Archive for April, 2008
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
I’m half-nerd, and nerds create technologies (called “hacks”) which are half-prank and half-project to increase convenience in the lives of nerds, often involving coffee and other caffeine-oriented beverages, since caffeine is what keeps us upright in front of our computers.
 Where I’m working now, the coffee is outright awful. Not only do they not clean the large thermos containers they keep it in all day, but the coffee grounds are the worst bulk discount over-baked watery stuff with a trendy name. To add insult to injury, people complain if the caffeine percentage rises. Consequently, my team makes its own coffee and it’s quite good.
However, we’re spread across the building, and so it’s a matter of chance to find a fresh pot waiting on the desk. Until now. Since one of our supervisory people has been on a tear to get us to adopt RSS readers on the desktop as a means of keeping current with the company intranet, an idea was hit upon: promote RSS through coffee by using an RSS feed to keep track of when the pot is hot and the coffee is fresh.
Not revolutionary, not new, but a fun evening project. Here’s how it works.
When the maker of the coffee puts on a fresh pot, he enters in a description and clicks submit on a form that sends the information to a server in our department.
In turn, this server stores the data, and then generates an RSS feed of the last six pots of coffee, with the new one on top.
At each desktop, our RSS readers — which are set to update every five minutes — see the change and alert us to the freshness. (Image shown is from Snarfer, the RSS client we use.)
It’s moronic little hacks like this that keep a geek active. If anyone actually cares for the source code, I will provide it.
Tags: coffee, geek, rss
Posted in Information Technology | No Comments »
Monday, April 7th, 2008
Small sites (those with less than one million page views per month) command nearly three times as much per ad as large sites (those with more than 100 million page views per month): an effective CPM (cost per thousand) of $1.18 versus $0.38. The effective CPM across sites of all sizes is $0.49. All of these figures are for March, 2008. Ad rates are also growing faster for small sites, up 18 percent since January versus 12 percent growth overall. ^
What this reveals:
* Niche marketing, and brand loyalty to media products, has finally become reality it was predicted it would when the playing field was levelled between those who owned big printing presses, so their per-copy cost was low, and those who had small or no presses. (I just got spam for something called “MegaPress,” what does that mean?)
* Blogs — or as a programmer might call them, dated entry management and presentation systems — are going to dominate because they are perfect for niche topics and periodic, informal, informative updates.
* Big Media is suffering because it targets a mythical average person duplicated ten million times into the mainstream product, when really there’s a silent majority out there with variations within it we call niches.
Posted in Branding | No Comments »
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Serving 10 billion page views on a few hundred servers, craigslist leads the internet industry by orders of magnitude when it comes to efficient use of electricity. The last time I checked we were clocking something like 175,000 page views per kilowatt-hour.
Compare this to single digit thousands of pages-per-kwhr for most large sites, which typically run tens to hundreds of thousands of servers.^
Sounds mysterious, huh? This whole “green computing” thing must be some wacko technology to cram more pages down the tubes, or maybe they use transparent pages. Far out. Not even close.
Craigslist achieves green computing through three simple methods:
Use simple pages, with few images and no flash, etc.
Pre-generate the pages if possible, to avoid as many active database calls as you can.
On your servers, strip down to 3-4 basic technologies and turn the rest off.
This isn’t just green; it’s common sense. The average web user doesn’t care too much how the page looks, except that they want a nice experience and a good interface. A page that acts upon familiar principles to give them an interface they can intuit and manipulate will make them happy. If it’s not outright ugly, well, they’re fine.
As many of us who have worked the web since the early days know, it’s not the looks of a page but its organization. Did you put the important stuff in the upper right? Can people grasp how the site is navigated with a quick gaze? Is there unnecessary or disorganized stuff on the pages?
Who would have thought that such things are also “green.”
Posted in Information Technology | No Comments »
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
In so many ways, we developed computers and are only slowly learning to organize their power.
For example, we have variables in our FrameMaker documents. These can be set to pop out a value whenever they’re inserted, so if the version of software we’re writing about changes, we can have the right file name or version number in the text.
But what if we were to re-organize, and use hierarchical variables?
These would replace the variable with a condition, and that condition would activate any of the variables under it to have multiple values.
For a condition, defined as version 2.0 or 3.1 or 4.7, a set of variables — like book name, version number, product name, file extension, directory location, copyright — would all change in synchronization.
This is one of those features that should be standard in any application designed for professional use and, quite frankly, don’t most people want to buy those anyway even if they don’t use the extra capacity? In software terms, extra power is slightly longer load times and extra bytes on the disk — no big deal.
Posted in Information Technology, Technical Communications | No Comments »
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Although this article got talked up on the web, few seemed to understand how important this data is, and why it signals a favorable Microsoft/Yahoo balance against Google in the next generation:
The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers. ^
Ouch! This means that many of those great online sales leads clicking away may be the same audience who are targetted by garden-variety spam. This of course threatens Google’s dominance of the adsphere, because they specialize in ads without tracking, and throws the balance to companies like Microsoft and Yahoo who offer a wider range of social networking-styled services to get users to log in, so that their searches can be tracked and better ad targetting can exist.
In other terms, hitting this 50%-6% audience is easy, because they’re going to visit the most basic and spammy services the net has to offer. Advertisers are increasingly going to want ads for, as an example, high-end laptops, to be directed to the audience that not only likes the product but has the wherewithal to buy it. The recent rush by Google to get people into online mesh applications is part of their desire to adapt to this new reality, as is Gmail. Want to bet their internal metrics, six months before Gmail’s launch, revealed this same trend?
Posted in Culture, Information Technology | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
No one likes to exhibit schadenfreude at the misfortune of others, but in the case of Austin-based Dell Computers, it’s purely professional: they failed to fulfil the need they claimed to meet, and are a drag on the market until they do, so it’s good the market is kicking them out the door to make room for others, namely HP-Compaq which just surpassed IBM in sales.
Layoffs hit close to home Monday at Dell, which said it will close its Austin, Texas, desktop manufacturing facility as part of an effort to trim billions in costs.
The Austin facility, which replaced a smaller facility in Austin, is where Dell fine-tuned its “build-to-order” strategy that allowed it to vault ahead of Compaq for the top spot in PCs in the early part of the decade. By not building PCs until orders get placed, Dell minimizes the time it holds components in inventory, which in turn reduces costs.
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Dell also reaffirmed its plans to reduce employee headcount by at least 8,800. So far, it has eliminated 3,200 positions. Overall, the company hopes to reduce expenses by $3 billion a year on average over the next three years. ^
Did that shadow passing over your face connote a sense of deja vu? Perhaps:
Dell released preliminary earnings Thursday showing positive signs in its servers unit, but announced it would lay off 10 percent of its workforce over the coming year.
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Dell has been attempting to turn itself around in the last year after losing its lead as the world’s largest PC maker to Hewlett-Packard in 2006. It’s seen heavy turnover in leadership, including the return of founder Michael Dell as chief executive, replacing Kevin Rollins. ^
No word on whether this is the same 8800 but you can see how long this downward pattern has been working.
Dell was a one-shot wonder. Its concept was the build-to-order PC, based on a Burger King drive-through, and it came along just as most of the American public were buying PCs to experience that new intertubes thing. Now that people have computers, and older computers, and multiple computers, and we have computers coming out the wazoo, the fat margins are gone. So is the rising demand. And suddenly we see that Dell’s business model is flat.
 As soon as this business was starting to wane, Dell introduced its $400 basic price point machines, a low cost unheard of before that time except in real junker white boxes. This was their solution to declining demand: downscale their market. In doing so, they handed the baton off to their competitors, because their $400 machines were highly unreliable.
As a consultant, I’ve heard many stories of how Windows “just crashes all the time.” In all but a handful of these, the answer to the question “where did you get your machine, and how much did you pay” has two parts: Dell or HP, and under $500. These machines are prone to lockups, overheating, erratic internal incompatibilities and so on because they are new spare parts grab bags. You don’t have the money to pay for engineers to ensure that a cheap box of parts has high degrees of internal compatibility or reliability. Instead, you make the worst sin a PC builder can do, which is to look at the packaging and say “well, it says it’s compatible and it’s cheap, so go with it!” You wouldn’t do that for your home machine, but because Dell is a giant brand, you would buy it from them. Silly you.
In pursuing the $400 market, Dell depleted itself of brand momentum and gravitas. Dells went from being seen as the Saabs of the PC world to its Hyundais or Ford Focuses. Even worse, they went from being seen as reliable to being seen as erratic junkers. The consumer may act dumb, but he or she may not be as dumb as they act, because when you see a $1500 box that runs Windows XP flawlessly and then come home to a $500 box with constant crashes, it’s a simple mental step to recognize the cheap box is a junker, especially when we’re in a society where the tendency of cheaper products to be junk is well-recognized. Otherwise, why have brands and brand value at all?
Dell attempted to patch the situation up by buying Alienware, a company that started as a specialized outfit making high-performance machines for gamers, but then found that its primary customers were businesspeople, artists and musicians who wanted laptops and desktops put together with a higher regard for part quality. Even so, Dell didn’t take the hint.
Many of us hoped that Dell would become the Apple of the PC world, selling nicer-looking machines and using its bulk purchasing power to sell nicer components at a lower cost, but even Apple doesn’t do that, and Dell didn’t come close. Instead, it sold us cheap machines loaded with adware, and almost no attention was spent on making the user experience simple, powerful, beautiful and effective, something that Apple does well. Building user experience builds brand. Dell build a brand befitting a manufacturer of microwaves for college dormitories.
Now we see Dell face the inevitable conclusion of its decline. A 10% drop in employees isn’t a death blow, but it’s far from a good sign. The worse sign is that Dell has no clue how to market itself and so stop the bleeding, which means a slow spiral into true irrelevance. HP has surged ahead by having a good-better-best product line, but this is success in a relative sense and still does not challenge the rising ideas of computer as luxury good (Apple) and computer as appliance (Asus). HP has the market — for now — but could learn a lot from deposed Dell and fading IBM.
Posted in Branding, Information Technology | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Today’s post is part-Linkpost, and part a summary of some trends predicted on this blog. Hold on for a slightly wild ride through the return of the boomerang on some of these important but understressed topics:
Fear of Piracy is Overstated
Internet piracy, no matter how pervasive, is not about to bring the worldwide production of literature to a grinding halt, just as rampant music piracy isn’t stopping my neighbor’s kid from playing his drum kit in the garage every day before dinner. But the piece does raise the real question of whether the best writers will continue to work to their full potential in a world where their main product can be had for free. ^
Why this is true: people who pirate extensively are those with more time than money, and there’s no evidence to suggest they would buy the products in the first place. Additionally, for the near term, eBook readers are still a work in progress, although Amazon’s Kindle is probably the best of breed so far. Books, like CDs, endure wherever we go and can always be referred to even if the publisher goes bankrupt, the book goes out of print or society collapses because kids text too much.
Another article that covered this brilliantly:
So why aren’t these games, which, combined, have sold half a million units on a small budget, getting more attention? Because they’re not aimed at some nebulous idea of the “hardcore gamer.” This is a market that may exist in the minds of people writing about games, and it may describe those who buy gaming magazines, but such gamers are certainly not a force at retail. “Heck, how much buzz does The Sims get in terms of editorial when compared to its popularity?” Wardell asks.
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The way to make money in the world of PC gaming, according to Wardell, is to make sure many systems can play your games, while continuing to make them attractive. Find a market where people want to buy and support the games, and don’t go by what the magazines and the blogs seem to think are the big name titles. Don’t let people who aren’t your audience control the titles you make, and ignore piracy. This is much like Trent Reznor’s strategy, although the execution is different.
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“The reason why we don’t put copy protection on our games isn’t because we’re nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don’t like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count,” Wardell argues. ^
Macs Aren’t the New Savior
Yet, depending on how a company uses Macs, trying to integrate the computers into a company’s workflow can kill productivity, Keanini says. The applications never quite match up, data has to be massaged to be useful, and the company has to design workarounds for each issue, he says. ^
Why this is true: It’s the software that drives people to an operating system and Apple, with its mercurial product lines and even more chaotic series of corporate strategies, has never nurtured software apps or developers except in the arts. Quite simply, Microsoft has Linux and Apple beat in this regard, and only if they screw up and follow the dying trend of SaaS will they fail at this. The negative FUD (fear, uncertainty, despair) over Windows Vista is also overstated, because in the real world, people who did not buy $400 Dell boxes are enjoying the Vista experience — and it’s getting better.
The New Security Woes: Mesh Apps, Thumb Drives
One solution is to take a hybrid approach, using a software product that only allows usage of thumb drives with pre-defined serial numbers in conjunction with an IronKey to handle the encryption. Some antivirus suites, like Symantec’s Endpoint Protection (SEP) 11, already offer this type of capability.
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If you’re on a very tight budget — and if you have a high level of trust in your users and don’t need an enterprise solution — cheap thumb drives and the open-source TrueCrypt technology could be the way to go. ^
Why this is true: we’ve seen how the loss of laptops containing seven million customer records and credit card numbers is a catastrophe. As thumb drives continue to be popular, and people spending more time at work use those work networks for their downloads and Amazon shopping and so on, we’re going to see more people also using those thumb drives to take work home — and losing those drives or having them stolen inside a purse, car or luggage. Since every person in North America now knows how to load up a thumb drive, and open basic file types like MS Word, and many of them also know how to bypass the passwords, it’s important to have a more robust system in place. Also look for mesh apps and SaaS apps to become big security holes when users adopt their hotmail password for their Google apps and vice versa. We all know how secure hotmail passwords are, right?
Why Social Media is Expanding
Job hunting has literally become a contact sport. That is, you need contacts—lots of them—to expedite the process of landing your next job. In particular, you need connections inside the companies you’re targeting. Why? Because employee referrals are becoming a proportionately bigger source of new hires, according to recruiting consultancy CareerXroads. Employers are keen on employee referrals because they generally come from trusted internal sources and because they serve to pre-vet candidates. Consequently, between 70 percent and 80 percent of new hires join their new employers through a personal connection or a networking referral. ^
Why this is true: companies can get sued if they hire the wrong person and then have to fire them, which is the same reason it’s often hard to get fired even if you are incompetent, drunk and downloading porn at work. They’ve circled the wagons because of this, and casual contacts even through social networks get through the initial barrier. They give the company some way to vet the candidate, and yet do so without being intrusive or requiring people to remember more names and faces than their overloaded brains can already handle. There’s also no question of impropriety regarding the buying of dinners, drinks and gifts. I’m sure there’s a witty parallel for our personal lives, or some social network called actuallynotarapistorstalker.com for single people, but it’s unknown to me.
The Wisdom of Crowds is Not Wisdom
And I say we’re Web 3.0 (now) because we’re the only news aggregator out there which is edited, which I think is the next step in social networks because right now everybody is talking about the wisdom of crowds, and all that—which is complete horse shiat, and I think the next step is realizing that what crowds pick is pretty much pornography and Internet spam, and as a result you’ve got to have some editing involved there somewhere.
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I’ll tell you the one I’ve seen recently which is really funny, ‘Dig,’ another news aggregator, had a top link that got 15,000 ‘digs’ on it, which is something phenomenally high—maybe a record for all I know. (It was) puppies playing around, which again, goes back to the whole idea of the wisdom of crowds. No. They’re stupid they want to see puppies…all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Wow man, people will click on fuzzy cute animals. We need more of these.’ ^
Why this is true: life without editors is chaotic because each person begins acting exclusively in their own interests, not in the intersection of their interests with those of the group and any goals it may have. Peoplemedia sounds good until you realize that most of the loudest voices on the Internet are people with nothing better to do, little money to spend, and few actual ideas. So they can imitate something they saw other people like, but not invent one. The exception is Wikipedia, which encouraged college students to plagiarize their professors and so has actually gotten quite good in some articles.
Turning Off the Gadgets Gives You More Life
In the headquarters of Dogster, a networking site for pets, employees are allowed to bring their dogs into meetings but they can’t bring their laptops or any other electronic device.
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Laptops are not allowed in some classrooms at USC’s law school. Etiquette coach Colette Swan said, “We are becoming an internalized society. We are living in our laptops, our cell phones, in our texting.”
The experts don’t call it attention deficit as much as continuous partial attention. As Swan said, “If you’re multi-tasking, no matter how good you are, you’re still half-ignoring someone else.”
Why this is true: “Western man is externalizing himself through gadgets,” William S. Burroughs once famously wrote. What is called “internalizing” in the article is what he calls “externalizing”; paradoxically, putting our lives into gadgets allows us to introvert, although we’re doing it with external means. Meetings are overused, and are inefficient ways of communication that are generally favored for the appearance of keeping everyone informed, but when people look out at a sea of laptops, they drone on assuming that no one is paying attention — and they’re right. If you have ten employees paid $30 an hour in a meeting that lasts one hour, and it achieves what five minutes of direct conversation could from a $60 an hour manager, what kind of money did you just lose?
Literature Is Life
It didn’t take long for police to realize the man swerving through town with a missing rear wheel and no headlights was intoxicated.
Police caught up with the driver after the vehicle was found in a ditch on the side of the road. The man who exited the driver side claimed he had only had four beers but could barely walk when it came time to exit the vehicle.
When asked why he was driving without a rear wheel the man responded with extremely slurred speech that he had hit a sign and was “just trying to get home.â€
While being transferred to the Summit County Jail the main spontaneously uttered to the officer driving, “Thanks for getting me off the road, I’m in no condition to drive.†^
Why this is true: As reported before, scenes from literature often come to life, which tells us why people read books in the first place. We can find patterns and archetypes of real life in them and through those, can steer ourselves around hypocrisy and self-deception. In addition to the inherent comedy of being physical, and so having brains that can be “hacked” by too much alcohol, we face an era where our machines can dominate us in many ways if we let them.
Tags: DUI, fitzgerald, macintosh
Posted in Information Technology, Linkpost, Literature | No Comments »
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