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Nov 23 2004
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Is Firefox the sign of long term problems at Microsoft?

Posted by | predictions | No Comments

Microsoft is caught in a potential pincer movement where it will have to: 1. compete in a consumer market where MP3 players, media PC’s and laptops will be sold as luxury goods with value-added hardware and software design, something that is not Microsoft’s strong point. 2. compete in a business market, where the vulnerabilities of buying into a monoculture cost time and money. As Firefox continues to grow its market share, the difference between now and the Netscape days is that Internet Explorer is often a disease ridden product. The advantage of having it preinstalled on most machines is outweighed by genuine benefits of switching, and large corporations have IT staff that will do that for people, to save time and money. It is not hard to imagine a headline – ‘Merrill Lynch to switch to Firefox’. A friend was recently dissing a competitors use of Apple Mac’s for their…

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Nov 22 2004
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The earth is made of termite shit

Posted by | darwinism | No Comments

A Pennsylvania school district has decided that alternative theories to Darwinism must be taught, including Intelligent Design. Since there is no evidence for Intelligent Design (it is a hypothesis not a theory), then presumably other ‘theories’ that are backed by no evidence are equally valid examples to teach. One such theory, as pointed out by Richard Dawkins and held by a certain African tribe is the much more logical creation theory that the earth, the whole thing including the brown stuff under our feet that looks like crap, is actually crap – created from eons of termite defecation.

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Nov 21 2004
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Official – two thirds of Americans have been brainwashed.

Posted by | religion | No Comments

What is astounding about the Gallup poll of belief in evolution is not that, as they conclude in the headline: “Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory” it is that two thirds think that it has not or don’t know. Suppose the same poll were run about a theory that has a similar amount of evidence supporting it, namely that the earth revolves around the sun, and the results were the same. A news headline reporting a Gallup poll on the ‘theory’ of solar orbiting would reflect what would be strange and newsworthy – namely that educating people about a fact (not a theory) has been so manipulated by religious fascists, that a terrifying situation has been created where in an otherwise developed country, the majority of people still hold Bronze Age beliefs. via Kottke

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Nov 18 2004
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RSS ads

Posted by | rss | No Comments

Dave Winer on RSS ads in feeds without full content: “To read the full article you have to click on a link and (listen very carefully now) see an ad as you read the article. In other words, the RSS feed is itself an ad, pulling you in to read a page with a big ad on it.” This is true, but then again, Google makes most if its money by serving up pages of links with ads alongside, the links pointing to pages that in turn are often ad supported. If double-dip advertising works for search engines why shouldn’t it work for feeds?

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Nov 18 2004
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Racists

Posted by | politics | No Comments

A lot of fuss in the news today about a sensible proposal to allow people to check one box labeled ‘multiracial’ under federal requirements for collection of race data for publicly funded universities. The trouble with race classification is that it is scientifically meaningless and empirically racist itself. Statistically we are all ‘illegitimate’ descendants of unknown fathers and racial traits are not always visible. Therefore none of us knows what our ‘race’ is. What you mark on a box indicating race necessarily misleading as any geneticist or genealogist can attest: 1. Because race is an abstract notion attempts to classify it logically are always pseudo science. Hence government forms almost always end up confusing nationality and religious and cultural groupings. (I ended up in a fun argument with a mindless bureaucrat at my local council in the UK because I marked myself down as Irish on a form marked ‘ethnicity’….

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Nov 10 2004
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I want my iPhone

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Given that: 1. All cellphone OS’s suck. 2. Most non PDA cellphone hardware design seems to have stayed the same, apart from the addition of a camera lens, for the last 2 years. 3. Unlike computers, for most people, cellphones are a luxury device where good hardware design is a premium. 4. Apple proved that people would pay for their software and hardware design value-add, in a luxury market, with the iPod. 5. Cellphones & MP3 players make sense and may converge, making a hedge against this a good move for the iPod. 6. The market for cellphone hardware is big but the incumbents are stumbling. 7. Even buying ringtones on cellphones is a $3 billion market (much bigger than the current music download market). 8. The form factor of the iPod mini is the same as a phone, and Apple pretty well invented the PDA (but just got the…

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Nov 05 2004
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CSS is broken

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Designing a site in XHTML/CSS is elegant and good according to many of those who preach web design. But there is a problem: CSS itself is badly designed, not just at the detail level, but in its overall concept. Essentially, CSS is inside out – you don’t want to flow style into content, but to flow content into style (a template). Any blogger or developer of a database driven site knows this. But what about structure? No matter how hard you try to put all of your style and structure into CSS you still end up with some style in an XHTML document. Style and structure are not mutually exclusive, which is why HTML table elements just won’t die. CSS is based on a broken metaphor one which separates style, structure and content. People have naturally gravitated towards separating style from content through template based web design and there is…

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Nov 01 2004
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They called it freedom. Why a Bush win has a silver lining

Posted by | politics | No Comments

When the Democrats became the Republicans, Election results in 52 and 64: I always wondered when the Democrats, who were traditionally a party with an extreme right, racist platform, became the party to the left. What is amazing is how absolute the transformation was, the Democrats basically became the Republicans. Maps of the election results in 52 and 64, illustrate this perfectly, they are almost the inverse of each other. Left and right, conservative and liberal, labels attached to parties are abstract; however conservative is the label that the Republicans want to own. The problem is that the current Republican Party may be socially conservative but fiscally it is careless. But social conservatism is not really what America is about. What made the US special to my mind was that most people, both to the right and left rooted for being socially liberal with a small ‘l’ – they called…

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Oct 14 2004
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Google lock in

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

With desktop search Google now has an application that makes it much more likely that you will continue to use their search engine. They have created a switching cost – after spending several hours indexing your drive, you are less likely to switch to a different service. Although there is a lot of hoo hah about desktop search, its still amazing that it took till 2004 for searching your own machine to become a mainstream app, when you have been able to search thousands of other computers around the world, within an instant, since the last millennium. Expect Microsoft to counter aggressively, their business is built around owning the command line or desktop and they will likely build in indexing out of the box, meaning that Google desktop users will end up with two or more indexes. Whatever Microsoft do, Google have shown the way forward, their desktop search makes…

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Oct 13 2004
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Paypal founder backs local services site, Yelp.com – Yahoo and Google local, Citysearch, Craigslist and now Yelp!

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Backed by Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal, Yelp! is a service that allows you to find, share and manage recommendations for local services from people that you know. Most online local services sites are not that useful, basically just an online version of the Yellow Pages. In fact, until this year, Dex, one of the major suppliers of local listings, did not even have search. Google and Yahoo have embryonic local services sites but Yelp adds persistence and reach to the word of mouth process, which is the way most people find local businesses. It’s a marketplace worth more than the entire online advertising market at $14Bn in the US and $40Bn worldwide and so is starting to attract a great deal of interest. Add Yelp to Yahoo and Google local, Citysearch and Craigslist and an interesting space is shaping up. www.yelp.com Disclaimer – I worked on Yelp.

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Oct 11 2004
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Blogging and Youth Culture

Posted by | rss | No Comments

The real growth in blogging and syndication is amongst Xanga and Livejournal users and these systems are walled gardens. RSS and syndication are an anathema. Good lowdown on Zephoria: “[young people] use the Profiles in IM to find out if their friends updated their LJs or Xangas, even though they are subscribed by email as well. The only feed they use is the LJ friends list and hyper LJ users have figured out how to syndicate Xangas into LJ.” apophenia: a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture

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