of conclusions, and the assertion that taking interest only in the last 30 years of Irish history is a Unionist trait? I'm not even going to go into it, it's so silly.

On the 200,000 hits, well, I've had over 80,000 in the last year, and my blog is about... well, nothing, really. Similarly, I've been nominated for various Irish Blog Awards categories twice. I just have rather less up my own arse about it than the blogger.

As for the "text is obviously wayyyy too heavy for you", well, that's rich from someone who talks about "photo's", quite frankly.

Now, justifying the assimilation of a foreign nation on the basis that the majority of your own nation approves the fact is nothing short of imperialism. You might as well say that the German invasion of Poland was justified because a lot of Germans felt that they had some obscure historical right to it. If a Unionist is someone who resists the imperialist takeover of Northern Ireland, then call me a Unionist! Of course 'Unionism' is more rational in Northern Ireland; it is the will of the people.

This is not to say that the oppression of Catholics in Northern Ireland in the past was right, or even that the current situation is ideal. To be honest, I think both Gerry and Ian are rather dreadful, and the world would be a far better place without them and their rabid followers. However, the past does not give us a right to take revenge in the present. Northern Ireland is not part of the Republic of Ireland, and its citizens do not wish it to be. Let it go. Focus on something more bloody important, if you must obsess about something.

Wikpedia on MS Services for UNIX

Confusingly, Microsoft Services for UNIX is a UNIX compatibility layer for Windows, rather like Cygwin. One might reasonably assume the opposite. The only circumstance I can think of it being used in is the Hotmail Windows port, and that was only because Windows Scheduling was at the time vastly inferior to cron.

Anyway:

There was at least one beta release of the initial version of SFU before its final release in February 1999. This release was only in English and was supported on Windows NT 4.0 SP3+ for x86 and Alpha platforms. This is the only known release to support Alpha

Presumably this is as opposed to the three secret versions for Alpha, the architecture which no-one has ever actually run Windows on. Along with PowerPC (yes, really! NT for PPC!). And MIPS. And possibly Itanium.