Technology
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Dear Google: Please Stop Finishing My Sentences For Me
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 8, 2010 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010I personally find Google Instant more annoying than useful. But I have 786,240,000 seconds to kill.
When a friend of mine’s two year old son doesn’t like something, he uses an expression which I find handy. He says “I can’t like it“. That’s my reaction to Google Instant. As googletastically amazing as I’m obliged to say that it is – for fear of being perceived as a Luddite – it mostly just gets on my nerves. There are a number of reasons I’ll probably keep the feature disabled, but primary amongst them is the fact that it mimics one of my few pet peeves, which is when people try to finish my sentences for me. My thinking is far too erratic most of the time for people to ever get it right. I mean, it wouldn’t bother me if they did get it right, but they almost never do. And since Google’s results have become so blogjammed anyway, I feel like I’m just getting often mediocre results faster. Which I don’t find all that gratifying. One of Google’s biggest sell points is that since they’ve determined that it saves you 2-5 seconds per search, they can make the cute claim that “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second“. Personally, I have the time to waste. If I live to the age of 75, I have about 786,240,000 seconds left. And if I did 50 searches a day for the rest of my life, that would only be about 456,250 searches, which – with the cantankerously slow “old school” method, clocking in at around 9 seconds per search – would only take me about 4 million seconds. I’ll wait. For the record, I have other objections that have to do with tools that control us rather than the other way around. A few of them are summarized nicely in this piece, which points out not only how much control the feature gives Google over word usage, but how the new feature affects how ads are displayed. I think Google Instant is more about creating Buzz than a good user experience. What about you? By the way. Thanks for not interrupting. Read the rest of this entry »
Captcha’d Forever
[ Comments Off ]Posted on September 4, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, September 4th, 2010The best use for those annoying squiggly log-in words called Captcha’s? COMICS!
I’ve often joked that the web is an excellent reflection of humanity and the human psyche. This is reflected in the fact that most internet traffic is generated by sex, trying to meet someone who likes you, or getting the free stuff you think you deserve. In the broader view – as often happens in the real world – the evolution of the web went something like this: some smart clever people create something cool, less smart people come along and join in, everybody has fun for a while, and then their stupider, greedier, eviler friends show up and eff it all up. This pattern is probably why a lot of humanity’s energy seems to be devoted to protecting itself. Like building thousands of nuclear bombs to make sure no-one uses them, or destroying your freedom to protect it. On the web, this behavior is why we have so many tools for proving you’re human, i.e., the many variations of the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart). You know, those squiggly words you can’t read with your blurred vision and splitting headache the morning after a hard night of partying, when you’re trying to check your finances online to see if you burned your bank account in the last few hours of the night, the ones you don’t remember after buying the entire strip bar a round to prove to your favorite lap dancer that you’re loaded. It’s amusing that with Captchas we’re just protecting all the “good” web applications (useful web services) we write from “bad” web applications (spambots) we write. Typical human acts of futility. In any case, in spite of their assumed usefulness, Captchas have been cracked in a number of ways. Or have they? Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com points out some interesting fallacies in this article, and claims he has a 99% bot-blocking rate with what he calls a “naive captcha”, which is simply a well-designed captcha image that never changes! If you don’t think conventional Captchas are good enough, there a some alternative methods like this math-based Captcha, which will not only keep out spambots, but probably everyone but Stephen Hawking or Richard Feynman as well. Other versions include solving a tic-tac-toe puzzle, or this one, based on pictures of cats and dogs, or this one, which requires you to solve hieroglyphics. And then of course, companies like Google or Microsoft will try to figure out ways to make or save money with them. Microsoft’s idea is to make you look at ads; Google uses Captchas to make you read the words their scanning technology can’t. Yup. Your obstacle to the content you want is Google’s free labor force. Probably the best use of Captchas I’ve run across though is using them for making comics. This Something Awful forum may have started it, but there are amusing collections here and here. Some images may be NSFW. My quick stab at it is below. Read the rest of this entry »
I Spy Something Red White & Blue
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 28, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, August 28th, 2010Why spying on your fellow Americans is your duty as a patriot, and how to do it.
For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me until the other day that because the Bush administration made spying on citizens part of the American Way (an idea that in spite of all his talk of change, Obama wholeheartedly supports ), we’re actually obligated to spy on each other to show our patriotism. As always, if you want to know how to spy, there’s a retarded eHow article on the topic. I hope the author of “How to Use a Webcam to Spy on People” causes the content farm Demand Media to get their pants sued off; before you write a piece like that, you might want to ponder the legality of what you’re suggesting. That issue doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone though (including us); there are hundreds of articles like this. Although we’d hasten to point out that the content farm hack that wrote How to spy on people for Hubpages.com also authored Tips on how to get a girl to go out with you and How to invest in the nigerian stock market. So frankly, you might just improvise. There are plenty of tools available, so the only limits on what you can do these days would be a result of your own lack of moral decrepitude or ingenuity. In light of the legal decision handed down the other day that allows government agents to sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car, and keep track of everywhere you go, why not just do it yourself with an Always Find Mini Realtime Covert Vehicle Tracker
Facebook Like Button Alternatives
[ 7 Comments ]Posted on August 14, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, August 14th, 2010I really hope you like this. Because if you don’t, I’m assuming you hate it.
Don’t you love the Like button? No longer must we pause, actually think about something and articulate a response; we can either just “like” it or not. Which sort of raises the question: if you don’t click the “Like” button, doesn’t that mean that you don’t like something? I mean, when life is distilled down to a binary set of responses, and you don’t engage in the simple action of clicking a little “Like” button, shouldn’t your inaction be perceived as an active dislike? I’m going to assume so from now on, and be forced to ask: WHY DO YOU HATE ME SO MUCH??? The fact is that although I personally find it frustrating that on Facebook I can only “Like” something or not, or be someone’s “Friend” or not, Facebook will probably always thrive on this kind of binary decision making process. But that won’t stop some of us from pondering the possibilities. Mark Cuban for instance, thinks the Like button would benefit from some color coding. And a BoingBoing.net reader has proposed a “meh” button. So, never wanting to miss a ride on the meme wagon, we’ve come up with a few of our own. See below. And remember: if you don’t “Like” this article, we’ll be assuming you hate it. Read the rest of this entry »
Top 10 Things That We Don’t Need Top 10 Lists Of
[ 5 Comments ]Posted on August 11, 2010 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010We’re generating more information every two days than we did in all of human history prior to 2003. Unfortunately almost all of it is YouTube clips, stupid top ten lists, infographics, and crap content created by underpaid hacks writing linkbait for content farms to generate AdSense revenue.
You may have read the other day that although it took all of human history up until 2003 to generate five exabytes of information, that much is now created every two days. I can tell you where all that data resides. It’s comprised mainly of YouTube clips of teenage boys igniting their farts, self-referential personal blog posts about why the blogger hasn’t blogged for a while, incomprehensible infographics, overwrought and not-very-funny flowcharts, and useless top ten lists of things that don’t warrant top ten lists. Below is our contribution to this steaming heap of useless data that guarantees that of the 2646 web pages you view this month (infographic here), approximately 2645 of them will be of no lasting value to the human race. Read the rest of this entry »