Category — General

Just saw this and thought it was not only funny, but largely true… 

An Experiment

Start with a cage containing five apes.

In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the apes with cold water.

After a while, another ape makes an attempt with the same result - all the apes are sprayed with cold water. This continues through several more attempts. Pretty soon, when another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes all try to prevent it.

Now, turn off the cold water. Remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the other apes attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five apes and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm. Again, replace a third original ape with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four apes that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest ape.

After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all the apes, which have been sprayed with cold water, have been replaced.

Nevertheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs. Why not?

“Because that’s the way they’ve always done it, and that’s the way it’s always been around here.”

And that’s how corporate policies begin.

Funny, Corporate Policies

I love my ISP.

Know why?

Speed Test to L.A

Speed Test to San Diego

Speed Test to San Jose

And even clear across country:

Speed Test to Washington DC

Nuff said.

Time Warner Business Class Cable, ISP, Internet Connectivity

In the last 7 years in CA, we have been on fire for 5 of them.  I’ve never sustained any direct damage, but the cleanup is always dreadful.

God bless the men and women who fight these things, and Lord help the people in direct danger.  I hope we are not one of them soon.

This was the view from my house:

UGH.

California Wildfires, Chatsworth, Simi Valley

Auto lust is in the air, and it seems to be spreading.

Could this car get me to buy American again?  Just maybe.  Its a technophile’s playground.

Now, don’t get on my case about NOT buying American.  These days, my US assembled ULEV Honda is more of an American car than your average Mexican built Chrysler.  And, I’ve more than paid my dues with my other car, a 10 year old Cadillac SLS.  Its the second Caddy I’ve owned, after the first one died on me in roughly a year.  Never again!  Should have thought of that before getting my current one!  Ha!

The biggest question with the Lincoln is, will I fit in it?  Well, OK - that’s probably second to will I ever be a non-cheapo and actually buy it?  Probably not.

*SIGH*  Being fiscally responsible really sucks.

Lincoln MKS, Techno Car

I won’t take a bunch of time telling you what Google Chrome is about.  Rather, I’ll give you a quick bullet list of neat features and let you go out on your own and get the details.

• Its fast.  VERY fast.
• It has crash control - one tab won’t crash the whole thing.
• Tabs can be ripped off to their own window or merged back into the bar.
• Incognito mode - a “no record” type of web browsing, which is great for accessing sensitive or confidential information on shared resources (think web banking at work, web mail at a conference, accessing your company’s CRM system at one of those public PC’s at an airport, etc.)
• Application shortcuts to make web apps feel more like desktop apps
• A minimal interface so that the content is the focus, not the browser
• and more.

Its still a beta version and has a few issues - for instance, while writing this post, the entire browser crashed, not just one tab.  So much for crash control! To be fair, it wasn’t my web app that crashed. It was the browser itself - so, crash control on tabs wasn’t supposed to solve that kind of thing.  Again, its a beta.  As such, it is very promising.

My overall feeling about it - WOW, is that fast.  Every page seems to load 20-50% faster anecdotally than anything in FF or IE, and the minimal interface is really nice (a bit similar to full screen tabbed browsing, but that’s OK).

I have a few concerns too:

• How long will they actually continue developing it?
• Spell checking doesn’t seem to be integrated yet - I LOVE integrated spell check in FF
• There is no plug-in mechanism yet (AFAIK…)
• Will this derail Google’s long time support of FF?  They did just renew their commitment to it, but is another browser really necessary?  I love FF and wish they would have simply worked with that initiative to improve FF to be everything that they wanted to achieve with Chrome.
• Google has its own agenda (ad revenue), and sometimes things seem out of touch with that goal.  With FF as a non-affiliated browser, why the need for Chrome?  They give some answers, but none that ring true enough to warrant a separate branch from FF, in my opinion.  It makes me wonder what evil plans they have lurking in the wings.  To be certain, Google has long been the Jedi to Microsoft’s Sith, but (in my best Yoda voice) - “The Chosen One, Google may be. Still, too clouded its future is.”  Google has been trying to become a viable and complete computing platform, hoping to drive Microsoft out of its stranglehold on PC computing.  But, once it is successful, what evil things will it start to commit? Some would say the evil has already started…  To borrow a line from The Dark Knight - will they be the hero long enough to see themselves become the villain?

Only time will tell.

But, if they clean up a few of the gaps that currently exist as compared to FireFox, Chrome may actually be an extremely viable third option.  After all, its from Google.  They usually don’t make things that suck.

Chrome, Google, Google Chrome

“A team of Japanese researchers are looking at the next step in immersive gaming, and it just may be ultrasound. The technology adds a sense of tactile feedback to games, without the use of gloves or other devices.” from Gearlog

Wow, now THAT would be cool.  Though, would I really want to actually feel all those sword slashes, bullet wounds and tactical nuclear strikes on my person?  Hmm… Maybe I need to rethink this…  :)

Actually, this reminds me of a PC peripheral that was described roughly 10 years ago - it was a scent generator that was hooked up to your PC and that sat on top of your monitor.  It could generated about 10 different scents and they were working on more.  The idea was that since the sense of smell is the one most closely tied to memory, that it would be an excellent sensory immersion mechanism.  It never really went anywhere, as far as I can tell - maybe it had to do with the fact that people don’t really want to know what hordes of rotting zombies being burned to bits smells like.  *shrug*  Just a thought.  :)

Games, Ultrasound, Immersive Gaming

Have you heard about the new search engine created by ex-Googlers?

Its called Cuil - pronouced Cool - from the old Irish word, meaning Knowledge.

Its - well, its a search engine.  Has some neat features - I very much like the layout of search results and the tabs that help merge search with navigation.  Will all this be enough to pull me away from Google?  I don’t know.

I have such a love / hate relationship with Google, so it is hard to tell.  They have great stuff, but they are also extremely liberal in nature.  How liberal?  The last reported numbers that I could find had 98% of all political donations going to the Democrats.

Do I really want to use / enrich / endorse a company that is so blatantly anti-conservative?  Not really.

I guess I will try Cuil for a while and see how it goes…

Search Engines, Cuil, Google