Postcards from the Bleeding Edge
Saturday, January 29, 2005

  Distributing order takers in time and space

I disgustedly notice that I've had a lot of brands in my blogs lately. But:

McDonalds is using voip to distribute order taking out of the restaurant into a call center. Brilliant, so I thought - now someone can work as a burger flipper - from home (cool!)... or overseas (far less cool). Programmers in China and Bulgaria make less than a senior burger flipper does in the US. As pleased as I was originally with this innovative use of voip technology - I wonder what a burger flipper earns in these countries?

What the hell is a modern day American teenager to do when his/her job, too - is outsourced? What happens when this sort of outsourcing is critical to the day to day functioning basic services like fast food?
    Fast food riot, circa 2020: Multiple riots took place throughout the southern U.S. today when several major fast food restaurant chains suffered an internet outage, disabling order taking and resulted in hour-long delays in the delivery of "fast" food. Available local cooking staff were unable to compensate as none had been trained on the complex order taking functions, and few spoke English. Workers at many of the remaining American institutions, notably the few still working in the legal and garbage collecting professions, were late to work this morning after fighting through angry crowds at the drive thrus.

    In other news, deaths due to heart disease and obesity took a small spike downwards today.
 

  AOL announces it's going to drop USENET... finally

From: ...[somewhere out of time]!brad!farber!bmc
Via: Brad Tempelton, via Dave Farber, via Brian Clapper and Evan Hunt

AOL announces it's going to drop USENET... Imminent death of USENET predicted! Cynically, I snorted: "All of them, spammers". I well remember AOL's entrance to USENET in throughout 95 - I stopped reading USENET because of AOL's clueless luserbase polluting it... and the alt.binaries.* newsgroups taking out every server and T1 I had that could service it.

and I also thought - what a wonderful april 1 joke if it's true. I'll go back to using USENET if AOLHell gets off it. F*ck blogs and bloggers and all their broadcast natterings about conversations - USENET is where real conversations took place until it became too difficult to hear one another over the shouting...Amen, brother.

USENET is still the best place where the asyncronous Net stays alive. LONG LIVE USENET. Think I'm gonna start reading comp.arch again...
 

  The LizardWrangler's Restaurant

21 million downloads of firefox... With apologies to Arlo Guthrie:
 
Monday, January 24, 2005

  Sun's open letter to IBM - too little, too late

Dear Jonathan:

SUN's donations to open source are appriciated, but your hardware is overbuilt and overpriced, and your developer base castrated by age and neglect, and I doubt that pleading for support in public with IBM is going to save you.

Although I applaud your company's upcoming release of Solaris 10 as open source, I think the advantages of releasing an OS as free software - GPL'ed - has been graphically demonstrated by the marketplace, and you'll make little headway against Linux unless you GPL it, and worse, by making your license incompatible with the GPL neither Solaris or Linux will be able to benefit as much from either in the ongoing battle against Microsoft. (remember them?)

From Open Source Foes:

I do think that SUN die-hards will leap in and massively improve your OS beyond what any can now envision, and unlock the true powers of your multi-core hardware. I have great hopes for that.

But: I think you'd better get used to being a much smaller company.

I wish I could help you, I have fond memories of SUN gear, especially in the pre-solaris days, and your company has been an integral part of the internet revolution.

Best wishes,

Mike Taht
 

  Eagles are superbowl bound

I can hardly believe it!

Not since I was 16 did the eagles make it this far.

Now I have a reason to watch the superbowl other than the commercials.

 
Sunday, January 23, 2005

  Embracing the pain of being a long suffering Eagles fan

I have watched, on average, one Eagles game a year for the last 16 years.

The score: Eagles wins: 3. Losses 13.

In other words, my eyeballs on a game is a more potent force than the best coaching or quarterbacking or defense.

For the last few years I've toyed with the idea of adopting a more local team, the 49ers. Result... well, SFians know the result... I'm really, really sorry, ok?

The power of my mere intent to watch an Eagles game is equally impressive - I intended, for the last 3 championship games, to go to a bar and watch them. In fact I did get to a bar in time once, but they were showing something of more interest to californians at the time - the sewing channel.

Still, the score was: Wins: 0. Losses 3. Cross-stitches: 8.

This year, I'm hoping that by Tivoing the game and thus breaking the bounds of time and space - whatever cosmological quasi-mystical link between my eyeballs and the Eagle's performance will be broken.

I've thought seriously about just not paying attention, at all, until after the superbowl, as sort of a shrodinger's cat sort of way of coping with the situation.

In fact, in way of pre-apology to fellow suffering Eagles fans everywhere, I swear to never watch them again if they lose today... but:

Conditions are just right, with a foot of snow and 18 degree temp - for some impossible screwup of enormous magnitude - something bigger than the infamous Fog Bowl - and I can't help myself - it's in my genes - that endless hope born from not knowing the ending of all the Rocky movies I grew up on - I gotta watch it because I'll always, damn it, have (an admittedly confused) soft place in my heart for the Eagles and though I've moved 3000 miles away I can't ever give up hope for them and I can't ever lose my perverse curiousity as to how they might miss the mark again...

Doctor, it hurts when they do this:

So, Damnit - Go IGGLES!
 
David Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.


Resume,Songs,
My new blog, NeX-6, My facebook page
Orgs I like
The EFF - keeping free speech in the world
Musical stuff I like
Jeff, Rick, Ardour, Jack
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Best of the blog:
Uncle Bill's Helicopter - A speech I gave to ITT Tech - Chicken soup for engineers
Beating the Brand - A pathological exploration of how branding makes it hard to think straight
Inside the Internet Mind - trying to map the weather within the global supercomputer that consists of humans and google
Sex In Politics - If politicians spent more time pounding the flesh rather than pressing it, it would be a better world
Getting resources from space - An alternative to blowing money on mars using NEAs.
On the Columbia - Why I care about space
Authors I like:
Doc Searls
Where's Cherie?
UrbanAgora
Jerry Pournelle
The Cubic Dog
Evan Hunt
The Bay Area is talking
Brizzled
Zimnoiac Emanations
Eric Raymond
Unlocking The Air
Bob Mage
BroadBand & Me
SpaceCraft
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Callahans
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