[stretching paws up]
No amount of coffee is working this morning. Serious. I'm hittin' the hay.
Katherine M., nice find. Tho, they should have ended the movie at exactly the current middle point.As I'm too tiered to live out my frustration to gnome configuration I though something cute would be a nice change...
Update: - hacked Lightning Multiweek to work with Thunderbird 2.0.0.1.
technorati tags:Cute, kittens, youtube, fun
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The first thing is: Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 is out. Looks sleek, works a bit faster and looks like the spam engine got a little boost :) Lightning works also, but as usually there is a catch (and I don't get why the people coding lightning haven't integrated it yet) - Lightning Multiweek View is not compatible with with TB 2.0. Well I hope Joey Minta is fixing the problem, or at least he will update the version requirement in the extension. Usually people wont know what they are missing and a month view is not sufficient when you are at the last week of the month - this little gem will show you the next 4 weeks (thats how many weeks I want to see into the future - less is insufficient and more is too much I can bare :) ).
Next gem is the HP new printer family. Well It seems they are so efficient in inc consumption that they wont make ends meat with the ink industry. So the geniuses there will lease you a printer instead selling you one. I would have nothing against it BUT they charge for each printed sheet AND that is based on the printing quality. This pops up some questions:
1) I print 1000 pages that contain 100 dots of with the highest quality setting - probably I will be taxed with the highest rate per page, so increase the amount of pages by few million and HP gets a HUGE profit out of nothing as the ink will last well really long (this is a theoretical exercise, but to use so high volume printer you might just print out blank forms)
2) Ok, You lease the printer, You print um, some 100 000 pages in a month, so its time to start paying for the service. So do you call the service people and get them to come to your work place so they would take out the statistics? Who says that the data that the technician takes is the same you are billed by? You augment your network so that the printers can go and report to some HP site that they have printed xxx pages with this quality? Big deal, you just wont let the printers to connect to the HP site - profit right? Well, what happens if someone hijacks the session and crawls back to the intranet with that?
3) You take out you Uzi and start shooting it at your firewall to open up dozens of IP-s and ports so that the (hmm technicians?) processes can go and monitor the "printer". As the high volume printer probably will utilize some PC and most likely will operate on a OS (who wants to bet that it will be some kind of a stripped down windows?), so I will not go into the security risks it will propose...
4) Who can guarantee that the printer wont lie? Everyone lies - its just the matter of degree of detecting it!
Enough with HP - lets continue with google. I understand competition, but I don't understand regression. So far I have been happy with most of the services that they provide, but the deal to buy doubleclick.com was a blow below the belt (I think). I would understand the tactics to eliminate the the competition by eliminating them by merging (and I hope thats their tactic). Google has been my (Idol would be a bit much, but still...) example when it comes to web advertising. I survived the switch when they started to do flash based adverts - thats where I draw the line. I have seen my share of web based flash advertising that filled the whole page. SO I hope they are just eliminating the competitor!
New Ubuntu Feisty Fawn is out and should be looking great (haven't had time to test it tho).
Next rumor is that the Valve servers have been hacked - nothing is sacred any more.
There is a new material that is tougher than the diamond. Well its not completely correct, as there are several materials that are tougher than diamond, but they are super expensive to create. Most people would thing "the Frell with it" who needs it. I on the other hand would imagine creating some kind of hexagonal grids from it melted into a some king of a elastic material. Well I assume it is as fragile as as a diamond - tough does not mean strong you know! This would be interesting as micro meteorites ore some debree in space will not pierce or scratch the craft while out in the space :) Weird way of thinking? Well yea - I want to be in space someday so Ill try to progress it as much as I can :)
There is so much more I would like to comment, but soo little time - so thats it for today - hopefully tomorrow is a better day.
technorati tags:Thunderbird, Lightning, HP, printer, security, trust, valve, hacked, diamond, space
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The every year worst top 20 is out. The number 1. is AOL - not my preferred choice as I don't live in USA, so my vote went to the number 8 (Microsoft Windows Vista). Well at least I tried :)
I have lived through most of the products, so heres some of my comments: the number 2 was not so bad - SE was worse.
How could they put together iTunes WMP, Zune and Napster - I don't get the logic. Sure all they use DRM, BUT there is a difference - Apple is dropping it, Zune is just a virus with its infective DRM and WMP is just not worth to mentioning. Sure DRM is the common bad factor in all of them, but still - they are not comparable. Besides Apple is correcting its mistake!
Never used the nr. 4. security products... Penguin rules! :D No comment on nr. 5.
And the next contestant is - Bonzy Buddy :) Anyone remember the green/yellow/purple helper screaming and wanting attention? Thats right its the ultra functional, resource hungry, nothing doing monkey. At the beginning it had at least 1 cool feature - H&H language synthesis engine and a api to make it scriptable - it was fun for a while. But as usual nothing good will last forever. Soon after MS integrated its functionality the the Clippy (well it became famous with Bonzy at least) and some time after that they started to bundle adware with the installer and as usual it was followed with spyware. Bye bye monkey (wave)!
Next stop MySpace - It matured too fast and so started the scamming, viruses and spyware - never got into it really.
Ok, we covered the Vista part - it just isn't worth the money, time and resources.
The next one is is kinda out of place (or should I say out of time). I would say it is the only good thing MS has ever done properly (if someone could kill the BITS). Windows Update isn't so bad thing (well it right now, but it started with Windows XP - 2004 or 2005). Well it started with WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) - Microsoft just got greedy and lost around 10% of its share with it in the enterprise world (Good luck with Vista - hi hi hi...).
I never had a quarrel with Apple QuickTime under windows - tho Now I have under linux, so in conclusion it never worked as needed!
Office 97 was usable (even tho it crashed in the places where you hadn't done a save and when restarting it erase the changes from an ancient backup).
Hmm, the next on is a pickle - Adobe (Formerly known as Macromedia) Flash. It got its bad name form flash advertising, but around 4..5 years ago some people created fantastic flash based sites. So I have no quarrel with the technology but I have with how its been used. Well thats up to today when Adobe joined the DRM market. I hope they wake up soon like Apple did - otherwise they will start to fade and waiting MS Silverlight to drop DRM and to be ported to linux will take ages, so life will get pretty interesting...
Next on the platter is AIM - as usually its a big corporation and should be spliced up to smaller peaces (in my opinion) too much power is never healthy... Also forcing Gaim to change its name to (what the **** was the new name?) Oh... Yeah... Pidgin... I feel sorry for the person who thought up that name. I understand the need for a not yet trademarked name but come one... I hope that name is not final as (If i remember right) that means pretty nasty thing in one language!
Windows (Live!!!) Messenger is almost totally unusable (PS! I didn't mention linux here!). None of my friends who use Messenger use the Live version. After Bill left the MS the design department has gotten free hands to redesign everything and as usually they tried to do the best, BUT as usually they managed to develop the worst. Go figure... I Have never used YIM nor PS3 so I leave them alone.
E-Bay - I cant say I have anything against them. They run a sleek operation, BUT as usually the greed of the government gets the worst out of them. Online taxing is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard of - basically its outrageous, people have bought the products once and now if they want to sell them again the government wants more money out of them. Why don't they go catch some Al-Qaeda or Bin-Laden or terrorist or something useful, not harass the simple people!
Now we get to a nice looking product :) Apple Pro Mouse - looks cool, but is totally useless (buttons anyone?). Never used plaxo, Outlook, Power Mac, Harmonium, Quicken, Harmony (well, I have played around a little with it but still - looks nice but programming is pain!).
This should be mandatory to every manufacturer on how NOT to do things!
That about it for todays technology bashing - see You all soon :)
technorati tags:Top, Annoing, technology, Hardware, Software, products,Silverlight
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A lot of people are working on creating new technologies that will save the planet but they do it from their point of view. The problem with the new technology is that it takes time, to develop, time to mature, time to market and time to be adopted. Usually the better the technology is the longer it will take to develop and the higher are the costs to deploy, the higher will be the price and at the end run it will be adopted very slowly. So basically the development will kill the progress or an simpler alternative will be found.
I have read about several claims of modified car computer firmwares that save fuel consumption, lower exhaust gases, give more horsepower and some more tweaks. So far they were created by enthusiasts wanting to boost the power of their car and the high mileage and lowered fuel consumption was just a bonus. Well it seems they were partially right - a Dutch scientist has created crude way of saving the planet. The idea in it self is to switch off the generator when it is not needed. I would argue that it is not sufficient to save the planet, but it could compensate for some pollution. The original story is here. I would make a little alteration to this tweak - instead of switching the generator totally off I would just disconnect the battery charging circuit. Usually car generators utilize electrically enhanced magnets witch draw energy from the battery/generator it self. It wont be as effective as running the car electronics from battery, but in the log run it will save the battery itself. Constant charging/discharging the battery will kill it in around 2..6 months thanks to high cycle count. I would suggest starting to charge the battery 2 minutes after the engine has started, charge it to the full capacity and turn off the generator for the next 30..60 minutes and check the battery conditions after that if it need another recharging (this would have to integrate a temperature gradient tho - on cold weather the charging can take a lot more time). The voltage regulation could be replaced by a capacitor circuit to regulate voltage fluctuations.
There are around 1 billion cars out there and this technology could be applied to around 50..75% of them. When the current EU regulation is saying that the current norm is 160g/km CO2 - assuming that each car drives 10 000 km/year we get that each car produces 1600 kg/year and now all cars together we produce 1.6 billion tons of CO2. So what can the 1..5% CO2 cutoff give us? Well... we get at 50% implementation 8...40 million tons less and at 75% 12...60 million tons of less CO2 pollution. It wont save the planet but it helps a bit - progress is needed, but it will give few more years to develop better technology...
technorati tags:Save, the, planet, CO2, car, software, patch
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