Author Archive | Harry McCracken

Twitter Goes Down, Down, Down

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 6, 2009 at 9:23 am

Twitter goes downWhen Twitter is having reliability problems, the site is usually able to at least summon up a cheery FailWhale by way of apology. This morning, however, the nation’s  hottest social networing site has been the victim of a massive and effective Distributed Denial of Service attack. The problems apparently started around 6am PT this morning, and continue on–I’m only able to get in sporadically at the moment.

The site is hiccuping back to life, though, which is good, since it lets Twitter fans tweet about the unavailability of Twitter:

Twitter down

Here’s hoping that the trouble ends soon, and that we learn what happened–and that there aren’t too many Twitterhaters out there who are openly or silently gleeful this morning…

5 comments

Mouse Trouble: 20 Weird Pointing Device Patents

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2009 at 11:44 pm

Mouse Trouble

Build a better mousetrap, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously told us, and the world will beat a path to your door. On the other hand, computer-industry folks have been trying to build a better mouse for years–and the world has stayed away from 99 percent of them, including some fascinating works of unbridled mad genius. I’ve assembled a gallery of ill-fated mice (plus a few trackballs and mousepads), mostly drawn from the invaluable Google Patents. Some of these presumably turned into real products; others never got off the drawing board. Herewith, brief moments of delayed glory for all of them.

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Bing Gets a Jingle

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2009 at 11:36 pm

Bing LogoI just this very moment formulated a new theory about search engines: It may be impossible to do good TV-style advertising for them. They’re free, you can try them at will, and if they’re not pretty self-explanatory, they’ve failed from the get-go. All of which makes it hard to spend thirty seconds saying anything useful about them.

With that in mind, my instinct is not to judge the user-generated Bing jingle video that won Microsoft’s contest too harshly. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler compares it to Hell; I just find it…odd. (Possibly intentionally so, and odd in a catchy way, at least.) And except for the fact that the lyrics wouldn’t scan, it could be about any other search engine on the planet, from Google to a tenth-stringer like Mamma.

(I’m not going to stoop for criticizing the ad for the fact that the queries shown, such as “Learn to dance like Jonathan,” don’t provide useful results in Bing or any other search engine.)

Also looking on the bright side: It’s nowhere near as odd and ineffective as years and years of Ask.com ads that cost that company way, way more money than the $500 that Microsoft paid its contest winner.

Ask.com

Another plus: Bing’s new singing, dancing spokesman doesn’t vomit onscreen.

(Full disclosure: Bing is an advertiser on this site, and I’m a contributor to the Bing-sponsored BingTweets.)

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Windows 7: Already Buggy?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2009 at 3:12 pm

Windows 7 BugInfoWorld’s Randall Kennedy has blogged about reports of a bug with the Chkdsk utility in the RTM (final release version) of Windows 7 that could cause the OS to blue-screen. Kennedy attempted to replicate the problem on three Windows 7 configurations; they didn’t blue-screen, but did spawn a memory leak that gobbled up massive amounts of RAM.

Meanwhile, Ed Bott has also looked into the situation and concludes that whatever’s happening isn’t likely to crop up often enough or cause serious enough grief to be classified as a showstopper. And as Ed notes, Windows head honcho Steven Sinofsky has commented on another blog that reported on all this, saying that Chkdsk intentionally grabs a lot of memory to speed things up, and that Microsoft hasn’t been able to replicate the crash but it is looking into it.

Assuming that this is a real Win 7 issue that Microsoft can fix– but not in time to get it onto the first Windows 7 PCs–I suspect that it’ll roll out a patch that will be ready and waiting for installation by the time Windows 7 arrives on October 22nd.  Swatting bugs during the time between finishing RTM code and software actually getting to consumers seems to be standard practice these days; I’ve even talked to industryfolk (not at Microsoft) who cheerfully admit that it’s part of how they make deadlines.

Whether the issue Kennedy wrote about is a serious bug, a minor one or (as Sinofsky says) a feature, Windows 7 will be buggy. So will Apple’s Snow Leopard when it ships. So is all software–especially major updates to big, complex applications such as operating systems. That’s why Kennedy’s concluding advice makes sense:

What this latest episode has taught me is that no major release of Windows –- not even one that is more or less a supersized patch of the previous version –- deserves a pass, and that the old wisdom of “wait for the first service pack” still applies with Windows 7.

I’m enthusiastic about Windows 7 myself–hey, I’ve been running pre-release versions since last year. But I’ll still advise many friends (especially the less adventuresome among them) that it can’t hurt to let other people discover Windows 7’s worst glitches before making the move from XP or Vista.

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The T-Poll: Apple’s iPhone App Acceptance Policy

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2009 at 10:49 am

tpollHey, let’s try something new–a fresh T-Poll (powered by the wonderful PollDaddy) every weekday. For our first one, let’s revisit the ongoing story of Apple’s, um, unpredictable behavior when it comes to approving third-party applications for the iPhone App Store–the latest chapter of which involves it censoring a dictionary and then restricting sales to people over 17 anyhow. (Here’s John Gruber’s account over at Daring Fireball, which includes some of the words Apple required be purged.)

6 comments

More Tablet Naysaying

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2009 at 10:12 am

No TabletsOver at Cnet, Rafe Needleman joins the chorus of entirely rational skepticism that the world is ready for a tablet computer from Apple or anyone else:

But what you can do with a screen-only computer gets really limited when you expand the device beyond pocket size. There are two big limitations. First, you need a keyboard for doing real work. At least most people do. Perhaps a generation of kids will grow up that are as speedy on a virtual keyboard as they are on a real one, but until then anyone who does more than write quick e-mails and Twitter messages on a computer will want to take a keyboard with them. And typing on the screen, even if you can do it, is an ergo disaster. Either you have to keep your hands up in the air (if the computer is mounted vertically in front of you) or you have to hunch over your screen to see it. Maybe it’s the national chiropractors association that’s pushing this form factor.

Well said–except that I think it’s possible that the Apple tablet, if it exists, will skirt the issue by focusing on stuff that requires minimal typing. You don’t need a a keyboard to watch movies, listen to music, or play games; you barely need one to read e-books; you can do a lot of stuff on the Web that involves typing only a few words here and there.

One of the reasons I hope Apple does indeed launch a tablet in September is simply so the world can start critiquing the real thing rather than a theoretical Apple tablet–whether the world turns out to love it or hate it…

2 comments

Chrome Gets a New Version. No, Not for the Mac.

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2009 at 9:39 am

chromelogo5Google has released a new beta of the Windows version of its Chrome browser. The company says it’s faster, and it’s also added basic skinning, an improved New Tab feature, tweaks to the Omnibox address bar, and more HTML 5 support.

I say “the Windows version,” but that’s the only version of Chrome to receive a formal release to date, more than eleven months after Google got into the browser business. Developers builds of the OS X version are increasingly polished, though. Wouldn’t it be cool if Google celebrated the browser’s first birthday by finally bringing it to Mac users? (For now, Chrome is the browser I use most often these days when I’m using one of my Windows PCs; when I’m on a Mac, I’m usually a Firefox person.)

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5Words for Wednesday, August 5th 2009

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2009 at 8:48 am

5words

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Google buys a video company.

Mozilla’s online store gets hacked.

Netbook users: hide Gmail labels.

Microsoft: Yes, Linux threatens Windows.

BlackBerry Curve: top-selling smartphone.

Sprint’s WiMax-and-3g router.

Are fuel cells almost here?

Apple censors an English dictionary.

Give away stuff with Listia.

iPhone users: they’re revolting! Maybe…

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The Search for the World’s Best Presentation

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2009 at 8:24 am

World's Best Presentation ContestI’ve been writing about presentations and tools and tips for creating and conducting them since the Mesozoic era–way back when you most likely created your slides with Harvard Graphics, and maybe even printed them out on overhead transparencies. Today, I’m pleased to be one of the judges of The World’s Best Presentation Contest ’09. The competition is being held over at Slideshare, the neat service for embedding presentations in Web pages–so everyone who’s interested can see all the entries. And there are some neat prizes to be won, including a MacBook Pro, a Kindle DX, an iPhone 3GS, an HP TouchSmart laptop, and copies of Adobe’s Acrobat 9 and Creative Suite CS4.

I’m one of the judges for a category for presentations created with Acrobat 9–Adobe is the sponsor of the whole contest this year–along with Scott Belsky of Behance and Julie Hansen of The Business Insider. And three presentations I put together are on Slideshare. The contest is running through September 8th–check out the entries and spread the word!

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