system.reflecti0n.net

Feedburner.com has taken it unto themselves to suggest: "My Feeds are guilty of some buzzword bingo"

What the Hell Does That Mean?

...Could they be trying to tell me something? Do they feel my headlines are rife with popular keywords and I'm not delivering on the promise raised by those headlines?

It's a mystery to me because the Feedburner help centre does not suggest what they're implying by "buzzword bingo". No mention of the phrase in their forums either. I am left to reach my own conclusions, but I'm not the only one who's noticed, either. Is it ironic that the way Feedburner presents "My Feeds are guilty of some buzzword bingo" is guilty of the very thing it says I'm guilty of because they offer no insight into the drawing of this conclusion?

For the Peons Like Me, We Live and Die by the Rank of a Page

I've been involved in the running of several websites and I know from looking out there that the bulk of Internet content is visible only by their search engine rankings. Seriously, RSS is a great way towards democratizing web content, but it's got a long way to go before it's on everybody's desktop or home-page.

A teensy little site like this has no chance if a service like Feedburner arbitrarily devalues my site, claiming I'm somehow "guilty" of screwing with my page ranking. I call it "arbitrary" because they don't explain how they could select a comment like that. I'm even questioning already if a post like this is somehow sullied now that I've used "search engine ranking". Am I digging a hole with Feedburner as a shovel?

Relax!

Chances are, these comments are just there to yank my chain. Some other web developer out there thinks they have a sense of humour. If that were the case, then the guy who came up with this random comment deserves a poke in the eye. Uh, wait. That's not "relaxing". The hell with that, I'll relax when this post is done.

There, after a page refresh I'm told: "My Feeds can’t believe it’s dark at 4 o’clock". Seems like I'm not the only one with stupid things to say.

Tags: web design, webmaster tools, feedburner

Anyone who actually uses broadband Internet damn well knows they don't really get the advertised speed. I actually feel lucky, on large files hosted on popular sites, I get approximately 80% of my advertised speed. On the other hand, I've provided tech support for several businesses in the GTA and know that most broadband falls really short of their sales pitch, many of my clients in the various locations I've been to see only 20-60% of the speed they purchased-- and 60% is on a good day. Like the fine print says, they're only providing you "up to" the advertised speed. And "up to" in most cases really means "a lot less than"!

They Sold Me 5Mbps, Now They're Saying "Hurry Up and Wait"?

In a word: YES!

Luckily for them, the average customer support telephone representative can bamboozle you with a number of "truthy" explanations for why you get so much less than what you pay for: "We're doing upgrades in your area", "Our network is experiencing high traffic volume at the moment", "I've tested your modem and everything appears fine". Bah.

So, Seriously... What Am I Paying This For?!

Exactly right. What are you paying this much for? Well, you're not going to like it, but you're the proof to the old proverb "a fool and his money-- are easily parted". So seriously, stop paying so much! The math is simple. When you're only getting 50% of the advertised speed, then buying 1.5Mbps broadband (a loss of 0.75Mbps) is less of a rip-off than buying 10Mbps broadband (a loss of 5Mbps). You're losing six to seven times more speed by paying for the "top tier" broadband!

So the answer is go for the lower tier service and spend your money somewhere else. Really, you can wait a few minutes more to download that album from the iTunes store. You'll still have the whole album in less time than it takes to drive to the local HMV, purchase, drive back and rip the CD. Kids, the best part of using a computer isn't how fast it goes. With a computer you can queue up all the tedious tasks into one long boring "to do" list and let the computer work through that queue, freeing you to do something better with your time like reading a book or doing an extra set in your weight training.

When We All Pay Less, Then The Corporations Will Have To Change

Hey, you hit them in their bottom-line, the fat-cats are going to sit up and take notice.

Then it's time for the broadband package you really want: from day-to-day, you pick the maximum speed you want, and pay accordingly. When you throttle your broadband to a low-speed setting like to "Email and Light Surfing" for the first 20 days of the month, you pay the "Email and Light Surfing" price, prorated to a percentage of a monthly price for 20 of 30 days. Then when you throttle up your broadband to "I'm Downloading Encyclopedia Britannica via BitTorrent" for the next 4 days, you pay a prorated "Full Speed" price instead. All this gets itemized on your monthly statement so you know exactly what you're paying for. All this would be managed by logging onto a customer service portal where you select from one of several throttle settings.

Sure, the ISPs can change you extortionist rates for the full speed/un-throttled setting, but you don't have to use it unless you have a need to fulfill. Most of the time, you can settle back to some affordable setting that isn't extortionist. Charging high, high rates for the full speed would happen since the ISPs can't provide the full speed to all their clients at once anyway. ISPs would be discouraging customers from heedlessly taxing the network... as well as parting the remaining fools from their money.

Tags: internet, broadband, isp

Just one of those days. You know, you hear a Cheap Trick song on TV and you Google the lyrics just to make sure you're not losing it, then you find a website with a byline like this:

You know its a good one when you start thinking up reasons to use the phrase in casual conversation. I hope Mr. McMahon is making good use of that and hands it out on business cards-- I would.

Tags: funny, blogging, motivator

Microsoft gets bashed a lot (no! really?). Yes, of course no secret. If you frequent the right corners of the web, there is simply nothing that Microsoft gets right, ever, ever, ever.

But, here they still are. NY Times on the weekend had a graph showing Mricosoft's market cap is still somewhat double that of Google (a golden child to the "anything-but-M$" crowd). So they're not doing bad... although the prevailing opinion is they're not just bad, they're terrible!

So what keeps them going? Momentum? 70,000 employees? A jillion dollars in the bank? Yeah, probably a mix of a bunch of reasons.

But what does Open Source have?

Surely a cloud or two of bad public opinion is going to pass over the Open Source camp someday. Could it survive?

I guess the difference lies in Open Source is more like an anthill. You'll never destroy every last ant. Open source is the result of many many coordinated pieces so an anthill like a Linux distro would be the result of hundreds of lesser Open Source products to make one significant thing. But if you push over one Linux distro, not only are there plenty more distros still left standing, none of the ants in the anthill would necessarily be disturbed, because unlike real ants they didn't exist to prop up one distro over another. These ants are just moving from one anthill to another. As distros come and go, the ants' route merely changes and they never have to stop moving.

So certainly the free-roaming and independent parts of Open Source would make it just as tough, and just as futile, to destroy as Microsoft is today.

So Microsoft is Forever?

Nope. No corporation lasts forever. If we stopped to look at the statistics, I'd bet most corporations don't outlive their founders by very long, if at all. But that's only a hunch. Microsoft will go the way of Amalgamated Opera Hat Company and United Hay Holdings someday. What will do it in is another question, insolvency, buyout, the environment... who's to know.

Pop the Cork! Open Source FTW!

Well I wouldn't be so sure about that either, maybe today's Open Source philosophy is tomorrow's phrenology. You know, something that was popular once, then everyone moves on to other ideas.

I suppose that's a bit difficult to swallow, but you know fifty year's ago you'd have believed it reasonable that Freudian analysis had all the answers we needed!

Yeah, Open Source could survive things that Microsoft won't, in ways that Microsoft can't. But a corporation isn't going to get supplanted by a newer more modern philosophy. Both Microsoft and Open Source will always be at risk, for different reasons.

Tags: open source, microsoft, press

Nobel Laureate Says The Internet Makes Us Dumb, We Say: Meh

It takes me seven days to read a 300-page novel.

It takes me seventy seconds to get through most blog postings.

When Impressions Last

Seven days after reading the novel, I can still describe the plot. Even after reading yet another 300-page novel. I can still tell you my favourite parts of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance and it's been nearly ten years since I read that.

Seven days after reading a blog, I can't tell you what the topic is. (I probably passed by another 2000 pages of information along the way too. I don't even remember how much I forgot about something I saw on the Internet, even when I think I remember it!)

Books are steak.

Tasty and nourishing. Every book I finish makes me stronger.

Blogs are sugar-free chewing gum.

The flavour's gone, you spit it out get out the next piece.

Now I'm Hungry, Make Your Point FAST!

How could I replace steak with chewing gum? The Internet can never replace literature because that's not what it's meant to do and it never tried to.

OTOH, the Internet is still valuable, but not like literature. My copy of Crime and Punishment isn't going to update itself every 60 seconds. If anything, I value the Internet less because there's so damn much of it that its value is spread so thin (re: this blog post). As a whole, Internet is a victim of its own success.

It has been proven from time to time that reading is second only to actually having a real experience. Sure, much of the Internet is reading, but I don't need to or want to turn off the TV when the Internet is on. I never leave the TV on when I'm reading a book. If I didn't, I'd be pissed I wasn't getting the full effect of the novel.

So I would agree that something so different from book-reading, as the Internet is, if it were to outright replace novels and biographies and whatnot I would have to say that's not a good thing either. Good for Doris Lessing. We'd never survive on chewing gum alone.

Tags: internet