monkeyc.net.a.life.in.motion

Safari for Windows Beta 3.0

Originally uploaded by monkeyc.net.

I admit to not being as big a fan of Apple as some people around here are, Ive supported their products enough to know ther are just another PC company in most respects, better than most sometimes and worse others at other times.

But I still had to download and have a play with Safari for windows, its worth a shot after all and I have some observations if youre wondering its is worth it.

First up in running Vista Ultimate using Aero on a newish machine (Dual Core 2.06 with 2gb ram) and it works well, hasnt crashed yet on me which counts for something. most sites work fine and its pretty frendly.

It does not seem faster than Firefox. Ive done some tests and it seems to load pages in the same time give or take and the application itself takes longer to laod - yes its faster than IE7 but many things are, its not however anywhere near as fast as Apple claim on their website for the Beta (but then Apple benchmarks are always a bit suspect and hyperbolic).

It is nice and easy to use but be warned it IS buggy, while it runs fine on this machine on my Dell D620 laptop it doesnt show correct fonts and some pages wont load at all, thats also running Vista on a 2 month old Centrino Duo with 2gb ram and an Nvidia card - it just seems to have a font problem.

Is it work installing? Yes. Is it working so far? yes. Is it the fastest browser ive ever used? No.

Look beyond advertising and just have a play, I think i could grow to like it from where I sit if there are available plug ins for it, but in the end it still has a lot to overcome - Safari may be fast on the mac but even on that platform it has SSL issues, HTTPS problems, just wont load some pages and will not work properly with Citrix Secure Gateway servers which forces our mac users to run Firefox anyway - for apple to make headway they have to make sure it will work fine in all environments and that means ASP and other things that might not please apple internally.

Time will tell. right now its worth getting and playing with.

New Years Eve Fireworks

Originally uploaded by monkeyc.net.

Happy New Year one and all - here’s hoping 2007 is a safe and succesful year for you all.

Time Magazine Cover

Originally uploaded by miss604.

Yes folks that’s right - you won time magazine’s person of the year award.
Say what? Well simply put the people at Time Warner (or is it Time Warner AOL? So hard to remember these days) have decided that its far easier to decide to declare the online bloggers and self proclaimed media outlets as collective persons of the year than it is to sit down and actually come up with anything approaching a real choice.

What Time are saying is that the bloggers and online consumers are the people in the power seat of the new media age, we control the flow of information and we control its dissemination.

What bullshit.

But then it’s easy to see the reasoning here - having realised that blogs make for great free copy (hell these people aren’t writers so who has to pay them) they also make for hordes of people like me who will link to their story and promote the ass out of it and hopefully you will be drawn to the Time website where they might convince you to buy a subscription perhaps to their magazine or at the very least click on one of their advertisements and generate some income. And let’s be honest after the whole AOL debacle Time need the money folks. Admittedly not as much as their shareholders and investors need the money they have lost back but hey anything helps.

My god you might be wondering what is he so snarky about? Blogging is the future of the media and look at Web 2.0, Time are right, You Tube and the like have so much power it must be the future.

Yeaahhh… Alrighty then.

I’ve often written about blogs here, apparently that’s called Meta Blogging these days (who knew - I thought it was phoning in a lazy blog post !) and I’ve said more than a few things about why the whole paradigm of blogs as the next media revolution is such cast iron bullshit - I happily recall my post comparing Political Blogging to a circle jerk (albeit a Party funded circle jerk with people you wouldn’t actually want to see naked) and my comment on the whole Tower of babbling monkeys that sites like Live Journal (many posts and still devastatingly accurate btw) but it’s to another point I’ve made before that I must go.

A few thoughts -

Blogs are not news sources.
Blogs should never be news sources.
Blogs (this one included) are full of shit
Blogs represent opinion - this may be original opinion or it may be someone else’s opinion passed off as the bloggers - you don’t know

But you say “blogs can be news sources !!”

How pray tell? A blog is in fact the last thing anyone should ever see as news - Blogs have no fact checking facilities, they come with no guarantees of factual accuracy or even honesty, they might be stolen from someone else’s page or thoughts and you may very well know nothing about the person writing the blog or what you think you might not might be false.

Repeat after me.

BLOGS ARE NOT RELIABLE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

Unless of course that information happens to be a Britney Spears up skirt shot - in that case they’re fine (and that’s a lousy C Section scar Britney BTW) but nothing else/

The reason why the old media loves the new media is one word only - Money. You guys are suckers - you take your photos and post them to sites with little or no license protection so someone can grab them, your thoughts and comments are subject to ownership of the site you are posting on and you are an advertisers wet dream - drawn like moths to the flame to the latest video on You Tube - My god why do you think Rupert paid all that money for it? It’s not for the concept because frankly You Tube is so pathetically simple as to be not funny it’s for the community - the likeminded suckers err ‘target audiences’ that can be found clustering in groups - its why Flickr was bought by Yahoo and Google buys anything in sight.

Its because these companies know a good thing when they see it - Hell Rupert and the boys over at News International have been in this game so long now they know every way possible to make money from the media game- this is a man who’s turned a little $100k stake in a newspaper firm into about $50Billion at last count - they’re not pissing money up a wall.

So congratulations to Time. They’ve sold out. They’re no doubt looking for a way to incorporate more blogging into their magazines and websites as we speak, its free, it’s easy and bloggers don’t have journalistic ethics to worry about and hey if you catch a blogger lying or plagiarizing content then you can just point to their non media status after all.

Mind you Time’s Interesting persons is worth a read - any list than can mix Muqtada al-Sadr, Jack Abramoff and the cast of Heroes in a list has got to be worth a read, or a laugh at how hopelessly pathetic Time Warner has become in not offending the sensibilities of its readership these days.

"take with water after food"

Originally uploaded by doc18.

Playing around with a tablet PC tonight for work reasons so thought why not try and write a blog post with character recognition to see how it works. Interestingly enough it works reasonably well for the task and what’s very cool is the speed at which it learns your handwriting. After 10 makes it had my chicken scratch writing style pretty much worked out and was making very few errors in transcription which was rather impressive to see. Many of the tablets I have used are not that hot at this, to be honest many as them are a little sluggish and on the slow side – this one is not in the least its pretty quick and very accurate actually.

Which makes sense I guess considering it’s a frighteningly expensive motion branded toy which apparently has some very proprietary software and hardware in it for motion and handwriting recognition stuff. All adds UP to above $ 6000 AU which is not cheap when you consider that you can get a very nice full featured laptop per around $2000 and a good tablet from HP fornot men more.

And yet…. I Still want one . Very cool toy and if you attend meetings like I do a very useful one as will. I took this one to a meeting the other day and it’s very easy to use one Note to take notes right on the screen and save them to your hard drive – no more note pads needed – get rid of paper at last… now to convince the wife.

And if you are wondering about the picture - well I searched for “tablet” on flickr and liked this one. Hey its a fun shot!