Geek Heaven Award

GSOC mentors have been introducing themselves to one another, and as always I've been avidly viewing the more esoteric web sites which this process introduces us to.

Today's winner (and its only 9:45 am) has to be Hironobu's HDD temperature graph here for its Zen like ability to ask us as many questions about the nature of life as it answers about the temparture of his drives.

Blow Your Own Trumpet Award

The Blowing Your Own Trumpet award goes to The Ministry of Truth for this little gem that appeared at the top of a page I was perusing...

"Wikipedia [sic] is one of the few reservoirs of hope left." — Anon.

Oh dear!

That the "facts" they accumulate are, to all practical purposes, anonymous makes the Ministry of Truth a wierd and dangerous phenomenon. One to be handled with extreme caution. That the recommendations are also anonymous is self aggrandisement of a kind not seen since Julius Ceaser wrote de Bello Gallico about himself in the third person, The Great General.

If I was tempted to go down the same route I would flaunt this quote:

"blog.Killerbees is one of the few sources for reliable bullshit detection left" - Anon.

Quote(s) of the [Specify Timeperiod]

This [timeperiod] there are two winners. In no particular order they are;
This one from the notes at the bottom of a government press release:

... followed postgraduate studies at King's College, Cambridge, before an academic career which has taken him to the Institute of Psychiatry...

And this from the English ruby coach Brian Ashton, during the build up to the world cup final:

I don't care what anybody says about England, it has nothing to do with me.

Lol!

cart-before-horse-FUD-ism award for the [specify timeperiod]

The cart-before-horse-FUD-ism (or "I can talk FUD out of my arse") award for the [specify timeperiod] goes to Carl Howe for his post about why the iPhone doesn't need 3g.

But the question left unasked as been, "Does 3G really improve the user experience dramatically?" Most pundits would reply, "Well, of course Internet experiences improve with higher bandwidth. That's why the world went broadband." And if the pundit is having a bad day, they'll add "Duh."

Funny thing though. They're wrong. Bandwidth doesn't affect the mobile phone experience nearly as much as most people think. And in some cases, high bandwidth Internet is actually worse for the user than a low-bandwidth one.

This IMHO is possibly the worst example of cart-before-horse-FUD-ism that I've read for a long time.

Here's why: Higher bandwidth means that you have a higher capacity for transferring data, in other words you could up and download more items concurrently or up and download larger items more quickly.

You could, that's what it means, go look it up. However your ability to benefit from this may be constrained by the phone you are using.

If, as he seems to suggest, the iPhone hasn't got 3g because it couldn't cope with the bandwidth then he ought to blame the people who designed the phone, not the people who provided the bandwidth. Better still, if its true someone ought to tell Apple, because an engineer needs to be fired at once!

My Sony Ericsson k810i works in both 3g and gprs modes and listen up, it is noticeably faster to download feeds and synchronise email when it has a 3g connection. Go figure.

So you get an award, Mr Howe, for cart-before-horse-FUD-ism. What you should have said is "Apple's iPhone probably wouldn't benefit from higher bandwidth because it would show high data error rates, and its battery and processor performance aren't up to the job of coping with data arriving in those quantities." And as for the part about http, I guess you haven't heard of keep-alives.

Quote of the [specify timeperiod]

I couldn't quite believe the hype:

"Oracle Coherence enables continuous data availability and transactional integrity, even in the event of a server failure"

Yes, it says "data availability ... in the event of a server failure". Of course they mean one server out of a cluster, but my mind boggled for a moment 'till my common sense caught up.

Perhaps not worthy of a QO[ST] Gold Award, but I'm reckon its worth one of those corporate shards of broken glass handed out for being-a-good-customer, which is surely a euphemism for spending-more-money-than-you-needed-to.

Stating the bleedin' obvious

I kept meaning to add this one to the awards, but never got round to it, I can't read it often enough.

Debra Chrapaty, the VP of Operations for Windows Live, in an interview with Tim O'Reilly, said

"I've learned that when you multiply a small number by a big number, the small number turns into a big number." (No shit Debra! Have an Award.)

With the ability to get right down to the fundamentals I'm surprised that she isn't a special advisor to the White House and President George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States.

The "What Planet Are you On" award for nonsense uttered in a meeting.

Colleague X said: "You wouldn't gift wrap her, she's a sandwich stealer."

What?! Why would you want to..?

Quote of the [specify timeperiod]

This [specify timeperiod]'s award goes to an unfortunate metaphor from Jonathan Schwartz (via Geir):

"Most of the world doesn't have access to the internet - that's the enemy to slay"

I'm quite sure Sun's PR people would be turning in their graves if they knew he was in danger of being translated literally like the possibly apocryphal story about coke/pepsi bringing your ancestors back from the dead. Slay your potential customers Jonathan? A worth winner.

Dumbest use of [specify thing] of the [specify timeperiod] award

I just signed up for an account at tumblr.com - killerbees.tumblr.com It should be aggregating my blog and my flickr photo feeds into one stream.
But no the award isn't for that.

However it did make me think what else I could aggregate, and I remembered that I could get feeds from Gmail labels.
So with all the talk about how much we could be doing with atom I felt that this award should remind us that technology is no better than the people who use it...

... The award goes to Google for Gmail's atom feed from the spam folder. :-) LoL.

If you have a gmail account check this out for the 100% most worthless use of atom... http://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/spam

Quote of the [specify timeperiod]

Nikki said "You get the champagne I'll get the hamsters"