Month: July 2010

Set the Way Back Machine For Way Back

OK this is kind of awesome in a nostalgic sort of way. Access who purchased PalmSource which was the spun off software side of Palm (seriously if you ever want to read a book on the most convoluted company history ever Piloting Palm is a good read) has release an Android input system that uses the old Graffiti system from original Palm PDAs.

I installed it and it’s kind of fun although still slower than the Evo 4G’s built in keyboard. Surprisingly I still remember most of the Graffiti strokes. Now that I think about it that shouldn’t be very surprising since I used it a lot throughout college (I wrote entire speeches for class on my PDAs because I didn’t often lug around a laptop).

What to Do if You’re Company is Failing

Sue somebody! Sharp as a Marble let us know that the good guys over at The Armed Citizen are being sued by a Las Vegas newspaper for “willfully copying content.” Translated into laymen terms that means The Armed Citizen blog reported news by sourcing a newspaper who is failing to make money and has no other business plan in place.

The main kicker here though is the fact the newspaper sued several blogs before even contacting them. Well I’m all for contacting people so here’s how to contact the Las Vegas Review Journal:

Las Vegas Review-Journal
1111 W. Bonanza Road
P.O. Box 70
Las Vegas, NV 89125

Main phone number:
702-383-0211

Newspaper office number:
702-383-0264

Let them know hos much you appreciate their news business strategy. Personally I recommend they put up a pay wall. That way us dirty bloggers can’t use their content and they’ll lose enough money as to fall into irrelevancy. Two birds meet one stone.

That’s a Lot of Wasted Money

Snowflakes in Hell points out that everybody’s favorite punching bag, the Violence Policy Center, is a pretty sweet gig to be in charge of. For doing no real work you can nab a six-digit salary:

On their 2008 tax return, of the approximately 890,000 dollars VPC took in, they spent 513,738 on salaries and benefits for employees, including a compensation package of 145,120 each for Sugarmann and Rand.

And they’ve done nothing besides some Google searches they claim are research. Damn that’s a fine little scam they have going there.

When a Problem Isn’t a Problem

Google’s been getting some flak for recording MAC addresses and unencrypted data from unsecured wireless access points while cruising around in their little street view cars. Several European countries have blown this completely out of proportion as have 37 states in this country.

Google has been very forthcoming with information including the fact that they were running Kismet in their vehicles. Kismet was being used to record the MAC addresses of wireless access points which were than tagged with GPS coordinates. The idea behind this is pretty simple; each access point has a unique MAC address. If you know the location of these wireless access points you can determine your location through Wi-Fi instead of having to rely on aGPS. The main advantage is you can have location based services with devices that have Wi-Fi cards but no GPS (for instance most laptops). By default Kismet saves all unencrypted data so Google obtaining this information isn’t so much nefarious as just forgetting to change the default settings.

Truth be told very little information is going to be gleamed from this data because the speed at which they were driving around put them in and out of range of most access points pretty quickly. Of course there is another thing to note here.

If you have an unsecured wireless access point and somebody is grabbing your data it’s your fault. Wireless data is broadcast out for all to hear. Treat it like yelling, if you and your significant other get into a yelling argument you can’t blame your neighbors for hearing what you two were screaming at each other. Wireless data is the same way. If your wireless signal enters my property then I have every right to eavesdrop on it. If you don’t want me to be able to do this you need to encrypt the data or shield your house well enough where your wireless signal isn’t entering my property (or in Google’s case public property where there is no expectation of privacy).

Instead of wasting time with this case I’d love to see these State Attorney’s deal with some real issues.

Finger Pointing at It’s Finest

Let’s say you’re a multi-billion dollar technology company who puts out a phone almost everybody seems to want. Now let’s say you release a new phone which has a slight problem, it drops calls when being held in a user’s left hand. What do you do? Well you could recall the phone or offer an in-store hardware fix.

Or if you’re Apple you could point the finger at everybody else and claim you’re phone is still good because everybody has similar issues. I guess I do like one thing about that page, it shows the Jesus Phone isn’t actually better than other phones on the market. Apple zealots always claim Apple makes hardware that’s far better than the competition but in actuality that’s just a total pile of shit (yes they make nice hardware, but so do many other companies).

Ireland Wising Up

It appears Ireland is wising up:

THE new home defence bill has shifted the balance of rights back to the house owner “where it should always have been”, say gardaí.

The Association of Garda Sergeants (AGSI) and Inspectors also said it was ridiculous to suggest the bill provided a “have-a-go charter” to homeowners and said the current situation, which legally demands a house owner retreat from an intruder, was “intolerable”.

Assuming a criminal’s life is worth less than the rightful owner of a home? That’s just crazy! Now people are going to shoot their friends when they come over! It’ll be blood in the streets! Death will be everywhere! Dogs and cats will be sleeping together! At least that’s what the anti-gunners are going to say about this.

It’s nice to see Ireland is looking at making criminals a lower form of life than law-abiding citizens. If only Britain would figured that out.

Cue the Sad Trombone

Remember that pay wall Rupert Murdoch is tossing up on all the “news” sites he owns? Remember all that bitching about freeloading Internet users no longer getting a free lunch? Remember how this was going to monetize the news industry and turn a profit? Well not so much. Via Dvorak Uncensored it appears as though not many people are subscribing to the London Time’s website:

After a month of forced free registrations and two weeks of a full paywall, Dan Sabbagh at Beehivecity.com says these are the numbers:

Apparently, the 15,000 paid subscriptions figure is considered “disappointing.”

That may sound like a lot but really isn’t not enough to pay for anything:

At 2 pounds a week, the average online subscriber would produce 100 pounds of revenue a year. 150,000 of them would produce 15 million pounds of revenue.

15 million pounds of revenue would be nice for a company used to living on, say, $5 million of revenue. But it wouldn’t even begin to offset the cost of the Times’ huge newsroom.

Meanwhile, what has the new paywall done to online traffic? So far, it has dropped by two-thirds. That, apparently, is actually better than expected. One editor feared it would collapse by 90%.

So what did Murdoch’s pay wall accomplish? A complete obliteration of online traffic and probably destroyed any chance of making a reason for advertisers to pay for in-site ads. Nice job dumb ass. I hope getting hit with the clue stick hurt.

It’s practically impossible to provide a free service and later turn it into a pay service. Almost everybody who has attempted to do as such has failed pretty miserably. The other thing to remember is the fact it’s very difficult to get customers to pay for a service that is provided free elsewhere (and even more difficult when those free sources are better than the pricey one).

Criminals Lie

A popular concept that seems to be completely ignored most of the time is the fact that criminals are dishonest and may in fact lie to you. What am I getting at here? Well a post over at Walls of the City brought up a case of a couple who was robbed by two thugs posing as police officers:

But Monday night, police cars surrounded a Woodycrest Avenue home. Earlier, at about midnight, two men yelling “police” pounded on the door, the family said. They were let inside.

The family said the two men wanted two things: drugs and guns.

The family said the whole thing lasted 10 or 15 minutes. They said they have every reason to believe the two crooks were, in fact, police.

OK we’re going to start today’s lesson in Gulliblity 101. Just because somebody says they are something doesn’t mean they actually are that thing. For instance when I was in college and attending college parties I would make up all sorts of stories about who I was and what I did to people I didn’t know. I wasn’t trying to impress them, instead I liked to amuse myself by seeing how outrageous of a story I had to make before the person I was conversing with finally caught on I was bullshitting them. Believe me I could get pretty far with some people. Did you know I’m actually a gun runner who is an exile from the former Soviet Union? Well I had two people believing that one night.

The point is people lie and we’re pre-programmer to assume that’s not the case. This of course presents a predicament. Let’s say somebody is pounding on your door yelling “police” what should you do? After all if you don’t answer the door and they are actually police officers you’re in for a world of hurt when they decide to bust in the door. On the other hand if they aren’t police you’re letting criminals into your home which is one layer of your defense strategy down the tubes already.

And the answer is… dial 911. This is advice usually given in driver’s ed to women who see a police car with lights on behind them while they’re cruising down a deserted road in the country at 0300. Real police call in any actions they’re taking which means if they are going to investigate your home somebody at the station knows about it. If people are at your door claiming to be police you should dial 911 and ask if the people at your door are actually police. If they’re not real police officers will be dispatched to come to your door.

If the people at the door actually are police then you can open the door and kindly inform them that they may no enter unless they have a warrant.