Posts tagged: RANTS

Seeing a QuickTime upgrade show up in Software Update today reminded me that I’d been meaning to briefly rant about the split between Quicktime and QuickTime Pro and what a silly anachronism it is. John Siracusa said it best in his Ars Technica review of OS X 10.4:

Mac OS X ships with a complete integrated development environment that supports C, C++, Objective-C, Java, and all of the APIs in Mac OS X (not to mention distributed compiling, a GUI design and layout tool, and a suite of performance monitoring applications). Tiger includes a free web browser, e-mail client, address book, dictionary, thesaurus, font manager, and AIM/Jabber instant message client. When you buy an iMac you get all of the above plus iLife: iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band, and iDVD.

The starting premise here is: most speakers sold to work with the iPod and other DAPs are crap. They have fragile plastic cases, pointless stereo, and little 1" speakers that “deliver surprisingly good sound quality” or whatever euphemism one uses when trying to rationalize spending $100+ on something that sounds like a telephone receiver.

I’ve pitched my idea for a better approach to my cool product designer friends, but they’re busy working on magnesium snowboard bindings, electric mountain bikes, and military-spec safety glasses.

Jakob Nielsen, who you of course know as “the usability Pope” and “the next best thing to a true time machine,” recently published an essay titled “Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes”.

I’m going to run down his ten-point list and weigh his “Alertbox” pages against my blog according to each of his criteria. Now, you might say that this isn’t fair since Alertbox is a newsletter, not a blog, and that he’s been doing it since 1995, long before “blogging” was even a word. I say it’s a “web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles” in reverse-chronological order and it’s time to face the music!

A lot of eBay phishing scams take you to websites that not only mimic the look of the site they’re impersonating, but actually contain live links to that site and even use images hosted there.

I just got one today: an email with the ironic subject line of “eBay Fraud Mediation Request.” I always take a look at these to see if the scammers have any new tricks. I even click on the links (being a Mac user emboldens me there). This one took me to a site called www.signin-e-bay.com (I’m omitting the full link that takes you to the scam pages). The page was full of links to real eBay pages and used images hosted on eBay servers.

Whenever I get one of these communiques through eBay I’m always astonished at the amount of extra verbiage. This one takes the cake, though. Only about 1% of the message body is the actual message – the words “it’s taken care of.” Presented below in full, slightly reformatted and munged.

From: 	  member@ebay.com
Subject: 	Re: Question for item #__ - __ __ __
Date: 	September 17, 2005 4:03:09 PM EDT (CA)
To: 	  __@e-scribe.com
Reply-To: 	  __@comcast.net

----------------------------------------------------------------

eBay sent this message to __ __ (__). 
Your registered name is included to show this message originated
from eBay. 
Learn more:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/confidence/name-userid-emails.html 
----------------------------------------------------------------
eBay sent this message on behalf of an eBay member via My
Messages. Responses sent using email will go to the eBay member
directly and will include your email address. Use the Respond
link below to send your response via My Messages (your email
address will not be included).			
----------------------------------------------------------------

Important Marketplace Safety Tip:
http://pages.ebay.com/securitycenter
---------------------------------------	
Always remember to complete your transaction on eBay -- it's the
safer way to buy. 

Please do not offer to buy or sell this item through this form
without completing the transaction on eBay. If you receive a
response inviting you to transact outside of eBay, you should
decline -- such transactions may be unsafe and are against eBay
policy.

================================================================
Response to Question about Item -- Respond Now
================================================================

Response from __
Item: __ __  (__)
This message was sent while the listing was active.
__ is the seller.
---------------------------------------
it's taken care of

================================================================
Respond to this question in My Messages: 
http://contact.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?M2MContact&item=__&
requested=__&qid=1251585165&redirect=0
================================================================

Item Details
---------------------------------------
Item name:                             __ __ 
Item number:                           __
End date:                              Sep-19-05 15:34:28 PDT

View the item description here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=__&sspagename
=ADME:L:RTQ:US:1

---------------------------------------
Is this email inappropriate? Does it violate eBay policy? Help
protect the community by reporting it.
-- eBay policy:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/rfe-unwelcome-email-misuse.
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-- Report URL:
http://cgi1.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ReportEmailAbuseshow&
emaildate=2005/09/17:13:03:09&emailtype=3&trackId=__

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Hitachi really made a splash with their “Hard Drive is the New Bling” promotion, or contest, or campaign, or practical joke, or whatever it is. We all had a good laugh and the writers of Engadget swore off the word “bling” forevermore. But the tin-eared marketing pales next to the sheer wrongness underneath.

The pitch wasn’t really about bling at all, or even geek bling. I imagine what it said before Cory Coolhunter in Marketing got hold of it was, “We should tell everybody that the best portable electronic devices use Hitachi microdrives.” I think in the end that will prove to have been briefly true. But microdrives are on the way out. They have no inherent advantages over flash (that I know of), so they only exist at a particular size tier as long as flash memory at that tier is significantly more expensive. This is surely obvious to everyone, except maybe to Hitachi – who don’t seem to make flash memory devices.

This is really one of the most maddening things that OS X does:

The disk "Foo" is in use and could not be ejected.

Try quitting applications and try again.

Hey, you’re the damn computer – try telling me what those applications are! Try telling me what files are in use! Try letting me override!

---

Quentin Stafford-Fraser commented on Tue Sep 13 04:29:25 2005:

Agreed - this has always bugged me, and Windows does just the same.