Under a Gibbous Moon

After watching the Google Buzz controversy play out over the last week or so, I can honestly say that I am completely confused.

I signed up on Buzz the day it became available in my Gmail account, which was, I believe, the day after launch (and definitely before the shit storm started). When I did so it was quite explicit about what was going on and what it was going to do. It even listed who would be listed me following and gave me the opportunity to edit this list (which I did).

From reading much of the fury around the internet, it seems that my experience was totally unique. Apparently everyone else had Buzz just load up on its own and suddenly steal their identities and head for Vegas.

Now, admittedly, if you started up Buzz and clicked through the first couple of screens, you could be unpleasantly surprised.

I personally believe that much of the confusion comes from the fact that the Buzz icon was placed into the Gmail menu whether or not you have activated it, leading people to believe that was automatically activated.

This simply could have been handled by placing it in the text menu at the top of the screen where the various Google services appear even if you are not currently signed up for them.

Could this have been handled better by Google, certainly. Is the internet’s response to it radically overblown, yes.

Tweet this!

Woke up this morning and this was sitting in my Twitter feed.

@PickettBill: RT @jforestier http://ljforestier.com/aB Not ready? Ha, is perfect for # of users. Dump the # of Windows users on Linux things fixed fast.

This is why the usability problems will not be fixed, “I’m sorry, it’s not me, it’s you.”

I think it’s time to stage an intervention.

Tweet this!

I have used Linux, in various distributions (Mandrake, Lindos, Red Hat, DSL, SuSe, Ubuntu), over the years and one thing has remained the same. Windows might have DLL hell but Linux has dependency hell.

Dependency hell? This occurs when you need to make sure that you have all the possible libraries needed to run (or just compile) a particular program. Of course, those dependencies require their own dependencies which in turn have their own dependencies until it spirals completely out of control and you end up with something that looks like the organizational chart for a multinational conglomerate. (continue reading…)

Tweet this!

The first hard drive that I ever had was 500 MB. Yes, it was smaller than the storage capacity of a CD-ROM, but that’s OK because they didn’t have those then either.

As the years went by, whenever I went looking for a new hard drive, it was always to get the biggest that I could afford. The size was needed to put all those shiny new games, MP3s, and digital videos that kept getting larger as their quality increased.

Recently and after a protracted illness, my hard drive passed away. After a brief mourning period I found myself tasked with replacing it. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a new one as my laptop is already over three years old. Instead, I found myself looking for the highest quality hard drive that I could find at the best price.

I found this interesting because storage is no longer a major issue. All of the hard drives I looked at were over 200 GB in size. Digital storage has no become so cheap that, unless you have specialized needs (i.e. video editing), it is impossible to pull a hard drive off of the shelf and it not be at least adequate. Suddenly it’s not all about storage size but the extra features (like shock protection for when I drop my laptop) and the specs of the discs (cache, RPMs).

From my earliest experiences with computing, storage space was always at a premium and now it has become essentially free.

Tweet this!

Screws like these just show that the manufacturer hates you.

Tweet this!