All posts copyright © 2006-2018, Peter Davis. All rights reserved.
Showing posts with label cloud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cloud. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Friday, June 17, 2011
N.M.F.D.
Some people have said the end of the world is coming on Oct. 21 of this year. This is based largely on the same biblical evidence behind the much acclaimed prediction of The Rapture on May 21. That drew a smaller crowd than the Red Sox/Cubs series the same weekend.
What few people realize is the real end of the world comes not in the form of Judgement Day or anything celestial. It will be N.M.F.D.
For the uninitiated, this is No More Freebies Day. It's the day when GMail, Skype, Yahoo!, YouTube, and all the other free Web services we know and love start charging money. Cause you know that's gotta happen, right? Turns out that giving stuff away for free is not a great business model. Imagine if WalMart had a "Help Yourself" policy. Do you think there'd be a store in every town in the country? Imagine if Ikea gave away furniture and cinnamon rolls. There'd be an epidemic of obesity. (Oh, wait.)
So prepare yourselves. The day is coming. You'll have to pay to watch YouTube! videos. You'll have to subscribe to use Skype. Facebook will make you pay for each exciting update on who had what for lunch. And The New York Times will allow you only 19 free articles per month!
Mark my words! It'll be worse than any apocalypse.
What few people realize is the real end of the world comes not in the form of Judgement Day or anything celestial. It will be N.M.F.D.
For the uninitiated, this is No More Freebies Day. It's the day when GMail, Skype, Yahoo!, YouTube, and all the other free Web services we know and love start charging money. Cause you know that's gotta happen, right? Turns out that giving stuff away for free is not a great business model. Imagine if WalMart had a "Help Yourself" policy. Do you think there'd be a store in every town in the country? Imagine if Ikea gave away furniture and cinnamon rolls. There'd be an epidemic of obesity. (Oh, wait.)
So prepare yourselves. The day is coming. You'll have to pay to watch YouTube! videos. You'll have to subscribe to use Skype. Facebook will make you pay for each exciting update on who had what for lunch. And The New York Times will allow you only 19 free articles per month!
Mark my words! It'll be worse than any apocalypse.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Technology Would Be Great If It Didn't Suck
As I mentioned in my very first post, I have a love/hate relationship with technology. I love the potential, but getting there is way more frustrating than it should be.
For example, I've been trying to put my iPad 2, Yeah song on YouTube, along with a bunch of images sync'ed to the music. Should be simple, right? Both Windows Live Movie Maker and Apple's iMovie make it painfully difficult to sync images with audio. Seems like such an obvious thing for digital camera-toting geeks to want to do. I'd like to be able to load the MP3 and the set of images, and then just play the music and hit a NEXT button to change images at the appropriate point. Is that so hard?
Love/hate.
This afternoon, I lost network connectivity for an hour or so. It was like quitting heroin cold turkey! (At least, I imagine it was.) What? I can't send email halfway around the world in nanoseconds? How can I live??
Love/hate.
I love the idea of the cloud, where all my apps and data co-exist blissfully in the universal mind, ready to appear when beckoned from any phone, tablet, computer, car dashboard, toaster oven, etc. My data is perfectly safe and secure because Google is looking after it for me, and they never have downtime or snoop at my stuff, right?
Of course, the drawback to using a browser as a computer is ... well, you're using a browser as a computer. What Chrome and Firefox and other browsers do is make sure Web pages don't display too quickly for me to read them. Where would I be without that?
Love/hate.
UPDATE 5/5/2011: I finally coerced iMovie '09 into letting me adjust the duration of the images, a painful process. The video of "iPad 2, Yeah" is now on YouTube.
For example, I've been trying to put my iPad 2, Yeah song on YouTube, along with a bunch of images sync'ed to the music. Should be simple, right? Both Windows Live Movie Maker and Apple's iMovie make it painfully difficult to sync images with audio. Seems like such an obvious thing for digital camera-toting geeks to want to do. I'd like to be able to load the MP3 and the set of images, and then just play the music and hit a NEXT button to change images at the appropriate point. Is that so hard?
Love/hate.
This afternoon, I lost network connectivity for an hour or so. It was like quitting heroin cold turkey! (At least, I imagine it was.) What? I can't send email halfway around the world in nanoseconds? How can I live??
Love/hate.
I love the idea of the cloud, where all my apps and data co-exist blissfully in the universal mind, ready to appear when beckoned from any phone, tablet, computer, car dashboard, toaster oven, etc. My data is perfectly safe and secure because Google is looking after it for me, and they never have downtime or snoop at my stuff, right?
Of course, the drawback to using a browser as a computer is ... well, you're using a browser as a computer. What Chrome and Firefox and other browsers do is make sure Web pages don't display too quickly for me to read them. Where would I be without that?
Love/hate.
UPDATE 5/5/2011: I finally coerced iMovie '09 into letting me adjust the duration of the images, a painful process. The video of "iPad 2, Yeah" is now on YouTube.
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