Is the Segway still cool? I don’t know, I tried one and liked it, but I think I might like this even better.
[Hat tip: Gizmodo]
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Category: Around The Web
Linkage I run across
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White Glove Tracking
The most bizarre website you will ever encounter. White Glove Tracking needs your help to isolate the white glove in Michael Jackson’s performance of Billy Jean. Every frame. This would have been an ideal project for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
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Fark Redesign
Fark is one of those websites that is was stuck in the past. It’s now been redesigned in a “Web 2.0” scheme. I’ve got mixed feelings on this redesign:
- Not sure if it’s just extra load, but it’s a bit slow. They just added a banner that says “We’re working on the slow loading issue”.
- When you visit a link, it’s link color doesn’t change, making it hard to tell if it’s one you visited or not (sometimes I forget where we left off hours earlier).
- Rainbow navigation? Not really fond of the eye-bleeding nav, but I guess it could have some merit as color is easier to find than words. Chromatabs for Firefox tries to do the same thing, but for tabs
- The right two columns (nav/ads) are just ugly and awkward.
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April Fools 2007
Some of my favorites for this year:
- heise.de – Mozilla sues Microsoft over tabbed browsing.
- WebKit – Switching to Trident (IE)
- NASA – Americans Defeat Russians in First Space Quidditch Match.
- CNet – Dalai Lama exiled to Second Life. Among other great fake story titles.
- BBC – Sniff Screen Technology.
- Google TiSP – Broadband via Your Toilet.
- Gmail Paper – Your mail printed out.
- Woot.com – Random crap is $1,000,000.
- The Pirate Bay – Hosting secured in North Korea.
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Book Mapping
Matthew Gray over at Google came up with the idea of plotting places referenced in books on a map. It’s really an interesting thing to see. As he notes, you can see westward expansion by filtering by publication date. Not much is said about the books used, but I would assume it’s books out of copyright, and mainly western literature.
I wonder what it would look like from 1900-2000.
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Confessions?
I’ve seen a few of these types of blog posts before. This one being “7 Confessions of a Cingular Sales Rep“. Overall it’s a good read, but it has me wondering. Are these legitimate “confessions”? Or Lonelygirl15 reincarnated?
There was an underlying message in that confession: If you buy more, we’ll be nicer to you. So please buy accessories.
I’m not calling it a hoax, but I do have to admit I’m cautious when reading these. I’ve seen them on several sites before. Either way it’s worth a read, and likely mostly accurate. But I can’t help but wonder if they are really as genuine as they sound. Many legitimate organizations have fallen victims to hoaxes before.
Just remember: Not many things on the Internet are what they seem. All that is printed is not fact. The barrier to entry isn’t high.
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Junk in Preloads
The Lenovo Blogs are just fantastic examples of corporate blogging. A great example is this rather candid post on Junk in Preloads. There isn’t much that’s really “new” in the post, but the amount of honesty in it is somewhat refreshing. My favorite quote is simply:
Now let’s be honest. We load up this software because we receive money from the vendors to do so. You as a consumer are much more likely to buy the full or upgraded version of a program if you already have it preinstalled. This is worth real money to PC vendors. On the other hand, it works both ways. It is this revenue from the software that helps fuel the PC price war. You all directly benefit from this practice. Without it, PC prices would be more than a few dollars higher.
How many would expect a PC vendor to say something like that in the past? They also seem to be using Flickr.
Dell is now getting in on the action as well with it’s own blog.
Still no true Apple blog. People have become desperate enough for a blogging presence that even Apple’s age-old Hot News has been referred to as a blog a few times. Most recently in regards to Steve Jobs Thoughts on Music. One day…
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Browser Tax?
We all know Tax season is here (in the US). So don’t forget to file. We also know there is a Microsoft Tax (you know, the price of the pre-installed copy of Windows on your soon to be Linux PC), and it is possible to get it refunded. New this year is a browser tax, as seen on Digg.
Want to know how much you’ll be paying? There is a formula, but I’ve got a cheat-sheet to help you out. Simply find your browser/platform and look at the filing price. Click to see the full screen and get all pricing. I did this myself between 6:40 and 7:00 PM EST today. Took a little while to crop and get it all together. Yes they are real. No photoshopping done. Note that free filing is offered in certain cases and not in others (which I presume is the offering as part of the free filing program).
Want to get the biggest deduction on filing your taxes with TurboTax? Just look below for the best deal.
For more great financial tips keep an eye on this blog. Next time we’ll talk about how my 401(k) is also incompatible with my browser, and since I used the contact form to mention the bug, it now warns me on every visit.
I’d love to hear Intuit’s explanation of why they are serving different products to certain browsers, and why they are charing different prices in some cases. Amazon tried something like this based on user profiles a few years ago, and it caused some trouble. You can find some information on that by searching Google for amazon price fixing.
Is it legal to make the Free filing option less visible to some users? Hard to say. There is an agreement with the IRS in place that facilitates all that. Didn’t see much about promotion or hiding the offering.
Images in various browsers/platforms can be found below on this post.
Jeremy Zawodny has a great post about common JavaScript usage where he concludes it’s harmful. Whether you agree or not, you have to admit it’s a great blog post. Here comes another long blog post.
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40 Years For A Malware
A teacher could get 40 years for Malware (which IMHO is nothing more than a variation of “Virus”). That sounds like a harsh sentence.
Even more reason to scan your computer regularly, and keep anti-virus and anti-spyware definitions up to date, but 40 years? Yikes.
For anyone interested, Sunbelt’s Blog is fantastic, and I’ve blogged about it a few times. It has a great approach to explaining and demonstrating IT security in an easy to read, non-pushy manner. Not many places you will see that. Most focus on general tech, and don’t touch security. Security is a fascinating field.
During a quick email exchange with Sunbelt’s Alex Eckelberry he pointed me to this comment which gives a little more info. Expect more from Sunbelt’s Blog tomorrow on this.
Blogging in IT and software development in general is really quite impressive. Only a few years ago the concept of transparency and open communication on this scale was virtually non-existent. Now Alex blogged, commented about Preston Gralla’s poor research behind his post and got a reply. I then emailed Alex about an unrelated topic (choosing passwords in the WeeklyTechTips post), happened to mentioned this topic, and he pointed me to a comment of his on Preston Gralla’s blog.
I have a book on my shelf “How The Internet Works” (Fourth Edition), which I got for a school project back in High School (great book by the way). Would I have imagined the above chain of events when I got that book? Not in a million years. A few years ago this would have been a small article on a tech news site, and nothing more. Two people whose writing I read, going back and forth, and having a chance to contact one of them and get a reply a minute later is really remarkable by those standards. By today’s standards it’s somewhat more normal (though still appreciated).
The blogging phenomenon definitely made IT more transparent. I become more convinced of this on a daily basis.
By the way it looks like Mr. Gralla’s now up to “How The Internet Works Eighth Edition“. I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought it was a cool book.