Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Technology

  • Patent Troll

    I have no comment on this article other than that it is important. The system is way broken…

  • Kindle Fire Enhancements

    One of the reasons I went with the Kindle Fire over the Nook was the overall Amazon content network. That decision was recently rewarded with a big enhancement to the Fire. Not a new app or software upgrade.

    It got a ton of free content.

    My daughters can now watch entire seasons of Dora, Yo Gabba Gabba, Phineas and Ferb, and iCarly. Free, on demand.

    Nice one, Amazon…

  • Apple Fanboys

    I enjoy reading Jon Gruber and I read the post in question, so this is concerning.

    If the pre-eminent Apple blogger (not Fanboy) is spreading BS, we have a problem. He recently updated his post at the bottom apparently admitting that his post was full of crap, without actually admitting that his post was full of crap. Or changing the now clearly misleading title.

    Bad form, Mr. Gruber.

  • Amazon Drops Prices Again

    It’s good to be in the cloud, where prices regularly go down.

    This chart is rather amazing…

  • To Sync or not to Synch

    Those that know me, know that I can be a grammar nerd. Poor writing really annoys me, and these days poor writing can be found everywhere.

    So I was reading a Krugman blog this morning (and Krugman writes well, whether you like him or not) and he discussed economies moving in “synch”. I hate that spelling. It just looks wrong. I prefer “sync”. But I’d never looked up if either is actually correct. I have a colleague who consistently uses “synch” and it consistently bugs me but I can’t say anything unless I’m actually right.

    Alas, both appear to be acceptable. “Sync” seems generally preferred and slightly more used. Google has come down squarely on the side of “sync” (gmail’s spell checker considers “synch” incorrect). But many folks as nerdy as me make the case for “synch”. Argh.

    So I am left unsatisfied. Go ahead, synch away. But don’t get me started about double spacing…

  • Bad Astronomer

    An example of why I love to read/watch Phil Plait:

  • Private Cloud

    I’ve always argued it was an oxymoron, but Tim Bray has a better quote:

    This whole “Private Cloud” notion is a conspiracy between CIOs who think they can do a better job securing data than professional shared-services operators (uh huh), and systems vendors who love the idea of selling enterprises way more hardware than they’ll ever need at one time, so they have the heavyweight infrastructure you need to support lightweight deployment.

    He’s right. Not an oxymoron, just a way to get you to spend more money for less.

    Stick with the regular cloud…

  • Old, but not that old…

    If you want to see what Google is guessing in terms of preferences, age and gender, you can go here.

    Google has my interests reasonably accurate. Computers, news, politics, science and football were the main ones. It also listed “Reference – General Reference – Time and Calendars” which is accurate since I’ve been reading plenty about the leap second controversy (what? you aren’t riveted on that one?).

    Google has no idea I’m interested in music, but frankly I don’t read that much about it online (and I’m not listening via Google Music). And they don’t realize I’m a huge Yankee fan, but it’s not baseball season.

    So overall, pretty good.

    But damn, under the “Your demographics” part, while they do correctly guess that I’m male, they have me as 65+.

    Ouch.

    Big fat ouch.

    I’m not reading about FORTRAN, I’m reading contemporary computer stuff. (side note. Geek humor courtesy of Linus here. Hilarious.). OK, I guess old people are more interested in politics. But 65+? Really?

    Interestingly, while there is an Edit link on the Google Preferences page, you can’t tell them what your age is. All you can do is remove the assumption. So I did.

    I wonder how long before Google thinks I’m old again…

  • iBooks Author

    When Gruber is slamming Apple, you know they messed up…

  • A problem that’s not a problem

    I promise, this is my last SOPA link. And the check is in the mail…

    But another great quote, this time from Slate.com:

    Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalize it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.