I think Marilyn Manson's music is shit but I respect him deeply for saying this

Marilyn Manson's commentary for Rolling Stone after Columbine is just as relevant for today's shooting in Connecticut

I love SemiAccurate

Microsoft could not buy Nokia outright, the EU would have rightfully laughed that out the door. Instead they put Elop in place and had him promote a ‘strategy’ that had no chance of succeeding. Once Nokia had burned all the bridges that could have saved it, most of the remaining pieces would be unpalatable to any potential buyer.

Read more here

I'm obviously biased, because they're saying exactly what I've been thinking, except more eloquently and with greater exposition. There really feels like a world of doublespeak these days in the tech press. You feel like you're reading marketing shill half the time and wonder why its being passed off as content. The troubling thing is that, just like in politics, this new talk technique of speaking non-truth into existence seems to be working (in everything but actual sales numbers). People begin to lose their will to hold on to their own ideas and start spouting worthless contrived phrases.

It seems to work, but at what cost? All this shouting down of dissent and the torrent of manufactured PR-talk to drown out originality might just cost humanity its humanity in the long run. It would be sad if the dystopian Orwellian world came to be not because of a political struggle, but to shift some worthless silicon toys off the shelves.

Binaries and Service Level Agreements

Technology has always had an obsession with numbers, especially in the way that its marketed. This spawned the megapixel race, where camera manufacturers pointlessly one-upped each other by cramming more and more pixels into ever tinier sensors, selling you on more while giving you less.

The same story played itself out in the CPU frequency race of the early 2000's, with Intel and AMD pushing their chips to untenably high megahertz and gigahertz until AMD bowed out and attempted to change the message. It didn't work out so well for them. The obsession with marketing-driven numbers may well be justified.

It seems that even when it comes to services, this obsession still remains. Perhaps because nobody really knows what technology really does behind the scenes and numbers become the only way to quantify what something technical actually means for them. Tech Support is sold on something called 'Service Level Agreements', SLA in short. This conveniently allows marketing to attach yet another number, this time with increasingly insignificant decimal places tagged on behind. 99.9% up time guaranteed! We'll throw in another 0.09% if you pony up another couple of thousand!

What the numbers really don't tell you is that percentages rarely reflect satisfaction. If you had a service that really sucked, you would still hate it even if it were available to you 99.99% of the time. If I sold you a shitty mattress and told you it would stay on your bedframe nearly all the time, it wouldn't make sleeping in it any more comfortable. You can get a dial-up modem to stay online for months, even years at a time, but all you'd see on the internet would be boring old text (like you find here).

SLA is a binary issue. Its either up or its down. Being up is good, to be sure, but it really only reflects a part in the larger whole of user experience. Binary systems don't work well with the entire spectrum between excellent and terrible.

+1 useless inventions list

Velcro Jenga

DNS. Broken Metaphors

Every time I approach a new topic in in technology, I try to relate it back to some other allegorical metaphor in the physical world. Its usually a great way to learn the basic concepts of an idea, even if the real thing and the metaphor don't fit quite right.

Some examples: when learning about electricity, I connected the basic ideas of it to that of water. For electricity we have voltages, for water we have pressure; electric currents - water flow rates, etc.

When I was first learning about DNS, I thought of using phone directories as a metaphor to how DNS works. It was alright for a while, and seemed like a pretty good fit, considering both systems were for matching names to numbers.

How quickly that metaphor fails though. DNS is like the phone directory compiled by a serial-murdering brain-rapist. If the phone book is like a charming old guitar, DNS is like a Moog hooked up to the soundbank from another galaxy.

So this was posted to reddit

Quoted:
...and then there was 5.30pm this evening when [guy giving lecture] rolls up and says "Where do I plug in my iPad, I presume you've got a lead? Oh, and which computer is [redacted] on?"

...and then I handed over the printed copy of the above email exchange that I had brought with me just for such an eventuality.

Original Link: ...and then I went home.

It looks like the irony was completely lost on the poster and commenters in this reddit thread. Cue cliche Einstein quote about the definition of insanity.

Where does the original poster get off on calling someone a drone when his own email replies read like they spewed forth from a primitive chat bot?

Its worse that the commenters, many of them in tech support positions themselves, found his responses entirely acceptable, admirable even.

Little wonder that most people view tech as an incomprehensible mess, guarded by barely humanoid troll-jerks

Welcome to My Blog

This is the obligatory first post. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with this space yet. Hopefully it'll have a word or two that's interesting to somebody out there