Tech Talk
Lots of Storage and Fun for the Kids!
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006
Check this out – Lego hard drives!
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From the Grimly Ironic file…
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006All this work to keep bombs off planes, and it turns out the unsuspecting laptop user may be a potential risk.
Categories: Tech Talk | 1 Comment »
Microsoft Takes a Cue from Spielberg
Monday, July 31st, 2006Check out TouchLight technology from Microsoft – 3D images that you can manipulate with your hands (like Tom Cruise did in Minority Report).
Very, very cool.
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Breaking News – Web Experts Also Good at Math
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006InternetWeek has published a State of the Spam article, in which they claim that 80% of all e-mail traffic during the first three months of 2006 was spam.
The article includes this stunning piece of analysis on page 3:
[Michael] Geist, the [Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa], figures that if 80 percent of e-mail is spam, “then four out of five e-mail servers are there to deal with spam, not to deal with legitimate mail.”
Ya know, I think the guy has a point – I mean, four out of five is right around that 80% figure quoted earlier in the article…
Sheesh…
Categories: Tech Talk, The World Wide Weird | 1 Comment »
The Internet’s in the Mail…
Monday, July 3rd, 2006Ladies and Gentlemen, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska):
(hat tip: Lileks)
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
[…]They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material…
[…]The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a violation of net neutraliity that hits you and me.
Can you believe….What is he….How could anyone …. BBLLLAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!
Sorry. The mind boggles. There is nothing left to say, except that it’s a pretty safe bet that no net neutrality legislation is going to affect this guy.
A series of tubes? Wow…
Categories: Political Rantings, Tech Talk | 1 Comment »
OyMap.com
Saturday, June 24th, 2006I got an e-mail asking me to register my blog at OyMap.com. It’s billed as a regional index of websites (in case you’re looking for websites published by people who live near you, I guess?)
The presence of “Oy” in the title, suggests it has something to do with Judaism, and that they probably found me because my last name is a common Jewish name.
In any case, it seems relatively harmless, so I gave it a shot.
Now you know. Moving on…
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Making Yahoo Mail Work with Outlook 2003
Saturday, June 17th, 2006Oh my God, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this until just now…
For a very, very long time, I’ve been having trouble using Outlook 2003 as a POP3 client for my Yahoo mail account. The replication would download everything in the Inbox just fine, but when it started to download the messages in Yahoo’s Bulk folder (the place where it puts potential spam), it would randomly fail with a mail server error (either 0x800CCC90 or 0x800420CD). The failure point was never predictable – sometimes it would fail on the first message, sometimes it would get through dozens of messages and fail then. Sometimes, I would simply click “Send/Receive” again, and the same batch of e-mail that generated the error would work fine. I even found that moving the mouse around or scrolling the scroll wheel while the messages were downloading helped prevent the error (maybe it had something to do with keeping the client side from going idle? I don’t know – it sounds strange to me, but I’m very sure it helped…)
This problem was particularly annoying because when the download doesn’t finish, Yahoo doesn’t delete the mail from the server. So if I walk away from my machine with Outlook running, and it has this problem after the 50th message, I might get 9 or 10 copies of those fifty messages on my hard drive. The only way to stop it was to go to the Yahoo Mail website and manually delete the already downloaded mail.
I spoke with Yahoo when it first started happening, and they sent me here and closed the support ticket. The problem is that this is a known bug with Outlook Express, not Outlook 2003. I tried the fix anyway, but to no avail.
So tonight, it hits me: the problem is only with the Bulk mail folder. For some reason, it never has a problem with the regular Inbox. So I shut off the Spamguard feature, which makes it send all the mail to the Inbox! Now, not only does the download work, but it goes faster than before, and there’s no scrolling or clicking required on the client end.
The problem remains unsolved, but it’s no longer my problem! Hallelujah!
Categories: Tech Talk | 2 Comments »
Smacking Around Your Mac…
Wednesday, June 7th, 2006There have been lots of stories floating around the web about that guy that made his Macbook change desktops by smacking it on its side. CNET just published video instructions on how to do it, including links to all the relevant sites.
Question 1: How long you think until Apple puts out the press release asking people to stop this, because their support lines are being overrun with people who’s hard drives have crashed from excessive smacking around?
Question 2: How long until Apple puts out laptops that switch desktops this way as part of the OS, using a separate sensor, rather than relying on the hard drive protection sensor that folks are using now?
Question 3: How long until people start making the Mac do other things when you smack it (like play a sound file telling you to cut it out)?
Categories: Tech Talk | 5 Comments »
Microsoft Gets One From the Government
Monday, May 15th, 2006It doesn’t happen often, but government regulators sided with Microsoft yesterday in rejecting Google’s complaint over IEv7’s Search Box:
The Justice Department has evaluated the search box — a new feature in IE 7 that lets users initiate searches — and concluded it “respects users’ choices” and “is easily changed”
They also mentioned, as discussed in these pages before, that the process for changing the default search engine is “relatively straightforward.” Interestingly, they pointed out that:
The number of steps to change the default search engine in IE 7 and Firefox, the open-source browser supported by Google with advertising revenue, are in fact identical: five.
Google is taking the same argument to the EU regulators, which strikes me as answer shopping, but given the two different jurisdictions, I guess isn’t a problem (at least not yet?) We’ll see if one body influences the other…
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EU to Microsoft: Don’t Build Any New Products Ever Again
Tuesday, May 9th, 2006The EU is considering action against Microsoft’s forthcoming version of Windows, Vista. They’re concerned that it will violate the ruling handed down by the second highest court in the EU in 2004.
Here’s the quote that caught my eye:
Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes told Microsoft in a letter in March that its plans for Vista could “deny PC manufacturers and consumers a real choice among competing software products and stifle innovation”, the Commission said.
That’s quite a stretch, isn’t it? Putting out a new product will deny consumers choice and stifle innovation? And, I suppose we’re to assume that the converse is also true: preventing Microsoft from releasing (i.e., innovating) a new product (i.e., another consumer choice) would (somehow) provide consumers with more choice and encourage innovation?
At particular issue, it seems, is the planned XPS format, which will compete with Adobe’s PDF format. Adobe has a near-monopoly in this space today, much like Microsoft’s monopoly on the PC desktop. As far as I can tell, XPS will have an advantage over PDF, because the ability create XPS files would come included with Windows (you can download Adobe’s PDF Reader for free, but you have to pay for software to create PDFs). PDF would still have the advantage of being cross-platform (Microsoft will allow royalty free licenses for XPS, but will only produce XPS software for Windows), as well as the huge advantage that Microsoft has today – ubiquity. PDF is a valuable format principally because everyone can read it. XPS will make a dent for sure, but will have quite a hill to climb to unseat PDF as the market leader. But regardless of whether XPS replaces PDF as the industry standard, I’m still lost as to how putting a competing product in the marketplace limits choice and stifles innovation.
If anyone’s stifling innovation here, it would seem to be the EU. And it would seem that we could point specifically to which innovation their stifling (Windows Vista).
The irony of the whole thing is that the EU is stymied by its own litigiousness. Microsoft has appealed their previous case to the highest court in the EU (the Court of First Instance). If they sue for changes to Vista based on that previous ruling, and the CFI overturns all or part of it, it could invalidate their Vista claim right out of the gate. On the other hand, if they wait to see what the CFI will do, Vista may be released in the interim, reducing their ability to influence changes.
I think this is starting to smell like a vendetta against the front-runner – in this case, Microsoft. I can understand the need to keep the playing field level, offer consumers the most options, and encourage other firms to compete. But if doing so means that the organization with the most resources and, arguably, the most experience is not allowed to compete at all, then aren’t we throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Categories: Political Rantings, Tech Talk | 5 Comments »