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Weekend Roundup #67

Jaypee Habaradas — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:03:52 +0000

Hello everyone! Hope you all had a good weekend. I had a pretty good weekend because it wasn’t too busy and because I was able to play basketball again after almost a month of absence from the basketball court. Like most weekends, I spend most of my time with my family and this weekend, I spent a lot of time with my son Matthew, playing with his Thomas the Tank Engine train set. I recently bought him an expansion track set and 3 new cars/coaches. I like assembling things and I had fun setting up/designing the new and bigger track and we both had fun watching the train go round and round.

Anyways, my apologies for the late Weekend Roundup, but I do hope that you enjoy this week’s edition.

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Thank you for your time and hope you guys have a great week!

Weekend Roundup #55

Jaypee Habaradas — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:47:22 +0000

Hello everyone! Pardon the very late release of this week’s edition of the Weekend Roundup. If you’ve been visiting/following the blog the past few days, you know that I was migrating my blog to a new webhost. I did that last weekend but encountered some mod/rewrite rule issues so I decided to go back to my previous hosting provider. So in a span of 3 days I migrated my blog to different webhosts, twice. Because of that, I wasn’t able to publish this edition of the Weekend Roundup on time. I had to wait until the DNS propagation was in full effect before posting any articles/updates so that everyone would be able to access them. Hope you guys like this week’s roundup.

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Thank you for your time and hope you guys are having a great week!

Yahoo Joins OpenID Bandwagon

Jaypee Habaradas — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:46:29 +0000

Last week, TechCrunch reported that Google, IBM and Verisign were on the late stages of discussion with people from the OpenID Foundation regarding joining OpenID 2.0. Well, earlier today Yahoo announced that they have already joined OpenID bandwagon.

Yahoo brings with them around 250 million user IDs which triples the current number of valid OpenIDs which previously only amounted to 120 million OpenIDs. Yahoo’s OpenID service will be available for public beta on the 30th of january. However, it is not yet known whether Yahoo would allow users with third party OpenIDs to login to Yahoo.

A while back, I explained here on my blog what OpenID is about, how it works and how it is gaining popularity. I also blogged about the time WordPress.com URLs became a part of OpenID. Some of you expressed interest while others thought that this is a useless idea. If Google is interested and Yahoo has joined it, I guess this must be something don’t you think?

What does this recent development mean? This is good news for the OpenID project and would definitely make it more popular. It also means that more people would have access to OpenID. Although I wonder what percentage or how many users with Yahoo IDs would actually use it for OpenID.

If you can’t fully understand the concept of OpenID and wonder why Yahoo and other companies are interested in it, check out this slide. It also explains the reasons why Yahoo chose to add OpenID to their features list.

Have you tried OpenID? Which sites do you use your OpenID? Do you like the idea of OpenID? Why or why not?

2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards

Jaypee Habaradas — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 07:17:35 +0000

by Tony Long

Leading off with a stupid quote from President Bush might seem a little too easy, perhaps unfair, a bit like stealing candy from a blind kid or something. But in a year chockablock with moronic quips, obtuse observations and mind-boggling inanities, you still have to put Dubya front and center. He is, after all, the most powerful man in the world.

“One of the things I’ve learned on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgotten the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It reminds me of where I wanna be sometimes.”
– Bush, asked during an interview with CNBC if he ever googled anybody.

“The Google.” How quaint — if it were coming from your grandmother. (And that would be Google Earth, Mr. President.)

Here’s a real beaut, also from a prominent political figure. For breathtaking cluelessness it actually surpasses Bush by a wide margin. But coming as it does from a mere U.S. senator, it must necessarily be subordinate. Rank has its privileges.

“They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material.”
– Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) deconstructs the frustrations of (we think) file sharing, during a speech opposing net neutrality before the Senate Commerce Committee.

OK, the guy is 85 years old. Ordinarily, you’d cut him some slack. But Stevens chaired that committee — which oversees regulation of the internet.

In the interest of being fair and balanced, like Fox News, it should be noted that famous liberals can have trouble getting it, too. Here’s CNN’s Larry King, admitting that he’s never used the internet before:
“What do you do? Punch little buttons and things?”

And how about this one, from Eric Schmidt, CEO of internet Wirtschaftswunder Google:
“We actually did an evil scale and decided (that) not to serve at all was worse evil.”

Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil.” When the company started doing business in China, it had to amend that motto slightly. Google took heavy flak for bending to the oppressive regulations severely limiting free speech on the internet there. Schmidt defended staying in the market (an important word to remember here), saying that even though “we weren’t wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all.” This is what Schmidt’s “evil scale” concluded, apparently. Presumably, his accountants concluded the same thing, but for very different reasons. A number of parody sites drew their own conclusions.

This next quote, by Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, doesn’t necessarily qualify as lame. It’s certainly cynical, but to some folks it probably just sounds honest:

“Let’s face it. We’re not changing the world. We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap — and watch porn.”
– As quoted by Fortune magazine during a corporate dinner in San Francisco recently.

Love him or hate him, Bill Gates has been pretty successful over the years, but he’s never been much of a prognosticator. Back in the early ’90s he prophesied that the “internet will never amount to anything.” He followed that up in 2004 with an airy dismissal of the iPod during an interview with Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “I don’t think the success of the iPod can continue in the long term, however good Apple may be.”

Gates was forced to eat crow on that one, too, which he did this year in a speech at Stanford University, where he described the iPod as:
“… phenomenal, unbelievable, fantastic.”

It was also in 2004 when Gates proclaimed that, “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” Given this guy’s penchant for picking winners, let’s hope he doesn’t spend too much time at the track.

And speaking of Microsofties, Gates’ caporegime in Redmond, Steve Ballmer, he of the infamous Monkey Boy dance, is a veritable trove of colorful, catty and occasionally just plain stupid observations. His 2004 classic — “My children … in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least in one dimension I’ve got them brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod” — is hard to beat. But he didn’t exactly take a vow of silence during 2006, either:

“I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation. That’s a software experience.”
– Ballmer, riffing on the virtues of the Zune.

“You’re not asking that and I don’t want to answer that.”
– Interviewee Ballmer, instructing a reporter for CRN on how to ask a difficult question.

Hubris is a common malady in the ego-bloated tech world, and Ken Kutagari, the chairman of Sony’s video-game division, can sling it with the best of them. For sheer arrogance, it’s tough to top this:
“The next generation begins when we say it does.”

Given Sony’s miserable year, you have to fear for the next generation.

This one sounds like a guy doing a little butt covering:

“The fact is that innovation was a little different in the 20th century. It’s not easy (now) to come up with greater and different things.”
– That would be Nicholas Donofrio, IBM’s executive VP of innovation and technology, in an interview with ZDNet Asia. Sounds like a guy who could use a little vacation.

“I would buy a Mac if I didn’t work for Microsoft.”

Not a lame quote but definitely a foot-in-mouth pronouncement, coming as it did from Microsoft executive Jim Allchin in an e-mail to Messrs. Gates and Ballmer. Naturally, it found its way out the door. The lame part came later, when Allchin felt compelled to “clarify” things in a follow-up e-mail released to the press:

“In the e-mail, I made a comment for effect about buying a Mac if I was not working for Microsoft. Taken out of context, this comment could be confusing.”

Fire for effect. Roger Wilco and out.

Source: Wired News