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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Jack Yan & Associates’
03.01.2023
Hat tip to Stefan Engeseth on this one: an excellent podcast with author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari.
Among the topics he covers, as detailed in the summary in Linkedinâs The Next Big Idea:
âą AI is the first technology that can take power away from us
âą if we are not careful, AI and bioengineering will be used to create the worst totalitarian regimes in history
âą Be skeptical of technological determinism
We should be wary nowânot after these technologies have been fully realized.
I also checked into Business Ethics today, a site linked from the Jack Yan & Associates links’ section (which dates back to the 1990s). The lead item, syndicated from ProPublica, is entitled, âPorn, Privacy Fraud: What Lurks Inside Googleâs Black Box Ad Empireâ, subtitled, âGoogleâs ad business hides nearly all publishers it works with and where billions of ad dollars flow. We uncovered a network containing manga piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation.â
This should be no surprise to anyone who reads this blog; indeed, this should be no surprise to anyone who has had their eyes open and breathes. This opaque black box is full of abuse, funds disinformation, endangers democracy, and exposes personal data to dodgy parties. As I outlined earlier, someone in the legal profession with cojones and a ton of funding and time could demonstrate that Googleâs entire business should be subject to a massive negligence lawsuit. The authors of the article present more evidence that Google is being up to no good.
An excerpt, without revealing too much:
Last year, a marketer working for a Fortune 500 company launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign âŠ
Over the next few months, Google placed more than 1.3 trillion of the companyâs ads on over 150,000 different websites and apps. The biggest recipient of ads â more than 49 million â was a website called PapayAds. The company was registered in Bulgaria less than two years ago and lists one employee, CEO Andrea De Donatis, on LinkedIn âŠ
It seems impossible that 49 million ads were legitimately placed and viewed on PapayAdsâ site over the span of several months ⊠âI donât have an explanation for this,â he said, adding that he does not recall receiving payment for such a large volume of ads.
I doubt this is isolated, and the story elaborates on how the scheme worked. And when Google realized its ads were winding up on inappropriate websites, the action it took was to keep doing it.
On a more positive note, I found out about Radio.garden in December on Mastodon (thank goodness for all the posts there these days, a far cry from when I joined in 2017) and have since been tuning in to RTHK Radio 1 in Hong Kong. I had no idea they even gave NZ dollarâUS dollar exchange rates as part of their business news! The interface is wonderful: just rotate the planet and place the city of your choice within the circular pointer. It works equally well on a cellphone, though only in portrait mode there. Youâd be amazed at what you can find, and I even listened to one of the pop stations in Jeddah.
My usual suspects are âfavouritedâ: KCSM in San Mateo, Sveriges Radio P1, and RNZ National here. I might add Rix FM from Stockholm but I seem to have grown up a little since the days when its music was targeted to me.
Itâs now been added to our company link list. Sadly, a few dead ones have had to be culled today. But I must say Radio.garden has been one of the best finds of 2022. Almost makes you want to surf to random sites again like we did in the 1990s.
Tags: 2022, 2023, advertising, AI, Doubleclick, ethics, fraud, Google, Hong Kong, Jack Yan & Associates, LinkedIn, online advertising, podcast, radio, Radio New Zealand, Stefan Engeseth, Stockholm, Sweden, technology, transparency
Posted in business, culture, design, globalization, Hong Kong, internet, media, New Zealand, politics, Sweden, technology, USA | No Comments »
23.07.2022
The last few days have been about âHow awesome is Mojeek?â and âHow shit is Bing?â
Iâm finding great search results from Mojeek, and as a site search for Lucire, itâs absolutely brilliant. Blows Duck Duck Go (Bing with privacy) away, even back when DDG had a reasonably comprehensive index of our pages (before the HTTPS switch). I donât have to subject anyone to Google tracking, and I didnât have the hassle of installing an internal search ourselves.
Cisene, who I met via Mastodon, very helpfully suggested on that social network that I submit site maps for the Lucire website as that would take a reasonably short time to remedy Bingâs ills. Iâve never had to do them for Google or Mojeek: their spiders work as they have always done since the dawn of search engines. For some reason, Bing needs its hand held if I want it to have thousands of pages again, as it did earlier this year.
One thing I found curious with Bing is its insistence, in a site search, to place a page that we have not linked to since 2005 at the very top. Of course I could delete the page or program in a forwarder, or make a 301, but I was also once told that dead links and forwarders were bad things for search engines. Our âAboutâ page also ranks highly in all search engines, despite not being linked to in anything weâve done in over 15 years as well.
But whereâs the home page? Happily, after submitting site maps, Bingâs index of our pages went from 10 to a whopping 55, and the home page appeared for the first time in a site:lucire.com search:
âItâs an improvement,â I thought, though the search engine is still massively handicapped compared to where it was at the start of 2022.
Checking on Bing Webmaster Tools to see where things were, I was curious to see it claim that it could not crawl or index our home page though it was discovered in 2018:
But you just crawled and indexed it. Which is it?
The excuses this time (as Big Tech people love to make stuff that blames users) are that there are no <H1> tags (Iâve got news for you, Bing: we donât use them, and why should we? There was never any rule that stated that headlines must be between them, and no one else seems to care) and that the description is too long (again, it was fine for you beforeâand actually you’ve just shown that it is fine).
They arenât in the business of search though, as their explanations reveal. It’s seach:
Goodness knows how many years thatâs been there, ignored.
Itâs all so slap-dash and unprofessional, and as Duck Duck Go search results are based on Bing’s, Iâm going to have to stop recommending it. Fortunately, I found Mojeek at the perfect time.
Iâm also discovering that maybe Bing can no longer handle more than 50-odd pages per site anyway, which, of course, makes it useless as an engine that powers a site search. (Like I keep saying, the defunct Excite in the 1990s could do better. Any search engine from those days could spider and index more effectively.) It would be in line with other Microsoft products, such as Notepad, where the software giant now prevents us from typing ÂŁ or âŹ, except, presumably, people from the countries where those are the common, keyboard-accessible currency symbols. Want to write CĂŠsar drinks NescafĂ©? You can try, but the diphthong and Ă© will be missing.
Today I searched site:autocade.net on Bing. Now, we never switched Autocade to HTTPS. After how all our sites fell, would you risk it? This site is dependent on search-engine traffic.
And here are the number of pages each search engine brings up for a site search.
Google: 4,080
Mojeek: 3,348
Bing: 51
Duck Duck Go: 50
Brave: 17 (plus 4 underneath first entry)
So I canât keep blaming the switch to HTTPS, though our troubles with all search engines I knew of then began around this time. Autocade still slipped in Bing despite no down time; we went to a newer Mediawiki version, but that was about it. Everything progressed as it always did.
Google eventually allowed things to recover (for the most part) with the exception of our company website (which rose up to 13th before dropping to 26th today), Mojeek never even had an issue to begin with, but Bing and Duck Duck Go donât link to Jack Yan & Associatesâ website till after the 40th position.
So where are we now with the sites I last looked at?
Number of results for site:lucire.com
Google: 6,250
Mojeek: 3,563
Bing: 53
Duck Duck Go: 53
Brave: 15 (plus 4 underneath first entry)
Number of results for site:jackyan.com
Google: 1,860
Mojeek: 438
Duck Duck Go: 54
Bing: 43
Brave: 13 (plus 4 underneath first entry)
Number of results for site:jyanet.com
Google: 743
Mojeek: 296
Bing: 49
Duck Duck Go: 49
Brave: 20
I honestly think Bing is broken.
Just as well no one I know uses it, but quite a number of people do opt for Duck Duck Go, because of the work itâs done in promoting privacy. I still admire them for this stance. But as many of you know, it sources its results from Bing, so if one is broken, both will be. And thatâs a darned shame as I almost hit 12 years of having Duck Duck Go as my default (from August 2010 or thereabouts).
All the more reason to retain Mojeek as my default search engine.
Will I bother looking any more into Bing? Probably not, but how do I convince all those I recommended Duck Duck Go to to check out Mojeek?
Tags: 2022, Duck Duck Go, Jack Yan & Associates, JY&A Media, Lucire, Microsoft, Mojeek, search engine, search engines, technology, website
Posted in internet, marketing, publishing, technology, USA | 4 Comments »
03.06.2022
With my personal site and company siteâboth once numbers one and two for a search for my nameâhaving disappeared from Bing and others since we switched to HTTPS, I decided I would relent and sign up to Bing Webmaster Tools. Surely, like Google Webmaster Tools, this would make sure that a site was spidered and weâd see some stats?
Once again, the opposite to conventional internet wisdom occurred. Both sites disappeared from Bing altogether.
I even went and shortened the titles in the meta tags, so that this site is now a boring (and a bit tossy) âJack Yanâofficial siteâ, and the business is just âJack Yan & Associates, Creating Harmonyâ.
Just as well hardly anyone uses Bing then.
Things have improved at Google after two months, with this personal site at number two, after Wikipedia (still disappointing, I must say) and the business at 15th (very disappointing, given that itâs been at that domain since 1995).
Surely my personal and work sites are what people are really looking for when they feed in my name?
The wisdom still seems to be to not adopt HTTPS if you want to retain your positions in the search engines. Do the opposite to what technologists tell you.
Meanwhile, Vivaldi seems to have overcome its bug where it shuts down the moment you click inside a form field. Version 5.3 has been quite stable so far, after a day, so Iâve relegated Opera GX to back-up again. I prefer Vivaldiâs screenshot process, and the fact it lets me choose from the correct directory (the last used) when I want to upload a file. Tiny, practical things.
Big thanks to the developers at Opera for a very robust browser, though it should be noted that both have problems accessing links at Paypal (below).
Weâll see how long I last back on Vivaldi, but good on them for listening to the community and getting rid of that serious bug.
Tags: Bing, bugs, computing, Google, Jack Yan & Associates, Microsoft, Opera, PayPal, search engine, search engines, Vivaldi, web browser
Posted in internet, marketing, technology | No Comments »
25.03.2021
Weâve had a âHighlightsâ section in our T&Cs for a while, but today I thought Iâd take another look at them. Without reading them again, I drafted these:
âą We donât know anything about you unless you tell us.
âą When you do tell us stuff (like signing up with your email address) we store that offline, not on the cloud.
âą When you comment on our sites, we donât see your IP address.
âą The businesses we work with might get data on you without us knowing because weâve used their programs. But weâve tried to work with companies in countries with stricter data laws, e.g. our feedback forms are with Aida in Germany.
âą We have ads on our sites, and they might pick up info about you. We recommend you opt out of ad networks setting cookies on your system through Aboutads.info and related services.
The law degree kicks in and I wasnât quite able to replace the existing ones, but hopefully the final highlights suffice (links removed here, but they are on the page):
âą We donât know anything about you unless you tell us.
âą When you tell us stuff (like signing up with your email address) we ultimately store that offline, not on the cloud.
âą When you comment on our sites, we donât see your IP address.
âą We donât have a Google Analytics account so we donât collect stuff on our sites for that.
âą However, the businesses we work with might get data on you without us knowing because weâve used their programs or plug-ins. Weâve tried to work with companies in countries with stricter data laws, e.g. our feedback forms are with Aida in Germany.
âą We have ads on some of our sites, and they might pick up info about you (e.g. through cookies). They donât share this info with us. We recommend you opt out of ad networks setting cookies on your system (for example, click here, here or here). We also recommend you opt out of Google Analytics tracking you.
âą More details are below.
While there are more bollocks below these on the page, covering our arses in various situations, including historical ones, fundamentally the above is what we follow.
We used to have a record of IP addresses and we never did a thing with them, and when our servers were rejigged in 2013, we stopped collecting them. Iâm sure some plug-ins on the sites know what they are, and theyâre bound to be in the logs, but no one here has the time to look at them. I donât think anyoneâs peered that those logs (save for debugging) for over two decades.
Anyone whoâs read this blog knows why I donât have a Google Analytics account, and long may it remain that way. I seem to recall finding a way to make sure I could never access that part of the Google Dashboard when I was granted access to Medingeâs analytics. Weâve none of our own.
I do know what pages are popular on the sites but thatâs from aggregated data. And frankly, thatâs all I need to know.
Itâs really how I expect to be treated by others and itâs not that hard to do this online. Who needs complicated T&Cs which even the company canât follow? Strip away the jargon, and both you and we win.
Tags: 2020s, 2021, Jack Yan & Associates, language, law, privacy
Posted in business, internet, technology | No Comments »
12.02.2021
I was looking through the old JY&A linksâ section, which dates back to the beginning of the site in the 1990s (indeed, back to Windows 3·1, as we couldn’t use a file name with more than three letters in the suffix). The last revamp of its look was over 15 years ago, judging by its appearance, and, although I attempted to update it to the current template, I decided the result was duller. Itâs not an area where too many images were used, and the old look was probably more representative of what it is: a relic of the original dot-com era. As I explain on the introductory page (which has been facelifted), one reason for keeping it is to honour link exchanges that I made with other webmasters at the time, but I doubt itâs examined particularly often. The main text column is wide on a modern screen, but it would have looked fine at 1,024 by 768 pixels 15 years ago.
One site that I linked, at its last update (which was probably around 2003 or 2004), was the humorous TV Dregs, which is written in a documentary style, about the lesser known TV shows that aired in the UK. The catch: every entry is fictional. It got me thinking about what it could have had if it were updated, and while Iâve done these jokes before (the Game of Thrones one I have cracked ad nauseam on social media), this was an attempt to write the entries in a TV Dregs style. Theyâre not as good as theirs but then Iâm not a professional humorist. I might have to send them a note to let them know that 18 years after their founding, they’re still getting visits from me and eliciting some laughs.
Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011)
With Changing Rooms, Restoration Home, DIY SOS, and Love Your Garden each dealing with different aspects of home renovation, HBO responded with Game of Thrones, where seven teams competed to fix toilets, to win the coveted prize of the Iron Throne. Hosted by Channel 4âs Jon Snow, it featured celebrity appearances, notably from Sean Bean in the first series. Given the locations, participants often got wet and the show became known more for the nudity as clothes had to be dried; but the ideas in the show got particularly extreme with on-set weddings, and in series 4, poisoned wine, to force players to finish their toilets in record time so they could relieve themselves. Host Snow even appeared to have died on the show, though fans knew he was all right since he appeared on Channel 4 News the next day.
The Master (BBC, 2006)
With Doctor Who revived, the BBC were keen to capitalize on its success with a spin-off centring around its recurring villain, the Master, this time played by John Simm. Who alumna Billie Piper kicked off the series with the unforgettable voiceover, âMy name is Rose Tyler. I had an accident and woke up in 1973.â Set in the 1970s, with the Third Doctor exiled to Earth while the Master ran rampant with his weekly schemes, it was highly acclaimed, though certain fans were up in arms with the regeneration scene at the end of series two, when the Master turns into a woman (Keeley Hawes). The show was eventually merged back into Doctor Who, placating fans who were glad that the Doctor would not suddenly change gender.
The Master even dons the Ninth Doctor’s jacket
Colombo (ITV, 2003)
With the cancellation of Columbo in the US, after a final episode with Billy Connolly, producers were keen to continue the concept but, with interest in foreign-location police dramas (Wallander, Zen), it was retooled from the US setting to one in Sri Lanka, guaranteeing support from Asian diaspora. Still starring Peter Falk in a humorous fish-out-of-water tale, the gamble didnât really work, since, as was pointed out at the time, only the supporting characters were played by Asians while the star remained white. It was also very predictable as Patrick McGoohan played the villain, albeit with different disguises, each week.
The Unger Games (ITV, 2012)
This remake of The Odd Couple takes place in a dystopian future, with Donald Sutherland as Oscar and Stanley Tucci as Felix, taking over the lead roles. Look out for a young Jennifer Lawrence as police cadet Marie Greshler, in the role that propelled her to fame. The principal change each week from the Neil Simon original was that Oscar was always finding ways to kill Felix, albeit unsuccessfully, though the shocking and dark finalé sees now-Officer Greshler plan to kill Felix, but turns on Oscar instead. A grim ending to an otherwise humorous sitcom.
Tags: 1990s, 2003, 2021, celebrity, fiction, history, humour, Jack Yan & Associates, parody, retro, TV, UK
Posted in culture, humour, TV, UK, USA | No Comments »
26.01.2014
Documentaries such as Terms and Conditions May Apply (embedded here) and Doc Searls’ The Intention Economy got me thinking about our privacy policy.
We have one for our company, but how do we really use your private data? It got me thinking.
Since we’ve been online for longer than most people, we have practices that haven’t varied too much.
They go something like this.
Our overall policy
We wouldn’t do anything that we’d get pissed off about if the tables were turned. Unlike Google, our privacy policy really is ‘Don’t be evil.’
Email
If you give us your email address, we’ll only ever use it for the purpose you gave it for. We hold on to it at head office, and it’s never shared with anyone. We don’t know anyone in the email-marketing game, anyway, and even if we did, we don’t see the point of giving away an address that we earned through your trust.
Just be warned that we do hold on to your address for ages.
We have to be nice about your email because we still let you write back to us to get your address removed, and someone here reads that message. We’d rather you not get aggro about it, so we only do what’s right.
Social networks
If you become a fan of ours, we appreciate it. We never drill down to find out your personal information. We sometimes check the graphs to see the age and gender breakdowns but we don’t find out about you personally. Be aware that the social network itself will collect stuff on youâbut we’re not taking any of that data ourselves.
Cookies
Our websites have cookies. We never check them ourselves. They’re only ever used for helping you log in, usually to partner websites who supply the back ends to stuff we do. They’re also used to gather stats about our readership. But we never associate any of this data with you because we’re a small company that doesn’t have the time. The only detailed readership stats we have are from users who knowingly volunteered them through surveys.
Some of our sites carry advertising, so unfortunately, this means the ad networks might try to track you. We suggest opting out through the Network Advertising Initiative for the US or check this page for other territories, or altering your cookie settings.
Some of our income comes from these guys, so we’re going to have to continue carrying their ads.
For the ads we serve ourselves, we don’t collect any personally identifiable data. Our clients are quite happy with the demographic breakdowns we give them.
Comments
We don’t even know what IP address you used since our websites are on the cloud. If you give us a comment, all we know about you is what you tell us.
The last one might apply nicely for this blog.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all firms were this up front, or even more so?
Tags: advertising, Doc Searls, Jack Yan & Associates, law, marketing, privacy, privacy policy, social media, social networking
Posted in business, culture, internet, marketing, publishing | No Comments »
23.05.2013
The below was written on April 22, 2013, in response to an article in The Dominion Post. It was offered to the newspaper as an opâed, then to The Wellingtonian, but it was eventually declined.
The Dominion Postâs headline on April 22 confirmed what many of us knew after numerous friends and colleagues left Wellington over the last several years.
Our population growth is below the national average, as are our employment and economic growth. In fact, the regional Wellington economy is stagnant.
In 2010, I stated that we needed to look at our creative sector, and encourage creative clusters, to get Wellingtonâs economy back on track. Even then it was evident that the early 2010s were not going to get off to a healthy start. If we were to get central governmentâs support for any projectsâeven the Mayorâs light-rail programmeâthen surely the wisest thing would be to increase the industry in our city first?
The free wifi I campaigned on was never meant to be seen in isolation. It was a signal to international businesses in that sector that Wellington was open to investment and collaboration. That inward investment and sharing of knowledge could, in turn, help local firms expand and export.
We had reached the limits of our natural resources, so we needed to start using intellectual property, and increase R&D in our city. While ICT is healthy in Wellington, the priority must be to identify companies, in this and other high-value sectors, that can become nationally or internationally competitive with the right nudge. We should not be, as the late Sir Paul Callaghan stated in a 2011 address, locked into a single sectorâand that was what the clusters were all about.
With my 2013 candidacy, not much has changed about these ideas. The real difference is that they have become far more pressing.
The next mayor needs to work with oneâs counterparts in the region and agree on identifying, using rigorous criteria, which are our next champions. Which firms, for instance, are those that are sitting on $1 million revenues today that can be at $10 million shortly, if they were given the right exposure, contacts or opportunities?
And since nationally, high-tech exports are growing at 11 per cent per annum, according to the World Bank, itâs not a bad sector to start with. It just shouldnât be the only one.
Wellington businesses are not asking for hand-outs, but the right connections. These firms also need to be encouraged to look beyond just being content with a small patch, when Wellington business-people often hold great ideals and more socially responsible ways of doing things. These can, in fact, inform the way business is conducted in other cities, and contribute to how New Zealand is marketed and seen abroad.
I do not advocate a policy of âgrowth for growthâs sakeâ. But I do argue that the innovative way successful Wellington businesses have approached their sectors can take a larger share of the global pie.
In my case, itâs putting 26 yearsâ experience on the line, the majority of that in exporting frictionless products and services.
We can opt for politics as usual, or identify and nurture the right players in our business sector.
When it comes to business, it must be international in scope, inspiring politicians at the national level about what Wellington is made of.
We can consider electing people who have spent time bridging cultures and creating those international links, which we need right now if two other cities are getting the governmentâs focus. Wellingtonâs businesses have gone under the radar for too long, and they need an ally who can balance their needs while ensuring citizensâ rights are protected.
I see our city having spent too much time breaking its own rules, and being forced to answer through formal proceedings brought by Waterfront Watch and other groups.
The system and its rules are healthy, but the players need to change, and a cultural change, internally and externally, is needed for Wellington in its local body elections.
Tags: 2013, Aotearoa, business, creative clusters, creativity, export, FDI, intellectual property, Jack Yan, Jack Yan & Associates, mayoralty, New Zealand, Paul Callaghan, politics, R&D, WCC, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in business, culture, leadership, marketing, New Zealand, politics, technology, Wellington | No Comments »
31.03.2013
Now that all of our email, bar a handful of client accounts, are going through the paid version of Zoho Mail, I couldn’t be happier.
When we shifted things over, my friend and web development expert, Nigel Dunn, suggested either Google or Zoho. He’s a big fan of Google, and I can see the good side of the company I bash regularly. But I opted for Zoho, and anyone who’s followed my ongoing privacy battles with the big G will know why.
It turns out I had a Zoho account anyway, thanks to Gabriel Weinberg and his Duck Duck Go team. But to go from the freebie that I’ve had for four years to a paid one was quite a big step, since we hadn’t ever done this newfangled cloud email before. However, I have to say I am very impressed, because of one major thing: Zoho’s customer service.
For starters, it exists. No more going to abusive Google forums where cocky users, in their worshipping of the cult, make it all your fault. Zoho staff actually write back to you. In fact, they put me on to their support system after a while and they’ve been dealing with my enquiries really quickly in there, too.
The longest wait I had was a question about Eudora, because I wasn’t sure how to get the Zoho POP mail working with an older program. While most answers came in 24 hours, this one took a weekâbut I’ll turn a blind eye to that one, given that it’s one out of a heap of questions I fired at them and it’s not a program they knew well. (For Eudora readers who are reading this, you turn on SSL, but you choose the ‘Required, alternate port’.)
The replies are courteous and make you think that India knows customer service considerably better than the United States, or Australia for that matter: you’re treated as you would expect, and they don’t start from the basis of “the customer is stupid”.
Even before I became a paying customer, Zoho treated me with respect.
Good service isn’t just the province of Indiansâjust yesterday I blogged about how well Tumblr handled user enquiries and reports, despite reaching 100 million users. However, you sometimes wonder if they are the exceptions in a world dominated by the likes of Google and Facebook.
The real kicker is this: the system works wonderfully when it comes to combating spam. I get thousands of messages per week so not having spam is a good thing. Our old Rackspace box, at best, killed about 50 per cent of the spam that came in. Granted, we chose our own blacklists, so this is not Rackspace’s responsibility. However, we used the ones we were recommended by experts.
Zoho gets rid of over 95 per cent, maybe more, of the spam. After a day, I’ve had no false positives, and only a tiny handful has crept in. My emailbox, as downloaded in Eudora, is almost as untainted as it was in the 1990s, and I am not exaggerating.
For those of you who use Gmail and are sick of the ads, this should appeal: Zoho is ad-free. No more using your personal data and linking it to advertising across all websites where Google and Doubleclick have their banners. As we become more concerned with online privacy, I’d say this was a very good thing.
Tags: computing, customer service, email, Eudora, Google, India, internet, Jack Yan & Associates, privacy, software, spam, Zoho
Posted in business, India, internet, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
07.11.2010
 Last week, our company’s Nokia 2730 Classics arrived as part of a contract with Telstra Clear, of whom we’ve been a customer since the 1980s. They are a reminder of how technology is regressing.
Remember that scene in Life on Mars, where Sam Tyler, or Samuel Santos in La chica de ayer, tells Annie Cartwright, Annie Norris or Ana Valverde (depending on which version you saw) how LPs had been replaced by MP3s and digital music, and that the sound is âmuch, much worseâ? That’s sort of how I feel with these new gadgets.
Left Not quite the same as oursâthe display is differentâbut this is a publicity shot of the Nokia 2730 Classic. Below Life on Marsâs record shop scene in its various incarnations (from left to right, top to bottom): the UK original in Manchester; the unaired US pilot, set in Los Angeles; the US remake, set in New York; and the Spanish remake, set in Madrid.
On the surface, the new phones aren’t much to look at. Compared with the 6275i phones that the 2730s are replacing, it’s clear that they are built to a price, cost-cutting for easy manufacture in China rather than Korea. There’s not much of an excuse here for design simplification: this is manufacturing simplification.
I have reason to be cynical. Iâm sure itâs part of a conspiracy to force us to get a nicer model. I remember buying a Microtek scanner for around $600 in the 1990sâprobably around 1996âand it lasted me for years, till around 2002 when I ordered an upgrade. I looked at the specs for the latest scanners and thought, âWow, hereâs one with a higher resolution going for half the price.â I brought it back and the scanning quality was total crap.
I wrote to the distributor in Auckland and they informed me: the equivalent model to my old one is this other machine costing $600. The difference is that the half-price one has a plastic lens and my old one had a glass lens. So if I wanted one with comparable quality, I would need to pay twice as much for one with a glass lens. In other words, it would still cost me $600.
I bought the glass one and they were as good as their word, although I had to put up with a smaller scanning area (but I got a faster speed). The resolution figure, it turned out, was meaningless, because the actual quality of the product was so poor.
Technology didnât really advance in six years. I still had to pay the same price for a machine with actually less capability on the primary function, which was scanning an area of x cmÂČ.
This seems like a repeat. I have yet to try what itâs like as a phone, because the switchoverâs not till the 8th, but for many features, itâs poorer. It has a better media player. The speaker for playing music and movies is better. The graphics move more nicely. Nokia supplies some free maps (which, incidentally, get deleted when you eject the memory card, though you can re-download them for free from its website).
But (and there must be a but given the headline): the camera is worse (judge for yourself below) and the battery life is shorter. I might not be an initié when it comes to cellphones, but I know that people have been using them for telephony and photography for a lot longer than as MP3 and 3GP players. On at least two of the three major criteria on which a cellphone can be judged, the 2730 is worse than the mid-decade 6275i.
Judge for yourself below. These are photographs (reduced) taken at Massey University’s Blow festival exhibition, currently on at its Wellington campus.
Nokia 6275i
Nokia 2730 Classic
Nokia 6275i
Nokia 2730 Classic
And what is the point of that? Unless Nokia now tells me: if you want the quality of the old one, itâs this other model, which will cost you an extra $300.
I know there are many exceptions to what I’ve just written. The Asus laptop I type this on is way fancier than one that cost twice as much with a fraction of the power in the mid-2000s. But just because one area of technology marches so rapidly doesn’t mean every area follows suit.
Tags: BBC, cellphones, China, design, Finland, Jack Yan & Associates, Korea, Life on Mars, Lucire, Massey University, Nokia, photography, technology, Telstra Clear, TV
Posted in business, design, general, New Zealand, technology | 2 Comments »
25.10.2010
Today, I am eating Google humble pie, because it was right about malware on Autocade. Therefore: thank you, Google. (Iâm not so petty as to not thank them for when they get things right.)
Since Google had cried wolf over this blog, which has never had malware issues, I had to question it. Nevertheless, Iâm sure most people would agree that itâs better to be safe than sorry.
We originally suspected it was one ad network. This is also based on past behaviour, when one of our networks got suckered in to hosting an ad twice in 2007 that turned out to be a trojan. So we began limiting the creatives that could be shown on our sites.
When that didnât work, we had to keep looking.
We traced the malware from Autocade back to OpenX, which weâve now removed from our server. There is an upgraded version which weâll look at, as we need this program, but for now, Iâd rather lose a few dollars than subject innocent users to malware.
Itâs a shame there does not seem to be much action over at OpenX. Itâs a really good program but the forums donât seem to have too many staff present there. However, I know we were not alone.
For once, Iâm glad Autocade is not a hugely popular site, but itâs still disturbing that this happenedâand, as I understand it, Gawker and Gizmodo were affected, too.
The site acting as the malware intermediary is clickme199.ipq.co, which has been allowed to remain online. Whois gives ipq.coâs location in the UK.
Luckily, our other sites were unaffected, in that no malware was sent down the line. But as a precaution, we removed all OpenX code from our sites.
Itâs been a big weekend for computer problems, with one machine down due to a trojan and our ad-serving program sending malware. Plesk (the server administrator) also reported that we sent out 61 Tbyte of data this monthâand weâre only paying for 100 Gbyte. That was also scary, till I was told by Rackspace that thatâs down to a bug. So weâve had to upgrade Plesk as wellâprobably not a bad thing.
Not exactly the catch-up weekend that I envisaged, but at least we made some progress. The damaged computer is almost back to normal, too.
Tags: advertising, Autocade, bugs, computing, Google, hacking, internet, Jack Yan, Jack Yan & Associates, OpenX, Rackspace
Posted in internet, marketing, New Zealand, publishing, technology, UK, USA | No Comments »
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