Category: Random Thoughts

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HP Is An Evil Company

Hewlett-Packard is simply an evil company. In Israel, their customer support has been so awful that Israeli customers united and contacted the global management about the quality lack of service. That alone says a lot – Israeli customers rarely unite. Online forums are full with disappointed customers, who could not get their devices fixed for one reason or another. It has come to the point where I simply recommend friends not to buy HP products because there will be no support for them.

Another thing is the well-known high cost of HP Inkjet printer cartridges. The European Parliament even forced HP to remove “smart chips” from their cartridges in order to get their prices lower (link to a 2002 news article). I haven’t bought an HP product in years… I wonder if that actually worked.

Why do I talk about this now? Because an HP former employee just revealed 14 Hewlett-Packard “Company Secrets”, all of them infuriating if you ever had problems with HP customer support. The one that left me with my jaws open wide was this one:

Many HP Printers, like their laser printers, have a built-in page-count after which they won’t work.

Yes, you read it right. Your printer might stop working just because you printed a certain number of pages already. Later on, another 9 more “fun HP facts” like these were published.

There is only one simple conclusion – HP is an evil company. I recommend you to not buy their products and let them rot. (via Digg)

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An Observation About The Chevrolet Malibu Signaling Lights

Yesterday I drove behind a Chevrolet Malibu for about 30 seconds and noticed something that seemed strange and dangerous. Here’s what the Chevrolet Malibu 2006 rear side looks like:
Chevrolet Malibu LTZ 2006 Rear
The Malibu uses, as many other cars do, the same lights on the left hand and right hand sides for both turn- and break-signaling. Additionally it has another middle light only for break-signaling. Let’s call these lights L (left), M (middle) and R (right).

For example, what happens when the driver both breaks and signals that he’s about to make a right turn? As expected, L and M are lit (to signal the break) while R is blinking (to signal the turn). Only the timing is what’s wrong in the Malibu. For the following diagram, let’s assume that:

  1. turn signaling is on and off in one-second intervals (for simplicity, but I think it’s pretty close to reality, as far as the Malibu goes);
  2. the driver starts turn-signaling right at the 1.5 second mark; and
  3. the driver starts breaking at the 2 seconds mark.

Here’s what the lights look like in this case:

   |     driver starts signaling right
   |     |
R  | 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0
   |       driver starts breaking
   |       |
M  | 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
   |             L lights up
   |             |
L  | 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1
   |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+------------>time(sec)
   0   1   2   3   4   5

As you can see, when the driver breaks, M is immediately lit (thank god) but L “waits” and stays dark until R is lit again. Only then L is lit to signal the break – 1.5 second after the driver hit the breaks. While this is happening, only M is an indication that the car is breaking.

I think that’s dangerous, as the middle light is an auxiliary break light and the standard is for right and left (at least one of them) to signal the breaking action. In any case it’s weird because what the driver behind the Malibu sees is the blinking right light, then the middle light turning on and then the left light turning on. This is irregular and potentially confusing.

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Extreme… Diet Coke and Mentos

The original Diet Coke and Mentos video showed what happens when you put some Mentos in a bottle of diet coke (the bottle sprays diet coke as if it was shaken badly). Google started spreading the Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos video as a “tribute” to the domino effect an online video can have.

More importantly, other than being fun to watch, this video is the first ad sponsored Google video and marks a new era in the online videos market. Watch out for video and audio ads. They’re coming soon.

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I suck at explaining computer-related issues to other people

When I try to explain computer-related things to other people I usually fail at bringing them to the understanding level that I hope they will have following the explanation. The problem is that I can’t figure out what’s wrong with what I say.

I guess one thing is that I want people to understand what they’re doing instead of just following my instructions until the next time they need to do the same thing again. It’s hard for me to accept the fact that sometimes people simply don’t want to understand what they’re doing with a computer but just get it done. Surprisingly I was the same with math – although I wanted to understand things when I studied math, many times I gave up and just asked for a way to solve problems without understanding.

Another reason is that things seem pretty obvious to me. Of course they weren’t so obvious when I first had to learn them, but now I find it hard to explain because I can’t recreate in my mind the learning process that I had to go through. It’s probably a different process for me and for others, anyway. I guess I’m not such a good teacher – good teachers can relate to the student’s state of mind to see how they can bring the student to a level of understanding.

Anyway, the outcome of all this is usually that I get upset as things I say don’t help the person I’m supposed to help and it becomes very apparent, making the entire process a pain for both me and the other side.

So to anyone I tried to help and made it into an unpleasant experience – I’m sorry.

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The Daily WTF and The Hidden Network

The people at The Daily WTF decided to start a job board, HiddenNetwork.com, with the stated mission to “put top-talent within the reach of employers by advertising high-quality job opportunities”. The job board is not the first attempt at this. For example, Joel Spolsky (of Joel On Software) has his own niche job board with similar goals.

What I found interesting about the new job board announcement was this observation:

Have you ever noticed how, out of all the people you work with, the ones who read tech blogs are the strongest employees? It’s not that reading blogs inherently makes you smarter, but in order to read tech blogs, you need to deeply care about technology and have a passion to improve yourself and learn more.

When people ask me how I can afford reading one hour of tech-related news every day as part of my working hours, I say that as far as I’m concerned this is part of my job. I’m a better programmer thanks to reading about new software at freshmeat.net or even reading about new Web 2.0 start-ups although my job has no relation to the world wide web. Knowing what’s going on in the tech world is a good way of keeping my mind sharp and learning new things.

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Will eBooks replace books?

Now that Sony actually sells its Portable Reader System (pictures, some details) I’m wondering if eBooks will actually replace books and newspapers in the future. I would love to try such a product, although not necessarily from Sony, which has been really unfriendly to its customers/users in the past year or so.

On a side note: “Portable Reader System” – isn’t it the worst name for this kind of product? Makes me think like I’ll be carrying an entire computer on my back.

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Browzar – the secure browser that wasn’t (or: How tech sites sometimes report stuff without checking the facts)

A few days ago a new web browser, called Browzar, appeared on the Internet. Claiming to be a privacy-oriented browser, Browzar immediately caught the eye of technology websites which started reporting it. Here are some examples: The Register, Lifehacker and Download Squad.

However, after a few days it turned out that Browzar is not really what it claimed to be. Browzar is simply a wrapper around Internet Explorer, which is not a bad thing by itself. It keeps your privacy by cleaning Internet Explorer’s cache and history, thus protects other users of the same computer from knowing what you’ve been doing. That’s not enough for a browser to get so much hype, as there are many tools that do this already.

This wouldn’t make it to my blog on a regular day. But I’m troubled with the way this browser got so much news before anyone really tried it to see what it’s worth. The hype around this browser was very much unjustified, and this is why I didn’t include links to its download page.

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Are we in a new bubble?

Around the year 2000 there was the dot-com bubble. Companies got a lot of money just for adding “.com” to their names, and even companies like Kozmo.com, whose delivery costs exceeded their total revenue, grew bigger and bigger for no reason.

I remember back then that a website or a service with a user base had its worth calculated according to the number of registered users. That’s why ICQ got a lot of money from AOL (the technology of instant messaging developed by ICQ was relatively simple). I even remember that there were numbers saying “one user is worth so-and-so cents”.

Then, after everyone realized they were not actually making any profit, there was the hi-tech downturn and investors were very careful with their money. Now, following the whole Web 2.0 craze, investors are again investing in small web startups. However, lately some startup companies closed their doors. True, most of them are small and simply have rough competition. Take, for example, the online calendar market. It is now filled with competitors, Google Calendar among them. Kiko.com is a startup that had an online calendar as a product and sold itself on eBay later. Here are some notes from a Kiko.com GUI developer..

But this is not what worries me most. I’m mostly worried about websites that are given money according to popularity. It reminds me of the cents-per-user times and how much it didn’t matter later on when no one was making money. Now, in an interview with Paul Graham, Mr. Graham says we’re not in a bubble. He also says things like “founders shouldn’t worry about a business model when they start a company. They should have something that people want and worry about the business model later.” Although I would like to believe that’s true and go start my own company, such remarks frigthen me most.

So are we in a new bubble or not?

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Subject-only emails – I’ve been doing that for years

I have a friend who used to make fun of me for writing him email messages with a long subject. He claimed that the subject line already contained the entire content of the email. He, on the other hand, used to write me emails with a one-word subject, almost always “hi”. When I complained to him about this (not being able to locate his email by the subject) he started enumerating them (e.g. “hi1”, “hi2” and so on).

Now it turns out the subject-only emails can be an effective way to send a quick message without all the hassle of filling out a proper message body. (via Lifehacker)

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Videos and XHTML Strict (or: a rant about Google Video and YouTube)

Recently I posted a video of Ace, my cat, playing around. The video was uploaded to Google Videos, as I knew I could later embed the video in the post.

When I validated my home page a few days later, as I do from time to time to see that it still conforms to the XHTML Strict standard, I was surprised to realize that it does not conform to the standard because of the video code I inserted into the post. I tried looking for a solution, but the truth is that I didn’t want to be looking a solution. I expected Google to provide me with standard-conforming code.

You may (or may not) know that Google supports standards and encourages website owners to make their code standard-conforming. It is a common belief that the more a website is standard-conforming the more it is likely to be indexed correctly by search engine, like Google’s.

So, following my disappointment with Google, I uploaded the video to YouTube, hoping that their code would be standard conforming. I was upset to see that it wasn’t, but at least with YouTube I found a quick fix and now my website has the video and is standard-conforming to XHTML Strict.