464 words
A few bulletts regarding some of the day's reads
- Satellite based toll roads for the UK? at The Register. Hm. They're currently trying to implement this in Germany. Huge companies (the bastards known as Deutsche Telekom and Daimler-Chrysler, iirc) secured the contract to implement a high tech, satellite and mobile phone based toll system for the motorways – charging lorries only for the time being. It's a complete cock-up. The system should be running by now and it's not running at all. Every German probably knows the magic number of €156000000 by now, which allegedly is the amount of money the tax-payer loses because of corporate incompetence or lies. Per month, that is. They could fund more than ten times the money they stole our university this year from that sum. Even worse: the companies and the government are very secretive about the contract. Any compensation as you'd expect? Probably not. After all the companies will only earn nine digit sums from the system... The situation looks quite similar to what's told about London's congestion charge. Wouldn't it be simpler and as effective if you used traditional toll booths, put people without work in there and let them keep half of the money? Shouldn't the public have full access to any contract made in its name?
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More bitching about Google by Andrew Orlowski. While his observations are accurate, his conclusions are wrong as usual – as he's actually bitching about Movable Type instead of Google. Of course Google is the sole cause of the problems here. The web didn't ask Google to be indexed. If their algorithms aren't up to the task of extracting the relevant information from the pages they spider that's hardly the faulte of the (text) web pages in question. Assuming that Google's business is making people find what they're looking for, it's safe to assume that they're working on better algorithms as I write.
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Nice Dilbert and Calvin and Hobbes cartoons today. Featuring choice quotes as
The best part about hating people is that I never run out of great ideas
.
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Using choice as an adjective is quite tacky, I guess.
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A new version of TinkerTool. Unfortunately it has returned to be a standalone application rather than a preference pane. While this may be good for compatibility, it's a shame usability-wise. Yet another application littering the Utilities folder.
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CocoaSuite, a followup to Cocoa Gestures, I guess. Looks quite cool, even giving visual drop-shadowed feedback when using gestures and providing 'jog-wheel' control for the trackpad – with additionally pressed keys unfortunately and for Cocoa apps only at this time. While I think it's all neat and pretty, I'm not sure I'll actually use it. And $30 is quite a steep price for an add-on utility.
October 15, 2003, 16:15
