Google! Clean Up Your Act!
I have written before about Google's decision to value profitability over honesty and on Thursday of this week I encountered another clear indication of this. On a G-mail page, I spotted an ad: "Overstock iPads: $30.93. Today Only: Online auction site to give away 1,000 iPads for $30.93! www.BidRack.com/DailyDeals." Anybody who thinks Ipads are in an overstock condition isn't paying attention and anybody who thinks one can be had for $30.93 isn't too bright. Clearly there must be a catch.
It took only a few moments to turn up dozens of complaints about the company for everything from identity theft and unauthorized use of a credit cards to failure to deliver.
One victim who thought she was registering with the company found an unauthorized $75 charge on her credit card.
And ComplaintsBoard.com had lots of other reports of similar activity.
Another link to PissedConsumer.com had similar stories.
Here's one: "I spent approx. $2300 in bids. This is not the problem. I was loving the site, and having a great time bidding, AND winning! I was devastated after waiting over 2 months when I received an email telling me I would not be getting the items I won!!! I had spent HOURS and HOURS playing and winning on this site. I did receive a refund of some of my money, and was given more bids to use. However, this did not do much to rectify that I was not going to receive the $6,750 worth of merchandise I so called “won.” All in All even with the refunds I was out $4450 in items I won. This was just a horrible feeling. I was also very disappointed when I knew that some people were still receiving their items that I was told were not in stock, even though they had received a review. Even after all of this, I decided to give bidrack another shot….my second experience I did receive my products but 2 were not authentic – which now seems it will be impossible to prove to the satisfaction of bidrack. They are making hoops it is impossible to jump through. With losing the value of these 2 non-authentic bags, and the $1,000 per item guarantee of authenticity, I am losing out on a value of $3,185. With these 2 experiences the value of my time, product I did not receive, etc. would total about $7,835 (and this is taking into account the refund I received.)"
Google must be aware of these kinds of deceptions. Time was, many years ago, when I was working with a client to place some ads on Google, somebody at Google read every single ad that was submitted and any claim that was even slightly questionable was refused.
How times change.
Ads such as this one from BidRack.com are all too common and invariably research taking less than a minute (Using Google!) reveals many complaints.
Surely some of the smart folks living the pampered life at Google have the smarts to write an algorithm that checks advertisers links against complaint sites.
Surely some of the smart folks at Google could take time out from a game of pool or getting a free pedicure and write an application that would help police the adds.
Surely it would be easy for some of the smart folks at Google to find a way to remove fraudulent ads ... unless somebody at the top likes things the way they are.
Maybe you don't put much faith in consumer-generated reports on complaint sites. OK. So what about the Better Business Bureau? "Consumers report that when they sign up for the service, they are under the understanding that it is "Free", however, upon registration, their credit card is then charged a fee, often around $99. The BBB strongly encourages you to read carefully the terms and conditions of any offer."
Google, you were once a company with honor, principles, and scruples. Where has that old Google gone? Please come back.
Try Dual Monitors and You'll Never Go Back
No matter how large your computer's monitor is, if it's a single monitor it's still just a single monitor. Adding a second monitor is no longer expensive or difficult, either. So what are you waiting for?
Two relatively inexpensive options exist for increasing your computer's usability: The first is to add more memory and the second is to add a second monitor. Adding memory is one of the oldest tricks in the book of computer geekdom. If you use a 32-bit system with less than 4GB of RAM, you'll notice a distinct improvement when you add memory. And if you have a 64-bit system that doesn't have at least 8GB of RAM, you're shortchanging yourself.
But multiple monitors? You might think that you can look at only one monitor at a time (and that's true). So why add a second monitor? A second increases the net display area. That's obvious. But why is this an improvement?
People who use Photoshop or InDesign or Premiere will recognize the benefits immediately. It's easier to keep track of what's going on when your main work space in on one screen and menus or staging areas are on a second monitor.
At work, I don't use those applications, but I do work with several applications simultaneously. I might have two browsers open, one on each screen, to track tasks that are assigned to me and tasks that I have assigned to developers. Or I might have two instances of Excel running so that I can compare data from one sheet to another.
At the office, the monitors are matched and that is the ideal. At home, I use one large monitor and a second smaller monitor. This makes dragging an application from one screen to the other more difficult than if both monitors were the same size and height. But the monitors don't have to be matched. They can even be different types (LCD or CRT).
This is from Wikipedia: Video output is generated by a video graphics device, typically on a removable card but which may also be integrated into the motherboard as a discrete device or as part of the chipset logic. The output is interpreted and displayed by a variety of devices. Video outputs are generally connected to a monitor (of either the CRT or LCD type); however, they are increasingly being connected to projection equipment or television sets. As a result of this trend, manufacturers have produced video cards which can connect to several types of display devices using the appropriate interface. A "Dual Head" configuration utilizes a video card that supports two discrete outputs. Users may also utilize two discrete video cards, and sometimes even an integrated motherboard video socket plus a second video card, though often the motherboard disables the integrated video when a discrete video card is used (a limitation that was common on older chipsets featuring integrated AGP graphics and an AGP upgrade slot).
The primary hardware disadvantage to using more than one monitor is that this divides the video card's resources. In plain English, this means that you need a more powerful video card. If you're asking the video card to display 2 1920x1080 images, you're going to need a lot of video memory (VRAM).
Long ago, video cards with 128MB of RAM were on the cutting edge but today's video cards need at least 1GB of VRAM to support multiple monitors.
How and Why
TechByter Central: When I'm working on TechByter, I have 2 mismatched screens: A large wide-screen model is the primary view port while an antique low-resolution (by today's standard) handles the overflow. (Or a picture of a cat.)
Ideally, monitors should be matched and at the same height so that it's possible to extend an image onto both screens as needed or to drag a window from one screen to another. When they're at different levels as shown here, dragging isn't always as straight forward as you'd like it to be.
You'll also see a third screen in this image. I use the notebook computer when I need an extra screen for something and it's also handy for viewing a website with different browsers or when I want to work with Linux.
At the Office: At the office, I have matched monitors, which is a better solution by far. But any arrangement that has more than one monitor is better than any arrangement that has just a single monitor.
One instance of the bug tracker is open on the left and several windows are behind it. On the right, another instance of the bug tracker is obscured by OneNote and a Windows Explorer window.
At the far left is a netbook that is connected to the Internet but is not on the corporate LAN. This machine gives me access to my personal e-mail account and, during lunch, to websites that are blocked by the corporate LAN.
Forget About Plain English! How About Plain Math?
If you're looking for a digital camera, you probably pay a lot of attention to megapixels and that's exactly what the manufacturers would like you to do. One key factor is sensor size yet if you try to check that you'll find that they have measurements like 1/3.6", 1/3.2", 1/3", 1/2.7", 1/2", 1/1.8", 2/3", 1", and 4/3". No wonder we watch the megapixel parade and ignore the sensor behind the curtain.
Any of the sensor sizes shown could be in a 12 Mpxl (just to grab a number out of the air) camera but one of those cameras might cost $75 while another would cost $4000. The difference wouldn't be entirely because of the sensor but understanding why one will deliver better results than another is important.
This goofy system goes back to the days of tubes in television cameras. The first digital cameras were based on TV technology, after all.
Eastman Kodak engineers Steve Sasson and Gareth Lloyd are the people you can thank for the digital camera. They invented it in 1975 and the first one wasn't very portable. That's it at the right. (US Patent 4,131,919)
Back in the 1950s, the tubes used in TV cameras had "type" designations (2/3" or 1/2", for example). The designator is the outside diameter of the tube. The usable area of the sensor was about two thirds of the sensor's overall size.
What really matters is the physical size of the sensor itself. A 1/3.6" sensor is 4mm wide and 3mm tall with a 5mm diagonal while a 1/1.8" sensor is a little more than 7mm wide and about 5.3mm tall with a diagonal measure that's a bit less than 9mm.
The larger the sensor for any given resolution, the less noise the sensor will generate. Noise is random white speckles (luminance noise) and random colored speckles (color noise). You want as little of both as you can afford.
It seems to me that camera manufacturers should specify sensor size the way monitor manufacturers specify monitor size: Height, width, and diagonal measurements. It would be immediately obvious that 1/3.6" is smaller than 1/1.8". Actually, that's clear to anyone who know much about math, but the meaning of mixed fractional-decimal numbers like 1/3.6" isn't inherently clear.
By way of comparison, 35mm print film is 36mm wide (yes, 35mm film is 36mm wide) and 24mm tall with a diagonal of a little over 43mm.
To add even more mud to the muddle, the total number of pixels on the sensor is larger than the effective number of pixels used to create the output image. The camera manufacturer will almost always cite the larger (and largely meaningless) number.
Typically the camera doesn't use every photodiode, edge to edge, on the sensor. A camera with a sensor that contains 12.5 million photodiodes may use only 12 million of them and that's the number that should be advertised, not 12.5.
Even worse, some manufacturers install an 8Mpxl sensor and then interpolate the image to 12Mpxl. This is the same technique that's used for digital zoom and it degrades the image. But the marketing department can claim that the camera is a 12Mpxl camera because the images are 12Mpxl images. This should be illegal.
What the manufacturers don't talk about is the quality of the image that the sensor can create. More pixels doesn't automatically make the image better. Other considerations worth keeping in mind:
Is the lens matched to the sensor? If the camera is doing any interpolating, the lens isn't matched to the sensor.
How accurate is the color created by the photodiodes? The most accurate sensors made are those from Foveon, but the ISO rating is lower (meaning a wider lens aperture or a slower shutter speed, or both). That aside, the more accurate the color, the more the sensor will cost.
What kind of dynamic range does the sensor have? More is better. Dynamic range is a measurement of the camera's ability to record detail in dark shadows as well as in highlights.
How noisy is the sensor? Smaller sensor are always more noisy. Higher ISO settings generate more noise than lower settings. CMOS sensors, which were once considered substandard, now routinely turn in better noise numbers that the previous favorites, CCD sensors. (CMOS means "complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor" and CCD means "charge-coupled device".)
When you're in the market for a digital camera, pay less attention to the shiny objects that the marketing department dangles in front of you and learn how to read specifications for the important measurements.
Short Circuits
How to Make a Small Fortune on Wall Street
Start with a large fortune. Internet radio station Pandora's initial public offering was a big hit and intense demand drove up the price for Pandora's stock. But on the second day of trading, the shares lost and lost big.
The IPO price was $16. Shares climbed to $26. Every $26 share you bought is now worth a little more than $13. Even that is above the $8-per-share target price discussed a couple of weeks ago.
Recent Internet IPOs have been successful and there have been more IPOs for Internet-based firms than anytime since 2000.
Investors apparently concluded that an 11-year-old company that has never made a profit was a good bet. Instead of profits, Pandora has $92 million in losses. For the fiscal year that ended last January, Pandora had $138 million in sales but still lost $11 million.
We Can Haz CIA?
Lulz Security (aka "Lulz Sec"), a loose knit group of hackers who have been in the news a lot recently, are back in the news with claims that they broke in to the Central Intelligence Agency's website.
Announcing the feat on Twitter, Lulz Security said that it had caused the CIA website to fail. Technically, then, this wouldn't be a breach or a break in but a distributed denial of service attack that's conducted from outside the organization.
It's still an effective attack, one that renders the website unavailable to anyone who tries to access it.
Earlier in the week Lulz Sec said that it would release data from senate.gov. The files the group released were mundane and unimportant but a Senate official said that security staffers noticed the attack over the weekend. The attackers accessed files on the Senate's public website but did not get beyond the government firewall.
The author's image: It's that photo over at the right. This explains why TechByter Worldwide was never on television, doesn't it?
