After stomping all over Apple in a previous post for what I maintain are completely stupid problems with their website and receiving a flood of angry emails* from Apple fanatics drunk from the broth of marketing genious, I will grant Apple these points:

• They do have beautiful and large product photography.
• Putting a handle on a laptop is absolutely brilliant.

Apple fanatics are almost to the point where I wouldn’t want to be seen using a Mac for the same reason I wouldn’t want to be seen in a Porsche. The reason being that people would natually assume I use the product in an attempt to project certain stereotypes. In the case of the Porsche: I’m a cocky rich bastard with more money than I deserve. In the case of Macs: I’m a fancy-pants graphic designer and I went to @$%#ing art school.

For the record, I am not above lusting after after material goods or using products to impress people. For example, I want a Silicon Graphics 550 and an Audi A6 so people will know how smart and sophisticated I am.

* Only one nutty email was received and it was from someone I already know. I also received one positive email.

Why is it that every time Apple releases a new product their site goes down? I realize that they must have an enormous spike in traffic, but it should be completely predictable and can’t be near the kind of traffic Yahoo get’s on an average day.

While I’m picking on Apple, at last Apple expo, when Steve released the supercomputer in a 8″ by 8″ box (excluding the enourmous external power supply never shown in the media), the streaming video broadcast using QuickTime was crap. Through barely audible audio and nothing but still frames of video every 10 seconds (even on a fast DSL connection), I could barely make out Steve bragging about how he was being broadcast live to the world with QuickTime and Akamai.

Knowing I could do better, went to ZDnet.com and watched the exact same broadcast in glorious smooth full-screen streaming video using Windows Media Player.

Style + Shitty Products = Stylish Shitty Products.

Akamai, which claims to be “delivering a better internet” by mirroring popular content on their ‘bleeding-edge’ servers, seems to be a lot of non-sense to me. Sure, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but here is my anecdotal evidence: Two sites I know use Akamai, Apple.com and CNN.com. Apple.com crashes with traffic spikes and the streaming video feels like 1996. CNN.com has the worst video offerings of any significant website (in fairness to Akamai, this is partly do to poor encoding of video and audio).

I have mixed feelings about the unfortunately named Raging Search (raging.com) by AltaVista.

I like that I can choose my font and color scheme (I recommend verdana with the default colors). Other nice options include being able to turn off basically every feature (spelling suggestions, etc.) and choosing what info is displayed with the results (URL, date, size, etc.).

All in all it is quite a nice search engine with nice results. I do, however, feel a pang of guilt for using what is so obviously the result of a board meeting in which AltaVista execs decided they needed to be more like Google. I doubt they have the balls to make the enormously popular but cluttered altavista.com point to virtually advertising-free Raging Search.

May the simplest win.

re: Napster Thrives!

rob said:

I question CNN’s line:

“That made Napster the fastest-growing software application ever recorded by the Internet research company.”

CNN may have their ‘fact’ straight, but the hell is the “Internet research company.”

The Open Directory Project at dmoz.org is another wacky love child of the AOL-TimeWarner merger. Other bizarre offspring of the corporate mega marriage include Mozilla and Gnutella.

Basically an open-source version of the Yahoo editorial system, dmoz has the advantage of having actual human beings (of varying quality) decide which site goes in which category, without the disadvantage of possible censorship associated with a central system. Anyone can signup to be an editor.

Anyone can use the Open Directory Project data on their site. Sites using it include Google, Altavista, Netcenter, Lycos, and Hotbot.

Acts of Volition is proud to be listed under on The Open Directory Project under:

Top: Computers: Internet: WWW: Web Logs: Personal: A

• Signal vs. Noise – take a few minutes to read the many pages at their company site, 37signals, and wonder why you aren’t as smart as they are.
• dack.com – the sarcastic bastard and creator of such brilliant works as
  Amazon 2001: A Navigation Odyssey
• Jeffrey Zeldman Presents – for web people. this guy updates his site every morning for breakfast, literally.
• useit.com – for even webbier people
• kottke.org – some guy
• k10k.net* – the brave designers paradise

I remember reading an article about how the web and hyperlinks were going to change the way children thought. At the time I dismissed it as mumbo-jumbo about non-linear thought patterns and other such nonsense. I fear the hypothesis have been proven true in myself.

Sitting in an evening university class (a place which is both foreign and familiar to me), I found myself constantly wanting the professor to move on. I found myself ‘skimming’ the lecture and was incredibly frustrated when I couldn’t control the movement from topic to topic.

Clearly, part of the problem is my inability to interact with people who don’t exist on my computer. However, I think this points to a clear conclusion: The Internet has fried my brain.