Author: Mark Alexander

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Meme: Seven Deadly Sins

Lust: Something that I find attractive.
Have you not seen at the pictures I post?

Pride: Something that I like about myself.
My integrity, the fact that if I tell you I’m going to do something I do it.

Sloth: Something that I dislike about myself.
My general laziness and lifelong antipathy for exercise.

Envy: Something I wish I was better at.
I wish I understood more deeply the core concepts that I’m supposed to know for my chosen career.

Gluttony: One of my favorite [fast] foods.
Jack-in-the-Box tacos.

Wrath: Something that gets me angry.
Willful ignorance and the increasing insouciance of the human population.

Greed: Something I can’t get enough of.
Money. Once you have enough of that anything else you might want falls into place.

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Denial Ain’t Just a River in Egypt

Yesterday Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s outgoing CEO took the opportunity at what is undoubtedly his last company meeting, to take a swipe at Apple and a couple of other competitors that have largely stolen Microsoft’s thunder in the new age of computing. Apple, Ballmer said, is about being “fashionable,” while Amazon is about being “cheap,” and Google is about “knowing more.” Microsoft, Ballmer said, is about “doing more.”

Ballmer’s swipes and the company’s Siri-bashing ads are just the latest in a string of dismissals from Microsoft toward the company’s rivals, even as those rivals have gone on to greater heights in the areas where they are head-to-head with Microsoft. Apple, described as a “low-volume player” last year by Ballmer, is the most profitable firm making smartphones and tablets, which appear to be the future of popular computing. Google, too, has been the target of barbs from Ballmer, even as that company maintains a massive market share lead over Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Microsoft has a search engine? Seriously? Who knew? /snark

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This One’s Gonna Leave a Mark

I think I’ve experienced enough “Fuck Microsoft!” moments over the years to totally justify posting this.

From MacDailyNews:

Microsoft is (still!) led by a confused clown and hopelessly polluted at its upper levels with political schemers and backstabbers. It’s amazing the bloated carcass can even produce a product at this point, even if it is a product for a market that does not exist outside of Microsoft’s delusional dreams/misleading advertising campaigns.

The company is a failure. That’s why its products are failures, too. GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

In the end, Microsoft will be a mere footnote; a blotch on the early timeline of computing that nobody will remember fondly, if at all.

As we explained quite clearly last October in yet another prescient Take that even Microsoft could have read, long before they were forced to swallow a $900 million write-off over their Surface flop:

That dumbass kickstand is yet another ill-considered, misguided, corporate committee-driven “differentiation” squirted out of Microsoft’s back door unbidden onto the public.

Microsoft is staffed with stupid and/or lazy people. There’s no other explanation besides crippling narcissism – which is a very real possibility. Most people use iPads while lounging around. All Microsoft’s Surface “team” had to do was buy some real iPads and use them for a few weeks. Steve Jobs himself even demonstrated the iPad while reclining in a comfy leather chair, not sitting upright at a friggin’ desk. Microsoft was shown the way and, once again, they failed to properly follow Apple’s lead. By now, that’s just stupid and/or lazy.

Microsoft suffers from delusions of grandeur. They think they matter and that people will buy their pretend iPad over other pretend iPads because it’s from Microsoft. Microsoft does not matter. Microsoft no longer has the power to sell superfluous products. The world already has iPad. The thinking world finally woke up and moved on from Microsoft’s soul-sapping dreck. That clueless Microsoft haven’t figured this out years ago (Zune, Kin, how many total face-plants do they need?) is illustrative of the depths of their delusions.

More here.

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Quote of the Day

Sorry Microsoft. No one cares about this one either.

“So Microsoft unveiled its Surface 2 tablet on Monday and there were absolutely no big surprises. The device is priced at $50 less than the original Surface RT at $449 but overall this is basically the Surface RT with better specs and a presumably improved Windows RT 8.1 operating system. It goes without saying that this will once again not end well for Microsoft.

“Microsoft has done virtually nothing to add consumer appeal to the Surface 2. Throughout its presentation on Monday the company kept stressing that the Surface 2 was a tablet for people who want to be ‘productive,’ and emphasized that it came with the full Microsoft Office Suite… People who need to use Office at home can do so by bringing their laptop home with them. What they will not do, however, is spend $450 on a tablet for their own personal use just because it comes with Office. In fact, they are probably buying a tablet for their own personal use as a way to escape Office and other work-related productivity software.

“The Surface 2′s other problem is Windows RT itself… The Surface RT was a commercial flop, OEMs fled from Windows RT and app developers are less than enthusiastic about making apps for it. Simply making hardware upgrades and implementing very small a price cut to the Surface 2 would have been an acceptable strategy if the original Surface RT had been even a modest hit. But it wasn’t a modest hit: It was a massive bomb that forced Microsoft to write off $900 million.” ~  Brad Reed

Yes, I’m in a mood today.

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Bullshit

Like millions of others, I upgraded to iOS7 last week. I generally like it, but it’s taken me only a few days to discover a HUGE fail on the part of Apple and the bloom is definitely off the rose because of it.

The built in photo app now allows you to apply filters to your photos, either when you take them or after the fact. Pretty cool, right?

The problem is that when you transfer them off the phone using Apple’s own Image Transfer application on the Mac (or through iPhoto), all the filter information is stripped and you’re left with only the original photo.

WTF?

And moving the pictures back onto the phone does not restore that lost data.

So all of the original beautifully filtered photos that I took on our trip to Santa Fe are gone (except for the ones I uploaded to Instagram), and the only way I was able to get them back is to re-import them to the phone, reapply the filters, and then email the filtered photos back to me. Yes folks, email.

I would expect this kind of crap from Microsoft, but not Apple.

And did I mention that when you do this you don’t get the full resolution photos, even though they’re being selected to be sent as full size? Nope, they’re only 62% of the original resolution.

This is bullshit.

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Life Imitating Art

I am reminded of an episode of the old Outer Limits where an air force fighter pilot and his wife are trapped in an alternate reality suspended in time—or a variation of the time dilation idea that was later used in an episode of the original Star Trek.

From iO9:

A new study suggests that small animals like birds and flies can observe movement on a finer timescale than larger creatures. Compared to us, many of these animals are able to perceive the world through a Matrix-like “bullet-time,” allowing them to escape larger predators.

We know that animals sense the world in any number of ways depending on the species. Dogs, for example, have awful eyesight and low horizon line. So instead of depending on their vision, they perceive the world primarily through sounds and smells. In addition, animals have varying dynamic ranges when it comes to their senses; dogs can hear up to 40 kHz, dolphins up to 150 kHz, and bats up to an astounding 212 kHz. Much of this has to do with the various ways animals have adapted to their roles as predators and prey.

Now it appears that there’s a kind of dynamic range that exists in vision, as well — and it has to do with the rate at which the world can be perceived. As the new study published in Animal Behavior shows, small animals like insects and small birds can take in more information in one second than a larger animal, like us bulky humans.

Indeed, all you need to do to get this impression is simply watch the way a small bird, like a budgie, twitches as it scans its surroundings. What looks like near-spasmodic behavior to us is an animal that’s essentially working at a faster “clock rate” (so to speak). To them, humans, or larger predators, appear to move in slow motion; we likely appear impossibly slow and cumbersome through those eyes.

To measure this rate of visual perception, a team from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland, used a technique called critical flicker fusion frequency — a system that measures the speed at which the eye can process light. It works by measuring the lowest frequency of flashing at which a flickering light source is perceived as a constant. The team looked at more than 30 species, including rodents, eels, lizards, chickens, pigeons, dogs, cats and leatherback turtles.

So, for instance, at the low end of the scale, deep sea isopods (or woodlice) could only see light turning off and on four times per second. At rates just slightly faster than that, these creatures perceive the light as being constantly on. Flies, on the other hand, have eyes that react to stimulus more than four times quicker than the human eye. Compared to us, flies see the world in slow motion.

(more)

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