Khoji On Tech (and more)

I think the time has come for web developers everywhere to rebel against the tyranny of Internet Explorer, particularly the older versions (6 and before). We’re all donating hours of valuable working time making modern websites backward-compatible with IE6 for freeloaders who are feeding off of our work. The time has come to just say No.

Freeloaders? That’s right. Companies that still use IE6 are freeloaders feeding off your work.

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Geeks and tech users tend to be junkies. Literally. I’ve noticed that in myself recently in connection with the issue of whether or not to get an iPhone. There is no good reason for me to get one, but my inner geek has developed what is quite literally a physical craving for one. Dealing with this has become my ongoing Zen koan over the last few weeks and it’s a very interesting experience.

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The operating system debate is so dated that it’s getting to the point where it’s embarrassing when people get heated up about them. Nowadays being passionate about a particular OS makes you look about as cool as those people who used to build their own bomb shelters during the Cold War. Get over it, it’s over and everybody won.

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If you use Fring, the Skype client for the iPhone, iPod Touch and numerous other mobile phones, have a look at your Skype privacy settings on your computer after running Fring. You will probably find that all your incoming settings have been reset to “Anyone” can contact you for both chats and calls, no matter what you set before. This gets reset every time you run Fring to use your Skype account — you don’t actually have to do anything, just Fring starting up and logging into your account to display your active buddies is enough.

I’ve been getting a lot of Skype spam chats (“Hello Dear…”) and I finally discovered that Fring is the culprit that’s opening Skype up. There are quite a few annoyed messages about it on the Fring forum but the Fring programmers don’t seem to have responded yet.

Brilliant little idea suggested by SeanFX, use makeup bags transparent on one side for adapters, small cables etc:

OK, the story was different: Apple actually wanted to allow customers to be able to create their own ringtones for free. The RIAA forced them to charge royalties and pass them on to the RIAA, while ensuring that the artists responsible for actually creating the music would not get any cut of the royalties. Words fail me…

Apple is the latest major company to get into nickel and dime crime, which is safe, legal and fantastically profitable. Their new iPhone ringtones function gets people to pay 99 cents for something they already own, and money for nothing is always the best best profit margin you can have. It used to be called theft.

Robbers used to hang out in the woods and collect loot from unwary travellers by threatening to insert sharp instruments into their soft parts or banging them over the head with a heavy stick. This is no longer necessary, there are much better ways to boil a frog nowadays.

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There has been quite a lot of discussion lately about whether we might be living in a computer simulation. The current discussion is being fueled by a serious paper by Nick Bostrom and it is also being discussed in many blogs.

In terms of quantum mechanics the question as to whether our reality is a simulation or not is actually quite moot. To begin with, it is now as certain as science can be that matter as we subjectively perceive it does not exist — the huge majority of what we experience as matter is actually empty space and the rest is tiny areas of energy events popping in and out of “existence” (at least from our point of view) like whack-a-rats jumping in and out of their holes. Most people still miss this because physicists continue to use the comforting and misleading word “particles” for something that is actually about as particulate as an advertising popup on a website.

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It is becoming increasingly difficult to predict how new or updated programs will run on users’ computers. Third-party software, particularly security software, is making profound changes to the operating system, creating a constantly-changing digital environment. As a result, manufacturer accountability and due diligence are much less meaningful concepts than they used to be.

Releasing new software updates is a scary process nowadays. Even if you’ve tested everything on all the hardware, operating system and software configurations you can think of, you just know what’s going to happen: Within an hour of the release, six users on hotmail and gmail accounts with names like kilroywzhr779 are going to write you urgent and angry messages saying that your program, Windows or both are doing something radically weird. File output is taking two hours, bizarre error messages are jumping off the screen like popcorn, the program and/or Windows are crashing, and so on.

Looking at the messages, your initial response is always to think you’re in the wrong movie. You tested it, just know that there’s no way your program could be doing this…
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