Online rating systems: better based on cash

One may wonder why Amazon has various rating systems built in (one is customer reviews, another is "did you find this review helpful?", and finally, there's one for rating sellers), whereas blogger.com and Wikipedia do not. Even eBay has a rudimentary one.

You might also wonder book authors and electronics manufacturers don't spam the amazon rating system somehow. Even Wikipedia gets spammed. In the case of eBay, this is fairly clear: to rate, you have to pay. You could sell your friends stuff and they would up your rating, but you would still have to pay the eBay fee. Similarly for Amazon sellers: without a sale, you don't get to judge the seller.

Basically, the only way to be safe from spam is to force the rater to surrender cash. A possible alternative is to get his credit card details (although any one person may have more than one credit card), and a third alternative is to keep track of IP addresses (with internet cafes and dynamic IPs, this is a weak one, though). Email addresses, obviously, forget it.

Open source, stability and release cycles

Windows releases every, erm..., six years. Mac OS X releases nearly once a year. Ubuntu Linux releases every half year. Fedora Core is now releasing every seven to nine months.

My experience with both Fedora Core in the first three releases, and Ubuntu up until now, is that system updates break things. The final release has always undergone such thorough testing as to work really well, but it seems that the updates following are sent through relatively unfiltered from the upstream projects, and this is typically where things break. OS X has much less frequent updates, and these are generally better tested, and rarely break things (never for me).

The problem arises as much from the fact that servers need first and foremost to be secure (whereas desktop systems need first and foremost to be useable) as it does from the fact that desktop systems have more complex package dependencies. I hope that the software industry can get to the point where desktop systems need only be upgraded sporadically, and where the upgrades are thoroughly tested. This should be just as possible for Linux to achieve as it evidently is for OS X.

Closed source and reinventing the wheel

It's not great news to anyone that closed source code leads to permanent reinventing of the wheel. Nonetheless, I am impressed by the number of programs out there, especially on the Mac platform, that all do the same thing in only slightly different ways. There are at least a half dozen each of RSS readers, notebooks (think OneNote), launchers and web browsers for Aqua/Cocoa. I've no doubt there is a lot of innovation going on and that there are advantages to the approach in that it enforces having completely separate projects, each with complete freedom to develop (after all, some basic components, such as html rendering, are usually provided by the OS, meaning developers need merely wrap a GUI around it). However, it does strike me that the creators are often unaware of other people's existing creations. This does not usually happen with open source, as first versions are released early, and newcomers tend to join the fastest-developing projects, so that even competing lead developers sometimes abandon their projects and join their prior rivals. Nonetheless, as we see with jukebox applications, projects periodically replace each other as something better gets developed from scratch (for an example, see how Amarok is taking over from XMMS - with several others waiting in the wing for their chance - or how gnome is replacing KDE as the main Linux distributors' favourite). I have yet to see this approach stifle innovation, although it has to be said that OS X remains the most technologically advanced environment.

Google Earth will not go South

Anyone ever tried to surf Antarctica using Google Earth? I was disappointed to find that the satellite pictures are apparently organised to converge on the poles, leading to Antarctica being displayed in slices, besides the low resolution. I hope this will be improved.

Listened, not bought

I've just been reading about the new technology that's supposed to let you download any song that the radio happens to be playing. This is meant to be put into mobile phones and stationary digital radios, and a song would cost 1.25 GBP. The way it's described, it sounds like a client side technology, where the client knows the identity of the song playing on any given station. This would mean your client could continually pick the stations playing your favourite songs at that very moment, without any purchase ever made!

I really hope for their sakes that the inventors implemented this as a server-side technology, otherwise... oh dear!

Laptop makers supporting Linux

Just as I predicted, PC makers are being driven to increasingly support Linux as the only other notable operating system available to them, Windows, falls behind competitor Mac OS X.

How the distribution of money affects consumer decisions

I'll just give two examples here:

Speed-dating agencies in the UK charge about £20 per person per evening, where an evening might be attended by around 30 people. To put on an evening of this kind, they need probably less than a handful of their own staff, plus an arrangement with the venue (which is probably easily arranged, since the customers will be buying drinks - the venue is typically a reasonably fashionable bar).

Takings of £600 for an evening clearly outstrip the costs by a wide margin, I imagine in the region of 50-200% margin depending on the exact circumstances. Why are we willing to pay that much? Would you want to attend a meeting whose stated purpose is finding a social and sexual partner knowing they had paid less than 20 quid?

Example number 2. People often pay a premium of up to 100% on the top food brand as opposed to the store brand or an unmarketed "brand". Why? Because the industry leader is rich enough to take measures that ensure the quality of the product and avoid a lawsuit brought by customer. An attempt to build an alternate brand if the first one is tarnished would be unlikely to succeed. A brand that has not spent money on advertising can more easily recover.

I'm sure there are more business opportunities that could be built around these general principles.

Scratchy no sell

To my mind, the craze to personalise items is a scam by hardware vendors to prevent resale of products. One might wonder whether Apple's scratchy iPod screens fall into the same category.

Speeding up Firefox

Things to try:

Fasterfox extension - for all platforms
Firefox builds optimised for various Mac platforms - e.g. Firefox 1.5.0.4 builds
Swiftfox - Linux builds for specific AMD and Intel processors

PC upgrades: why little makes a difference

People may reasonably marvel why they should pay much extra for having an 60GB rather than a 40GB hard drive, or a 2GHz processor rather than 1.8GHz. On the face of it, the price may seem designed for people who want the best, and the abstaining consumer may be proud to be a member of the less easily fooled. However, do consider that your operating system may consume some 10GB of hard disk space, so now you get 50GB rather than 30GB. Sounds better already? The same goes for RAM (memory); it is anticipated that the next Windows version may consume as much as 512MB of memory just to run. So if you bought 2GB total memory rather than 1GB (as a hypothetical future example, these configurations would currently be thought unusually performant *cough*), you'd have 1.5GB free vs. 512MB. Quite a difference, non? You've suddenly gone from factor 2 to factor 3.

Thinking about CPU speed is slightly more complex, because the benefit depends whether your system usage scales with the clockspeed or not. If you have lots of CPU intensive services running at regular intervals (such as a web server, not unheard of!), you will benefit from having those extra 200MHz extra, although whether you realise this, and are actually more efficient because of it, is up to you to assess. However, personally, choosing between a 1.83GHz and a 2.16GHz CPU, I would always go for the lower end. For many years, chip manufacturers like Intel have worked hard to make us believe that your computer's performance depends crucially on the clockspeed. Experts know that RAM is more important, and stuff their machines full of it. (This is partly the fault of PC sellers, who will invariably package the smallest amount of RAM that will keep the machine going. Currently, this would be 512MB. Even 768MB will give you markedly better performance, and may cost you less than a 100 GBP to upgrade!)

Kaleem Aftab

Just want to share one of my secret tips with you. I was reading Kaleem Aftab's reviews when he was still writing for The List. Best movie reviews I ever read. He really knows what to appreciate about a film. He writes stuff for the Independent these days, aside of his book, Spike Lee: That's My Story and I'm Sticking To It, and his film projects. Kaleem, let's see more of you! Miss you at The List, it's not been the same and I stopped buying it.

The BBC gave him some "my space" thing with an interface that makes my eyes hurt. Still, some might find it useful...

How many packages does your distro have?

Data from Wikipedia.

Apple pricing: Mac Mini vs. MacBook

So an extra £150 (check out the Core Duo Mac Mini) gets you a display, battery, keyboard and touchpad?

Elephant Dreams

Being a fan of Blender and its community, I've just watched Elephant Dreams. It's like a film with bad acting. Rather reminded me of that other free animation film featuring a cute robot alone in a space station, with some kind of guard robot chasing it. It was really boring.

Elephant Dreams' character animations remind me of the Plumber short film, which was actually rather good, very funny. I just wish that they'd improvised ED with real actors first.

Okay. It sucks. Sorry. Show me some open source that works. Thanks.

OS X needs a meta-window-switching key

In order to ease the transition of Linux and Windows users to OS X, it really needs an application-agnostic window switching key, different from either Cmd-Tab or Cmd-`, which change either within or between applications, and can be quite limiting to the keyboard-centric user.

Update 30/07/2006: Prayer answered.

Growl, Azureus and other GUI evils

Some of you may be familiar with the OS X add-on Growl, which displays little messages that programs send in a pop-up window that does not take focus. Other programs, such as Azureus, have this ability built in without using Growl. Windows has had this feature for a long time, so why has Apple never implemented it?

There is a very sensible reason. Remember the icons in the dock that jump up and down when an application needs attention? Rather than throwing a window your way like most Windows applications would, often resulting in text or even passwords being lost or disclosed by typing them into the wrong window that has just popped up, OS X is courteous and kindly asks the user for some of his attention, "when you're ready".

Moreover, it does so in an area of the screen that is usually guaranteed not to be used for any other purpose. Growl, on the other hand, could quite conceivably pop up in an area of the screen that the user is actually performing work in, and prevent the user from executing a mouse action, and break his concentration. Some may intuit that the problem could be alleviated by having Growl messages displayed in a separate window, which would then cause its icon to bob, being more courteous. But this is actually worse than having the original application take such action, because the user couldn't tell at a glance which application was calling him. On the other hand, applications use Growl to display many more messages than they would usually display of their own. So perhaps they should not be displaying these messages at all, since doing so would simply lead to an inflation of messages, and an all-dancing desktop. If that's what we wanted, we'd be using Windows, right?

Google and Amazon?

If someone can explain to me why Amazon and Google haven't figured out a way to integrate GoogleAds and MarketPlace, please do! It could be so simple:

The customer pays Google not for clicks, but for actual successful sales resulting from clicks. Reciprocally, Google could automatically adjust its advertising so that customers' ads appear on the page for the search results that generate the most revenue for the customer. Finally, Google could reward customers whose clicks result in revenue more often by ranking them at the top of the ads page. I haven't recently followed up the GoogleAd bombs story (you make a bot to click on competitors' ads to relieve them of their money) and whether Google has found a solution for this, but this is a solution that works because you pay per sale, not per click. Hire me? :)

Update 13/06/2006: Well, look what they did. I should stop posting.

Update 30/07/2006: As a sidenote, Froogle already provides seller ratings for some sellers.

Spotlight: Apple's grip on UI goodness is slipping

Doubtless many of you will have noticed that Spotlight returns results in a window while it's still searching its index. This is a useless and annoying feature, as you could actually try to click one of the items - it is possible - but then end up opening the wrong one because the list has expanded between your first and second clicks. Steve Jobs, I'm losing faith. Thermal paste?

Apple needs to back web-based office apps

Here I go disagreeing with Robert Cringely again.

He writes in a recent "pulpit" edition that Apple needs to develop their own competitor to Office so Microsoft can no longer boss them around. I had previously commented on Cyberdog's suggestion that Apple had introduced BootCamp to break MS Office's power over OS X.

What Cringely is apparently oblivious to is the existence of web-based office replacements such as Group Office (GPL) and ThinkFree Office (proprietary). ThinkFree in particular constitutes a fairly faithful and fully compatible clone of MS Office. However, when I last checked, it was capable neither of executing VBA macros nor of performing statistical calculations, not to mention having citation functionality that usually comes on the form of EndNote.

Great as Pages and Keynote may be from a user interface and eye candy perspective, if Apple were to invest in one of these web-based office solutions to supplement the missing features, they'd catch Microsoft up in no time, at smaller effort.

Update 28/05/2006: I'm not the only one to find Cringely occasionally flakey. Daniel Eran also has a few chickens to pluck with the controversial man. Let's see if I can take on Eran next ;)

Who's your daddy?

I'm trying to decide whether this computer is trying to look like this computer or this computer.