Category Archives: General

Bears Make Money, Bulls Make Money, But Pigs Get Slaughtered

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Tech companies would do well to heed this time-proven advice to investors. They are truly greedy these days, forcing themselves on users. The most recent push-back by a journalist that we’ve seen is from Patric May at the San Jose MercuryNews, who tried to unsubscribe from the firehose of unwanted emails he was receiving. One thing he learned was that using “Unsubscribe” was like pouring gasoline on a fire, because it confirmed a valid email address to the sender, who could then sell it to dozens or hundreds of other companies, all of whom could then bombard him with THEIR emails.

There are lots of other self-serving ploys from other companies. Does Dropbox really care all that much to protect your files by reminding you to use it, or is it because they want you to use a lot of storage that they can charge you for? And why else did they immediately upload all your photos to their site other than filling up your “free” storage so they could start charging you for the additional storage. Apple does the same thing to a new iPhone, whether you want them to or not. Did you really want your thousands of carefully-cataloged photos dumped into a single big tub? We thought not.

How Do I Scam Thee (with SEO)? Let Me Count the Ways.

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The count must be in the billions. Our sister websites, Wilddancer.com and WhyMenDieYoung.com had been getting a few sales pitches from people who were able to breach our FormToEmail Comments security or leave comments on our WordPress blogs. But, thanks to professional advice and implementation, we were pretty immune to the automatic web crawlers, so scammers had to make considerable effort to get through. When we added our Blooper Jar, a kind of “incoming blog”, though, we started getting frequent posts from from an apparently clueless company called SwingSEO Solutions, starting with the following from Brigitte: “Hi, my name is Brigitte and I am the marketing manager at SwingSEO Solutions. I was just looking at your Worst User Interface | Blooper Jar site and see that your site has the potential to get a lot of visitors. I just want to tell you, In case you didn’t already know… There is a website network which already has more than 16 million users, and the majority of the users are looking for niches like yours. By getting your site on this service you have a chance to get your site more visitors than you can imagine. It is free to sign up and you can read more about it here: http://anders.ga/w-6×2 – Now, let me ask you… Do you need your website to be successful to maintain your business? Do you need targeted traffic who are interested in the services and products you offer? Are looking for exposure, to increase sales, and to quickly develop awareness for your site? If your answer is YES, you can achieve these things only if you get your website on the network I am talking about. This traffic network advertises you to thousands, while also giving you a chance to test the service before paying anything at all. All the popular sites are using this service to boost their readership and ad revenue! Why aren’t you? And what is better than traffic? It’s recurring traffic! That’s how running a successful site works… Here’s to your success! Read more here: http://stg2bio.co/10fz – or to unsubscribe please go here: http://todochiapas.mx/C/36p” There were small variations in the sender’s name, title, organization name, etc., but the pattern was mostly identical. Likely these were being done by a “Mechanical Turk” being paid a very small amount for each.

Likely the number of misleading missives sent by one Mechanical Turk is small in comparison to the number of companies claiming to conduct Search Engine Optimization (SEO) intended to skyrocket your site’s ranking to the very top of web searches. There must be a few legitimate experts, but they must find it tough sledding against all the illegitimate ones. Our advice: if you truly want to use one of them, do your homework first.

The Wall Street Journal’s Readers’ Most Annoying Technology Failures

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Two of The Journal’s technology writers led off with their own “Dirty Dozen” of most annoying technology failures in the March 11, 2015 issue, then followed up a week later with their analysis of readers’ comments. Thanks to our long background in surveys and statistics we at Technology Bloopers are well aware of the limitations of this data, but its high-level source and its “essay” type answers (as opposed to the all-too-frequent cookie cutter “multiple choice” questionnaires that flood everyone daily) were too tempting to pass up. (Note: Some commenters provided two or more unrelated comments, and we counted them separately, so strictly speaking the data we analyzed was about comments, not commenters.) We well realize that the sample is highly biased, but it is a very useful sort of bias; these commenters should be somewhat more knowledgeable, more powerful, and more well-paid than a random sample. So their comments, thoughtfully analyzed, should be very useful. But we can even further separate the comments into above-average and below-average knowledgeability by whether or not their comment was accompanied by a “gravatar” (i.e., “global avatar”, the little picture they use as a graphical representation of their Web presence, kind of an online logo). We were surprised that only about 28% of the responses came from the below-average-knowledge group.

The charts immediately tell a lot of the story: Passwords are the #1 most annoying technology failure (and this is true whether we’re talking about the whole group or only the above-average-knowledge subgroup). The combined complaints about the Wall Street Journal itself (bad technical support, bad advertising, bad comment system, bad mobile device app, and bad website) was #2 for the group as a whole but was mainly for the below-average-knowledge subgroup. Bad documentation/(technical) support and bad logic/user interface tied for #3, but the former had numerous above-average-knowledge commenters while the latter had very few. Two other annoyances that fell just below the top 6 shown in the chart were “Too Complex” and “Facebook is Not Essential”.

Pew Research’s Web IQ Quiz Suggests Need for Higher Questionnaire Design IQ

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What makes a survey good? It needs to be correct (i.e., to have correct answers that are representative of the populations being surveyed) and actionable (i.e., to have conclusions that are useful and can be implemented). Unfortunately the recent Pew Research Center’s Web IQ Quiz fails on the second criterion. Most of its questions would be more appropriate to a game of Trivial Pursuit than to a proof that U.S. adults are clueless about using the Web. Being able to identify Bill Gates or Sheryl Sandberg from their pictures is meaningless. Ditto the name of the first browser or the date of introduction of the iPhone. Moore’s Law is important as a predictor of computer speed and storage size, but has nothing to do with how people should use the Web. Etc. Interestingly, two of the most useful questions—on privacy policy and net neutrality—were answered as well (or even better) by older (50+) people than younger ones.

Black Friday: Brainwashed Beatification

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Black Friday is becoming a more important day than Thanksgiving. The name has two origins. First came the traffic chaos of the first day of the Christmas shopping season. Then came the recognition of another tradition–retailers’ switch from operating at a loss (“in the red”) to operating at a profit (“in the black”). While it is important for retailers to make a profit (otherwise there would be no retailers), and to be happy about that profit, it seems strange to see them advertising it. And even more strange to see consumers viewing it as a good thing … unless there is substantial price elasticity of demand, so that retailers truly will sell enough more at the lower prices so they can garner greater profits. Unfortunately, the commercialism of shopping is trumping an important American tradition, as people argue that they can buy more, or better, gifts thanks to the “special” prices than they could otherwise have done. Maybe they should re-think their list of giftees and quantity or price of their gifts.

But there seems to be a huge social aspect to “Black Friday”. Or at least there was when it was limited to Friday itself. Like a new product from Apple, when people camp out overnight to be sure to be among the first to have the latest iPhone or other gadget.

Can’t the FCC Count (the Viable Wireless Companies) Correctly? But Now They Have a Second Chance

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What are we at Technology Bloopers missing here? The Federal Communications Commission nixed the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint early in 2014, saying it was non-competitive. Huh? They apparently can’t count. That would have created three meaningful competitors rather than two meaningful ones and two also-rans. Even less charitable than us was The Washington Post. However, now T-Mobile’s prospective buyer Iliad SA has bowed out, giving the hapless FCC an opportunity to do some behind-the-scenes politicking to get Sprint to refresh their bid … if it isn’t too late.

California High Schools Flunk on Teaching Computer Science

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With giant companies in Silicon Valley needing software engineers, it would be logical that California high schools would be encouraged to teach computer science courses and the University of California system would count them toward the math requirements for admission. Aren’t both computer science and math what geeks are good at? As pointed out by Santa Clara University associate professor of computer science Dan Lewis there is a severe national shortage of computing-savvy college graduates. Latinos and African-Americans are way under-represented in taking AP (advanced placement) courses in computer science … and way under-represented in headcounts of Silicon Valley high-tech giants. Fortunately, San Jose Mercury News columnist Michelle Quinn is dedicatedly pushing to get headcount breakdowns, which could help motivate these minorities and stimulate their hiring by these giants.

Resolution Confusion: 4K TV’s, Apple Retina, and Lower-Resolution Displays

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The original goal of large-screen High Definition (HD) TV was to provide an immersive viewing experience. In order to achieve this the picture needed to be large enough to fill the viewer’s field of vision but to have small-enough pixels that the viewer could not see individual pixels. What’s a pixel? It means “picture element” (or “dot”, to most of us). Obviously, the more dots the better the picture quality. But more dots costs more money, so people buying TV sets or other displays (e.g., personal computers, tablets, or smartphones) may need to trade off image quality vs. cost. Fortunately, the constant advancement in technology means that displays keep becoming better and cheaper. The big deal in TV screen quality today is 4K. What’s that? It’s actually 4096×2160 (horizontal x vertical) pixels (4096 is 4K). Practically speaking, where displays are concerned, literally “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. It depends on how far your eyes are from the display, but if you can’t see individual pixels the resolution is probably high enough. Apple has made a big deal out of their 4K Retina displays, which are beautiful, but their high pixel density is unnecessarily high. And there is a huge amount of material that is viewed at far lower resolutions. Google Glass records its videos at 720p (1280×720 pixels), and a lot of YouTube videos are even considerably lower than this, maybe even lower than the old Standard Definition (SD) resolution of 640×480.

Will Solar-Powered UAVs be Cost-Effective to Bring the Internet to Unserved Areas?

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Facebook’s launch of its Connectivity Lab and hiring of the team that formed UK-based UAV maker Ascenta and Google’s acquisition of Titan Aerospace are aimed at putting long-life UAVs into the air that can transmit and receive Internet signals to locales currently lacking Internet service. While bringing the benefits of the Internet to developing regions is an admirable activity, we wonder if those regions offer attractively high purchasing power that would justify the advertising that will be beamed to them.

Technology is Not Wisdom

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In its day a solid-state calculator was amazing. And look at the incredible amount of technology millions of us literally have in the palms of our hands today with our smartphones. But, if we don’t use that technology to improve our comfort, safety, longevity, etc., where is the wisdom asks classics scholar and historian Victor Davis Hanson. Are the 4,000 texts per month of the average high-schooler wisdom? Do the million views per month of PewDiePie (Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg) watching as he plays video games add much, or any, wisdom to us individually or to our society?