A great post on Object-Oriented Javascript.
Monthly Archive for May, 2006
Press Release: IT Center offers free tech support. “Free tech support” being defined as, one free hour of support.
Sounds like a great marketing move. Sure, they might be overwhelmed, temporarily, with people who decide to take advantage of the free hour; but it gives them a chance to reel in a lot of potential return clients, if that hour is effective.
From the press release:
The IT Consulting Center has been in operation for 6 months and has met every time specific project goal to date.
Everyone likes “free”, but for me, that was the best line. Tom Peters likes to say that you ARE your list of recent projects. That is, if I can’t tell you what I done, and how well I’ve done it, lately — I really don’t have much to tell you about my professional abilities. Now, “on time” is not everything — but it’s a lot.
More power to them.
I just got an invite to the eBible.com Beta. I’ve only used it marginally so far, but it looks like a really handy tool… that is, if you’re likely to be looking for information in the Bible online.
My sole invite is spoken for, but if this sounds interesting, make sure to sign up on their waiting list.
Architect of New War on the West details the writings and activities of the now captured Islamist Mustafa Setmariam Nasar.
A couple snippets:
… Nasar’s masterwork, a 1,600-page volume titled “The Call for a Global Islamic Resistance,” has been circulating on Web sites for 18 months.
…
After the Sept. 11 hijackings, Nasar praised the attacks. But he said a better plan would have been to load the hijacked airplanes with weapons of mass destruction.
“Let the American people — those who voted for killing, destruction, the looting of other nations’ wealth, megalomania and the desire to control others — be contaminated with radiation,” he wrote.
Oh wait… but only cowards, only Right-wing maniacs with an agenda think we’re at war, right?
The headline Dell plans to open two retail stores is a little misleading; if you read just a little bit into it, it is apparent that these will be more of a place to see and touch a Dell, and then (hopefully, for Dell) make a purchase. The delivery would still be direct from the manufacturer to the consumer.
That being the case, the only loss will be whatever they’ll need to pay for the retail space, and the staff to run it — but I assume they have done the math and expect increased sales to compensate for that.
It’s not too surprising to hear it; I passed a Dell kiosk in the mall just the other day. A store space would be the same idea, just a little more space and more staff.
I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but they’re in business, and I’m not, so I guess we’ll see. ;-)
Every so often it’s good to remind oneself what the polar opposite thinks. Only cowards think we’re at war seems to be a good example.
I’m not going to waste space on analysis, as the whole article is staggeringly absurd, and speaks for itself anyways; a reader will most likely either already agree, or be automatically repulsed. I would suggest that comparing 9/11 to a “suckerpunch” is a ridiculous comparison, and is a slap in the face to anyone who lost a loved one that day.
Snap is an interesting new(ish?) search engine. I don’t see it replacing Google as my search tool, but I can see myself using it again; I thought it had a very innovative interface. Check it out.
While Akismet has done (and is doing) a stellar job at catching comment spam (of which there is far more than one might expect — I would estimate that Akismet is now catching a few hundred spam-comments on this site every few days), it doesn’t extend to catching trackback spam.
Trackback spam seems to be a fairly new thing — I’ve only noticed it on my own site in the past week or so, and it was getting progressively worse, so I temporarily turned Trackbacks off until I find a solution.
If this makes little sense, here’s Trackbacks, and Trackback spam, in a nutshell. A Trackback is basically a feature of many blogs which allow one to “link back” to a post on a different blog. For example, if Brian Glass or mr. Ben happen to have said something particularly interesting, I might comment on it here, and include a trackback link which would “notify” their sites that someone had linked to it. If their blogs have trackbacking activated, often a comment will appear under that specific blog-post — not a comment so much as a link that says, in effect, “Someone else wrote about this post on their own blog, here,” and there would be a link back to the post which I had made. Make sense so far?
What trackback spam is, is some other blog or website sending a trackback notification to your own blog, so that the link to their site will appear on your page; there is generally little or no text in a trackback, so often times keywords are used in the name that is being linked back to. For what nefarious purpose would someone do this? Since the trackback is unlikely to appear on the main page of your site, the only real reason I can see would be to generate “Google juice” — that is, the next time your site is crawled by a search-engine bot, the bot will eventually crawl to the various permalink pages, and will eventually count the link(s) back to the spammers site, thus possibly raising the sites ranking in various sorts of search indexes. If someone knows of other reasons, or wishes to correct my hypothesis here, please comment.
At any rate, it is an annoying and despicable practice. So far, as I mentioned, I dealt with it by simply turning trackbacks off, but I would prefer to allow legitimate trackbacks to work… so I may need to investigate the various plugins which seem to (already) be floating around to address this.
Microsoft is letting us know what we should all have to prepare for Vista — depending, of course, on whether we want to be Windows Vista Capable or Premium Ready.
If by “capable” (800MHz processor, 512MB RAM) they mean the same performance XP has on its minimum requirements (which I think are about 500MHz cpu, 128MB RAM) — then “capable” should probably read “barely able to hobble along.”
So, for most folks “Premium” will be the bar to aim at — if they decide to bother.
I’ll be honest; I’ve seen some of the screenshots of Vista with the new UI, and it does look pretty darn cool. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t — I could qualify it all day, but the bottom line is, it looks great.
For myself, though, I don’t think I’ll bother. I’m 90% decided that my next computer purchase will be a MacBook.
However, I’m sure hardware vendors are having preliminary celebrations (assuming Vista is ever released, of course ;-) )… after all, the whole thing does have an air of bleak inevitiability. What are the alternatives to Vista, for most people or businesses? Apple or Linux. Business is still, and will probably remain, violently allergic to Apple as a workstation — though I imagine it will pick up a greater share of the general consumer market as people opt for a Mac instead of a Vista upgrade.
Linux? I think it could be done, but so far I have not seen anything from any of the major Linux vendors which can compete for the general desktop market. I mean, realistically — for mom and pop, and Joe down at the garage. Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake has me hopeful… if only there was a good way to include mp3 and dvd codecs “out of the box…”
A TV station in Vegas has this report on Surviving Lousy Tech Support. Much of it is inspired by a recent Consumer Reports study… it seems that with the exception of Apple (which is interesting), tech support as provided by the manufacturer is rated as decidedly sub par.
One interesting tidbit:
Consumer Reports says independent tech services were far more effective at solving problems. In fact, 90-percent of the people who turned to an outside support system after tech support failed them, said they got their problem solved.
What? Do you mean that independent support professionals, whose very bread-and-butter depends on their reputation and word-of-mouth referrals, do a better job than the in-house tech departments who are just providing obligatory free support now that you’ve bought their computer?
Say it’s not so! ;-)
