Mobile phone companies have a problem: price competition is causing dropping call revenue. Solution: push phones that do data services.
Thing is, I use my phone to make phone calls. Oh, and as an alarm clock. Seems that lots of other people are only interested in mobile phones as telephones too. These people are destroying civilisation by being unprofitable consumers.
I gave PDF Creator a go last week. It’s pretty good for a freebie, quite easy to use, and has some configuration and so on.
Trying it with Word documents it did seem to have problems with some fonts/styles though (generally for users other than me looking at the PDFs), so it’s worth being wary if you rely on accurate PDF-rendition. In my case, the (alas not free) Acrobat works better.
Ultimately I suspect for “industrial-strength” PDF-creation it’s best to stick to the genuine-but-expensive Acrobat Standard or Pro. The cheaper (or free) alternatives are pretty good, but don’t quite seem to cut it when the going gets tough.
Mind you if you’re not prepared to pay for Acrobat (AU$400+ for standard… pah, their time will come) I don’t see a compelling reason to get a cheaper one when PDF Creator is free.
Do you recall having seen an Arab with blue hands? No? Fairly conclusive proof that All Arabs Are Evil.
You see, Arabic is a RTL script (in English, on the other hand – hah! – is Left-To-Right).
When you right a LTR script using your right hand, you get no ink on your hand, but try writing with your left hand. Blue ink everywhere! Yuk! But it’s the other way around with a RTL script.
It is widely known that Left-handed is evil, and the Arabs, well, they must all be left-handed because I don’t see them wandering around with blue hands; if they did, then we could easily tell them apart and protect ourselves.
Forward this one onto George, for the next time they don’t buy the Anthrax-vial speil.
Deborah Rothberg at eWeek has a puff piece about making yourself indispensible when the outsourcing comes.
My view is that management, the directors of any outsourcing drive, have no idea who’s indispensible or not. That coupled with “why would you want to work for a company that outsources it’s intellectual capital” brings me to a big yawn on this article.
I guess the many pieces of “don’t be a tech-dweeb” advice will help, in such that management will hate you less – you stop confusing them and instead talk about synergizing the paradigm going forwards for a win-win team outcome.
“Get into project management,” screams the article, “its your only hope!” – Yep, not enough PMs, that’s a likely problem. Very view people can drive MS-Project and run through risk-management checklists.
“Maximize internal knowledge” – unless that’s where the bodies are buried, I’m not sure tying your brain so tightly to one employer is such a great plan.
“Don’t whine” – well, I guess I can’t argue with that. The squeeky wheel gets tossed overboard at the first opportunity.
$50 million
Combined salaries of the Top 10 CIOs, according to Baseline’s 2006 CIO Compensation Ranking, released Aug. 1.
Wow. Check out all that value they’re adding, with their amazing intellects and all.
Has anyone out there found that certification (as suggested by the article) helps, either with staying or getting employeed?
To celebrate 15 years of the web, The Observer highlights fifteen web sites that have changed the world (via Clay).
Not sure about Easyjet, given it’s UK-only, though I suppose along with sites that are now not particularly significant, but were mould-breaking at the time (such as Salon) they have been important trailblazers, with media and travel being two industries revolutionised (or at least turned upside-down and inside-out) by the Net. Ask any travel agent.
Meanwhile Time has what they claim are the 50 coolest web sites.
All this stuff, obviously, is in the eye of the beholder. And the more I think about it, the more I think such lists are pretty pointless. With hundreds of millions, if not billions of people online now, we all have our own priorities for what we want out of the Net, our own places to go. To try and narrow things down to a few dozen “coolest” is, dare I say it, lazy journalism.
Amazon has lost historic data. Sales data. Data for profiling customers.
I know. They lost mine.
I found out because it wouldn’t let me look inside The Complete Far Side because I don’t have an account that’s bought stuff – according to their records.
Except now I can look at the excerpt, but still they reckon I haven’t bought anything.
Weird.
Given my ancient history in dabbling with games development, I’m looking forward to this: XNA Game Studio Express is a Visual C#-based game development environment, which will be free for use on (and for) Windows. To write for XBox-360 it’ll cost you US$99 per year, with professionally-priced versions as well. The beta will be out on August 30th.
I’m hoping it’ll be easy enough for my kids to use too… or, well, at least easy enough for the one who is really interested in computers to try out some programming. And (given time, which admittedly I’m not overburdened with) it might be fun to muck about with.
Who knows, it might lead to a new age of home-grown computer games of the type we saw back in the 1980s, before computers got so hard to program. (Whether any of them will be any good is a fair question.)
In Australia, footy-tipping (be it for NRL or AFL) is very popular. And every Thursday, the leading footytips web site footytips.com.au sends out a reminder notice, which goes something like “We notice you have not entered your tips for this week!”
It’s an attempt in human load balancing. Footy-tipping is, almost by definition, an activity reserved for Fridays. Discussions around the photocopier/water-cooler/kitchenette invariably take place about the fitness of each team in the competition, the players, the injuries, the stats. Close examination of the Friday morning newspapers reveals more information on how people should tip.
All of which means that for sites like footytips.com.au, they need a lot of server capacity on Fridays, when everyone enters their tips, on Mondays, when people look at the results, and for the other five days of the week they’re quiet.
In a way I can understand them wanting to encourage tips entry earlier than Fridays… but it goes against the whole culture of it. Nobody wants to enter their tips on Thursdays. And we all want to look at the results on Mondays. No amount of nagging people to do otherwise is going to work.
Maybe they can find some other application which is really busy from Tuesday to Thursday, and on the weekend, and share their infrastructure?
Alex Encel is having another go at getting everybody in Australia a government-subsidised set top box. (See last time).
I like the idea, but I’m still not clear on who would pay for those who need antenna upgrades (or indeed how many/how much dosh is involved for this).
As he points out, so far they haven’t picked up the idea apparently due to ideological grounds rather than sound economic argument. But that’s typical of the current government — otherwise why would we have massive subsidies for private health insurance?
By the way, just to be pedantic for a moment, in Australian English, the word analogue has a ue on the end.
It’s a bit quiet here this week, probably because I’m busy and Josh is away offline somewhere in Gippsland.
Google have announced the Anita Borg scholarship programme is now running in Australia, offering A$5000 scholarships to women studying at undergraduate or postgraduate level in computer science in Australia.
One of the oldest games software houses in the world, let alone Australia, Melbourne House is in trouble, and likely to be sold/offloaded by Atari in the near future.
Another example of where being geek luddite is good: Dans Data on why the latest and greatest X mega-pixel cameras aren’t good value for money. I’m sticking with my 3.1MP Canon A70, thanks — for web and domestic use, it’s great.
Nothing lasts forever. This page logs the deaths of free email services: Free email DeathWatch.
This is cool: Emulating a BBC Micro, Amstrad, Spectrum or Dick Smith VZ300 in a Java applet. Maybe I’ve been wrong in dissing Java.
Speaking of Beebs, apparently a version of cross-platform emulator BeebEm has been used to try to ressurect the 1980s BBC Domesday project. It makes interesting reading, particular with regards to the problems of digital preservation… not to mention the value of the resource in being a record of life in Britain from the time it was compiled.
Let me make this clear: When I paste, I want the text to match the document it’s going into. This is why I’d prefer Paste Special / Plain Text to be the default.
So why does Paste Special / Plain Text keep disappearing out of my corporate copy of Outlook 2003? If I’m stuck with rich formatted emails, I damn well want whatever I paste into them to match the text.
But every app wants to bring its own format across. Even Visual Studio for heaven’s sake. I end up having to paste it into Notepad, then copy/paste to the destination.
Very annoying.
There are a couple of ways of making plain text pasting the default: you can define a macro in Word or here’s a crankily-named Outlook macro. If you’re aiming to get it everywhere, it looks like you’ll require a program: either Cliptext or PureText would appear to do it (in slightly different ways).