The west coast of the USA is about to fall off – Lex Luthor style
Lex Luthor: Now, call me foolish, call me irresponsible, but it occurs to me that a 500 megaton bomb planted at just the proper point would, uh…
Superman: Would destroy most of California. Millions of innocent people would be killed. The west coast as we know it would…
Lex Luthor: Fall into the sea.
Lex Luthor: Bye-bye, California. Hello, new west coast. My west coast.
Lex Luthor: Costa Del Lex. Luthorville. Marina del Lex.
Lex may have just gotten his way with the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a subduction zone that stretches from Northern “Vancouver Island” to “Northern California”.
An interesting little footnote on Wikipedia states there is a 37% risk of a 9 (or higher) earthquake along the entire west coast of the USA within the next 50 years!
My advice? Buy Nevada BUY!!!!
Flash & Flex Latency – The Unspoken Elephant in the Room
At the risk of starting a huge flame war I’ve been wanting to mention something that’s been bugging me for years about Flash and now Flex.
User Interaction Latency.
When I use a native HTML or desktop app things happen instantly. When I click a drop down it instantly snaps down, when I scroll the page instantly moves.
When I do these things in Flash (website or air) there is a user interaction lag. Very noticeable on older machines but still noticeable even on the most modern machine. Just a fraction of a second, but noticeable none the less.
I’ve spoken to other Flash Dev’s (yes, I am a Flash developer of many years) who swear there is no Latency and that Flash is just as responsive as native apps HTML or desktop apps.. I don’t get why they don’t see it.
Anyway, user interaction latency is the only reason why I don’t use flash for my personal projects such as Pluggio
Anyone else notice it? Is it just me? Or am I correct in thinking it’s the unspoken elephant in the room…?
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You can follow me on twitter @justinvincent or check out Pluggio the twitter client I’m building in jQuery.
Bill Gates Bans iTunes From Windows
This just in from our news desk.
Today Bill Gates made the unprecedented announcement that Apple’s iTunes is banned from the Windows OS.
Our roving reporter was lucky enough to catch up with Bill and ask him why Microsoft had made this astonishing announcement. Bill had the following to say on this subject…
“In the first place we were happy that they (Apple) deployed iTunes to Windows; we got a lot of new customers just because of that one app, but, then we heard from an inside source that they (Apple) used the EXACT SAME code-base for iTunes Mac as for Windows.
On closer inspection we noticed that iTunes didn’t even use the real windows API! They make their own scroll system and their own chrome COMPLETELY bypassing our fantastic Windows OS. So, we’ve decided enough is enough. We’ll allow iTunes back into Windows when they (Apple) make the following changes.
- Apple MUST write a specialised version of iTunes on Windows and use Windows compilers and Windows languages ONLY
- Apple MUST use native windows controllers such as our in built Windowing system and scroll objects.
- Apple MUST lose this RIDICULOUS attitude of writing code once and deploying to multiple operating systems. Just don’t go there.
If they (Apple) can follow those few simple rules, then we (Microsoft) will be happy to allow them back on Windows.”
Update:
Just to be clear this is a Thought Experiment article parodying the double standards that came from Apple’s 3.3.1 T&C clause. Also, the author (Me) is a huge fan of Apple and ironically purchased a Mac Book Pro the very day this article was written!
Update 2:
If you liked this, you can follow me on Twitter @justinvincent and/or check out the Twitter client I’m building in jQuery @ pluggio.com 🙂
Url Shorteners Curse Like Motherf****rs
You know the theory that if you leave 100 monkeys in a room – with 100 typewriters – for infinity – they would at some point write the entire works of Shakespeare…
Well, for some reason (perhaps because I’m immature) it occurred to me – do url Shorteners make curse words as they cycle through their auto generated alphanumeric ID’s
Apparently they do.
http://bit.ly/DiCk
http://is.gd/ARSE
http://bit.ly/wAnK
http://is.gd/tit
http://bit.ly/FuCk
$10 prize to the person who finds the most humerus and ironic.
Note: Prize only awarded to entries based on auto generated URL shorteners.
Can Wave Really Be The Big-Ticket Google Wants?
In Daniel Tenner’s blog post about Wave he explains that the bad press is all a matter of perspective and that Wave is most useful for corporate collaboration… I have to say he makes a very convincing case.
But, for Google, if that’s true it’s not great news.
Google’s “big play” is advertising revenue… they make huuuuge amounts of money via advertising – their enterprise offerings are tiny by comparison.
So, if Google Wave is mainly useful for enterprise clients they will have to charge for it (because those clients won’t allow adverts).
And, given Google’s past history I doubt they would charge Oracle level prices… so, in other words, just how big is the opportunity from Google’s perspective? How much money could they make compared to the ubiquity of their global advertising model?
I’m not saying Wave is bad or anything like that, just making an observation that, perhaps, Wave will simply end up being a trophy technology that Google are very proud of – but that represents a tiny percent of thier anual revenue.
What do you think?