Jumping the shark. Technology has jumped the shark when it is has finally succumbed to progress and requires an end-user-accessible reset button in order to ensure it will continue to function after repeated use.
I am coining a new phrase.
March 28th, 2010Governments and large political parties
March 23rd, 2010The democrats want to steal from the rich and give to the poor.
The republicans want the rich to get richer which has the unfortunate side effect of making the poor poorer.
Stealing is out of the question. You do not have the right to just take what is mine.
Living in a world where the rich take advantage of the poor isn’t illegal but still is not a great way to live. The system won’t function that way forever.
Seems to me, both ways are broken. Democrats and republicans both lose.
Governments are guaranteed to fail.
In the rich times, they wouldn’t dare give back tax money, they can’t hold on to it and save it for a rainy day (all that unspent money? just sitting there? no way)
No they just spend more and make government bigger. Then during the lean times, when there isn’t as much tax revenue, they can’t make their payments to fund this larger government they have built.
And they fail.
I have the answer.
February 10th, 2010All politicians are assholes. Nothing new there.
The only time they put aside their personal agendas and pretend to be working for the public good (which is their actual job) is when there is a crisis of some kind.
Everybody wanted to do the right thing after 9/11, everybody wanted to help after Katrina, all sorts of efforts were going to be made to help out in Haiti.
But when things go back to normal, the pretense of doing the right thing goes out the window to be replaced with doing what benefits them.
The answer seems pretty obvious. In order to get politicians to do their job, we must live in a state of crisis all the time.
We need hurricanes, and suicide bombers and plagues and economic turmoil and earthquakes. All The Time.
Of course the other simpler answer, and one that would raise everybody’s quality of life rather than lower it, would be to simply get rid of the politicians.
Maybe we could outlaw it like witchcraft.
I have finally discovered the purpose of facebook.
January 29th, 2010It used to be that you would only share the minutiae of your life with close friends, or people you saw or talked to frequently.
Facebook has made it possible to share the minutiae of your life with everybody at the same time with no extra effort on your part, thus severing any special bond you may have made with the few people you chose to share the details of your life with, because now the bar is set so low, people you don’t even know, know every little detail of your life.
More progress, I guess.
My my, the web sucks.
October 27th, 2009In the 80’s you had a program running on a PC, and you selected a menu item by typing it’s number and hitting enter.
Rudimentary, but possibly still more efficient than clicking on a button with a mouse.
But the important point was, when you hit enter, the response was instant. Nowadays, you hit a web server and the response sucks.
Google is trying to change this by making chrome an OS so once again the weight will shift and the client will be thick/heavy/fat/smart and response will be better, but it will still under-perform my apple II because it’s going to be html based, which means when the presentation really needs to be put this box HERE, the program has to generate html that the browser then has to interpret to get the desired results. All very backwards, extra layer-y and error prone, just like SQL.
Somebody needs to come up with an important niche and write a client program that just blows away google’s best efforts, because they’re starting with such a broken playing field.
We are the facebook generation.
October 14th, 2009our kids will always have facebook or something like it. they will never be separated from their childhood acquaintances such that 30 years later facebook will come along and reintroduce them
The technology tax.
October 5th, 2009I figure that most people basically use their computers nowadays to surf the web, and read and send email.
Some do some programming, photography, and other less common things, but the vast majority generally facebook, shop and read email.
Yet every few years you have to buy new hardware so you can keep doing these things.
Just the same rant really, that if people would write better software, everybody could save a lot of money.
I just had a brilliant idea
August 27th, 2009Put speed limiters on strollers so even if it gets away from you and starts rolling down a hill, it won’t ever go so fast that you can’t easily catch up with it.
sshh
August 26th, 2009I made sshh downloadable. You can read about it here.
Or download it here…
http://deadpelican.com/sshh_release_I_20090814.tar.gz
Or the prebuilt cygwin windows binaries…
Why overclocking means you get what you pay for.
August 24th, 2009I spent a lot of time this weekend doing research to buy parts for a new machine.
One thing I realized is that people are stupid. Even technical people.
Specifically I’m talking about the overclocking crowd. Now I’m all about getting as much for your money as possible, but there are LOTS of people on newegg who complain that they overclock chips and they don’t work.
I don’t know if this is how it works anymore but in the good old days, intel or whoever would build a chip to the best specifications that it could, then test it. If it tested reliably as a 3ghz chip, it was sold as a 3ghz chip. If it only tested reliably at 2.5ghz, it was sold as a 2.5ghz chip.
Now in the days of quad cores, I can see where it would be hard to build a chip where all four cores tested reliably at 3ghz, which is why those chips are so much more expensive than the 2.8ghz for example. So people buy the 2.8ghz then try and overclock them and complain when they don’t work.
Do they not understand what’s going on? If it didn’t test reliably at a higher speed, then it’s not going to work reliably when you try and use it at that higher speed.
That’s why you pay more for it to go faster.
If you take your Chevy volt and try and go as fast as a Ferrari, it’s not going to work, the volt wasn’t tested reliably at ferrari speeds. That’s why you paid less than a Ferrari.