What a smackdown looks like, consumer electronics division

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Over at Gizmodo, the reviewer pulls no punches in his indictment of a particular brand. Not model; the entire brand. The article’s title is “Why TomTom Sucks.”

If TomTom isn’t willing to address its products’ fundamental problems, it deserves to fail in this business. Does that sound heartless? What’s heartless is foisting sub-par hardware on unsuspecting moms and pops, who don’t have the privilege of testing a bunch of stuff side by side. Because I have a heart, and care about your hard-earned money, it’s my duty to tell you—and your mom and dad—to avoid TomTom like the freakin’ plague. (In case you were wondering, Garmins are still the best—even the cheap ones.)

Heathen haven’t done a serious survey of the products from TomTom, Garmin, and Magellan, but we can say that the Hertz rental GPS (Magellan) lags significantly behind the aging portables offered by National (Garmin), and that TomToms we’ve seen in shops seem, well, hokey. When we buy, it’ll be Garmin.

Since reading “What’s the Matter with Kansas” here would be bad, maybe I should get this book instead

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Idiot America:

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool.

Nerd Alert

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If you’re a member of my tribe, you should definitely read A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Computer Languages.

A couple gems:

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

and

1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.

and of course

1980 – Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term “object oriented.” When asked what that means he replies, “Smalltalk programs are just objects.” When asked what objects are made of he replies, “objects.” When asked again he says “look, it’s all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles.”

Must. Have.

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When I was a kid, the best tie-in toy had nothing to do with Star Wars. Sure, the Death Star playset was cool, but nothing from Lucasland could compete with the Enterprise kit’s “functional” transporter. Spin the box, hit the button, and Kirk’s gone planet-side. Plus, the Trek toys were pre-shrinkray — 8 or 12 inches tall instead of tiny and cheap like the Star Wars figures. (Let’s not even talk about what they did to G.I. Joe.)

Turns out, it’s back, and so are vintage figures. I’m not really a fill-my-office-with-SF-toys guy, but for this, I may make an exception.

Observations on Running Outside in Kansas City for the First Time

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In which we note the weather
63, partly cloudy.
This is important because…
In Houston, it’s already like six billion degrees.
Why this didn’t matter as much as you’d think
In Kansas, the ground does this weird thing where it goes up and down, so “running” often involves “climbing” as far as this flatlander is concerned. Ow.
What else is weird about running in the sprawl of KC
Wildlife next to the thoroughfares: squirrels, rabbits, and curiously tame geese. Also, goose shit; seriously, if it was any bigger, I think we’d have to consider them mammals.
Final score
3.5 to 4 miles, about 45 minutes. Left the Garmin at home. Oops.

Dept. of Depressing Realizations

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I’m already into the 2nd elite tier of Hyatt’s frequent-guest program.

Amusingly, Hyatt is supporting the ongoing devaluation of precious metals in such contexts; rather than having levels at Silver, Gold, and Platinum, they use Gold, Platinum, and Diamond.

Some marketing douche thinks he’s clever for that.

Bait shop.

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In Belize. On the beach. No software in bait shops. No airports, either. And only bugs I can physically quash with one flip-flop.

Bait shop.

Smart move from Redmond

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A previously NDA’d feature of Windows 7 has finally gone public; basically, Win7 comes with a virtualization-based “XP mode” that creates a virtual machine to host any apps that can’t run in a post-XP environment.

The real bonus here is that it allows Microsoft, like Apple before them, to make a break with backward compatibility. OS X was a quantum leap over System 9 precisely because they made no real effort to allow backward compatibility outside a “compatibility box” that was the next best thing to virtualization (since virtualization wasn’t really an option 9 years ago).

Microsoft has, so far, not made the same kind of break with the past, and that’s hamstrung the evolution of the platform. If they do this right, they’ll be able to make the same kind of leap with 7 or whatever comes after 7 that Apple made in 2000.

This is a good thing for everyone; I’m not a huge Windows fan, but I want Microsoft in the race in the same way I want the GOP in the race. Competition is good for everybody.

New Frontiers in Suck for Kansas City

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Owing apparently to the departure of Northwest from the market, the Kansas City Airport’s C terminal now features ZERO food or drink vendors inside security. Nada. Nothing.

Since there are also no water fountains, it’s impossible to take water aboard a plane. Congrats, MCI, you’re Heathen’s new choice for Suckiest Airport in the Country. Even Jackson, Mississippi, sucks less.

In case you didn’t get it

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The implications of the recently released torture memos are fairly deep and significant, but the press at large isn’t boiling it down or providing any real analysis. Fortunately, at least one person is paying attention. Paul Krugman breaks it down for you thusly:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

Not much more to say about it, is there? Our government, working in our name, tortured people to get them to admit to things that weren’t true to justify a war unrelated to the assault we suffered on 9/11. And thus far utterly no one has been held accountable.

Dept. of Alarm Stupids

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So, Heathen Central has always had an alarm with these people. Over the weekend, we had enough heavy weather in Houston that we lost our regular phone line, and the alarm started telling us about it by beeping.

Ever ten minutes.

Without stopping.

Clearing the error doesn’t work; it tries the phone line periodically to check, and as soon as the test fails it starts beeping again (unless the alarm is actually ENGAGED at the time, in which case the alarm goes off; this is less charming than beeping).

I called ATT, sure (we don’t actually use ATT for voice; the POTS line exists only for the alarm and failover reasons), but in the meantime what I needed was a way to continue to set and use the alarm, even in the absence of a phone line for monitoring.

Well, it turns out there’s no way to do that, and this is bone fucking stupid. An alarm works on several levels:

  1. The big ADT sign does some deterrence;
  2. If some douchebag breaks in and the alarm goes off, there’s a nonzero chance the miscreant will just run away. Someone DID try our (unfortunately unlocked) downstairs patio door at one point, which is on a zero-delay switch. They got it open half an inch and the alarm went nuts; exit bad guys.
  3. If both of those fail on you, then yes, the alarm DOES use the phone line to alert the monitoring service, and the monitoring service will dispatch the authorities.

By making it impossible to turn off the phone line check (for situations such as the one we’re in), ADT has made the alarm system 100% useless until ATT gets off its ass and fixes my POTS line. Given the power in case #2, above, that’s just dumb.

(Well; the signs still work; call it 95% useless.)

I think it’s probably time to shop for a new alarm system. In a city with a history of heavy weather, a system designed like the one I have seriously needs to get fired.

Why piracy will win in the end

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Because, as this Slate piece makes abundantly clear, the movie people are just too bone stupid to realize they have to compete with it.

The days of controlling distribution with arcane contracts and weird periods of artificial scarcity are over. If consumers can’t legally watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it, it’s becoming easier and easier for them to do so in ways that result in zero revenue for the copyright holder. Do the math.