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Archive for July, 2011

Google takes on Facebook with Plusone (+1)

19 Jul

Who in this world does not know Facebook? Over the last 4 years Facebook has become the defacto place for finding your long lost friends, building fan pages and gaining support for worthy causes. Facebook has seen such success that last year they clocked past the 500 million user mark and attracted the world’s major organisations to create pages and to advertise Facebook logos all over the place. You can hardly watch a TV ad these days without seeing a “Visit us on Facebook” added to the advert. So yeah, I would say Facebook has been a whopping success.

But it seems Google does not share the world’s enthusiasm to Facebook and once again is digging their fingers into yet another slice of pie to further try and dominate the world. Google announced their new social networking site called PlusOne which at this stage is only available to those with an invite because, like most Google products, it’s still in a beta phase. Prior to this announcement Google introduced a new PlusOne button to their search engine and provided the API to webmasters to use on their web sites, as can be seen at the top of this post. This effectively allows you to promote certain search results to your socialite friends on Google PlusOne, pretty much a carbon copy of the Facebook LIKE button just with a different name.

My biggest question is who really has time for yet another social networking site? Facebook already dominates most people’s lives and you can walk into virtually any company right now and you would find a great precentage of employees stuffing around on Facebook. Now with Google PlusOne people will have to find even more time to say what they want across multiple networks. Of course you can download a piece of software that will do it for you but really what’s the point? Is it really necessary to let the same friends know that you just ate breakfast but now across multiple networks, seems like an awful waste of time to me.

If anything it shows how we have degraded as a human race. We have tossed personal communication in the waste bin favouring online social networks, yet in all honesty there is nothing “social” about sitting in front of a computer screen or being tied to a mobile phone all day long.

will social networking sites like facebook, twitter and plusone result in the human race losing the ability to speak?

Will social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and PlusOne eventually result in the human race evolving into beings that no longer need to speak? (Scene from the Matrix)

Many of the people on Facebook these days could hardly hold down a 5 minute conversation in person but can blabber on every 5 minutes of the day when they have a keyboard in front of them. I can only see Google’s PlusOne adding to this very big problem with human communication. You can tell how it’s affected us a race by watching the teenagers of today and how they communicate with each other. They can not get by without Mxit, Facebook or Twitter, I’ve seen groups of teenagers all sitting in a row, not uttering a word to each other but instead texting and messaging each other with their phones …. but they’re sitting right there next to each other … how daft.

I have little hope for the future of our race, we may just lose the ability to speak with our mouths in the next 100 years ….. that’s what I call progress !!!

 
3 Comments

Posted in Social Networking

 

Mozilla Firefox going from bad to worse

19 Jul

I’ve been a Firefox user since it was first ever released and have come to rely on it so much as the only truly reliable browser. Sometime in the last year however a lot of problems started to develop on Firefox and to this day many problems still remain. It seem the Mozilla development have really lost focus and have spent too much of their time in the last year fiddling with introducing a bunch of un-needed crap into the browser while almost ignoring stability issues. Firefox 3.6 introduced a number of bugs to the browser and it took until around ver 3.6.15 for them to get it right but since then they have released another 5 updates to 3.6 bringing it up to version 3.6.19 and once again it seems a number of new bugs have been introduced, the worst of all is the browser now crashing daily. In the interim Mozilla released Firefox 4.0 which was a total disaster and merely 3 months after that they released Firefox 5.0. Clearly not even Mozilla had ANY faith in Firefox 4 and decided to ditch it and try a fresh start with Firefox 5.0.

I personally hold back on any new versions because they always come with problems and so was the case with Firefox 4 which worldwide gained itself a really bad reputation in just a few weeks. I tried it myself for a mere hour or two and immediately went back to ver 3.6. I have not yet tried version 5 as I am hesitant but I’ll give it a go sometime, perhaps when they reach 5.10 or thereabout. The big problem right now is that 3.6 seems to once again have started its problems so I guess a downgrade to 3.6.15 is in order for a while.

I just wish the Mozilla team would keep focus on the absolute basics of browsers like speed and stability and once they have that right then they should worry about introducing things like Personas which to me are features for people who have nothing better to do with their lives than make their browser look pretty.

Google has the right approach with Chrome giving it a very lightweight interface but sadly Chrome after all this time is just one big piece of Google BETA software and lacks a lot of necessary plugins/features like side tabs and a no-script plugin. There are ways to enable side-tabs in Chrome but they look awful, like a 3 year old designed them and the equivalent of Noscript from the Google Chrome Plugins called “NotScript” leaves much to be desired. So after a few hours of trying Chrome again the other day I am straight back to Firefox, even with its bugs and will wait another year before I try Chrome again. Hopefully before then the Mozilla team pull their fingers out and get back on track.

 

 
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Posted in Technology and Computing

 

Joburg Metro Cops are USELESS and LAZY (Hendrik Potgieter Road)

04 Jul

Every so often I have the “pleasure” of taking a drive down Hendrik Potgieter Road which runs through Featherbrooke, Ruimsig, Strubens Valley and Hillfox and every drive is filled with frustrations at the lack of law abiding drivers who use this road on a daily basis. In 5 years of driving this road I have yet to ever see the Joburg Metro Cops actually prosecute someone for a moving violation.

In just one drive on Hendrik Potgieter Road a week ago I witnessed over 40 moving violations just going one way and another 50 or so going back home. In both directions I never encountered one JHB Metro cop anywhere … not one in sight.The only time I have ever seen Joburg Metro Cops on Hendrik Potgieter is when they rock up, seven vehicles at a time and conduct random pullovers checking vehicles and drivers for licensing. This is always done on a section of the road where the officers can hide in the comfortable shade of some trees but almost every day you can drive on Hendrik Potgieter and seldom will you ever see a Joburg Metro Cop prosecute someone for a moving violation.

The types of moving violations I witnessed in just one day are as follows:
- Vehicles using the left hand emergency lane for overtaking
- Vehicles using right hand turning lanes for going straight
- Vehicles regarding a red traffic light as permission to keep driving through
- Taxi’s using left hand turning lanes as places to stop and alight passengers
- Sand & Stone Supplier Trucks dropping sand and stone all over the road
- Emergency lane used to pass large queues of vehicles who are all abiding by the law

These kinds of violations happen every minute of the day on this road and it leads to a great deal of frustration for those who choose to abide by the law and follow traffic signals and road markings. The problem is that one driver sets a bad example and 10 follow him thinking they also have permission to transgress the law and because of the total lack of presence of any Joburg Metro Cops these problems are now starting to spiral out of control and violating traffic signals and road markings seems to be something that everyone thinks is OK to do.

Just spend 30 minutes at 5 in the afternoon at the point where Hendrik Potgieter crosses the N14 highway. Here you will see at least 5 vehicles at every change of the traffic light using the right hand turning lane as permission to cut into the long queue of traffic moving straight. You could spend 2 hours at this traffic light during peak hours and you will not see a Joburg Metro cop doing anything about it. You may see one pass this intersection on his way elsewhere but you will NOT see him stop and deal with these people who transgress the law and cause a great deal of frustration for other law abiding citizens.

As far as the trucks owned by construction companies or sand & stone suppliers who constantly drop sand and stone all over the roads, this not only leads to frustration but actual damage to people’s vehicles. I’ve personally had two windscreens smashed on Hendrik Potgieter Road from stones thrown up by other vehicles and I can bet there are thousands of people a month who go through the same thing. These companies are getting off scott free and instead the vehicle owner has to pay an excess to his insurance company to get a new windscreen in his vehicle. If Joburg Metro were pulling these trucks off all day every day and issuing the company with a fine that HURTS we’ll quickly see an end to this kind of blatant disregard for our roads.

Many articles criticizing Joburg Metro have been written in the last 15 years but it seems they continue to do as they please and instead of dealing with moving violations (part of their job) they continue to choose the easy work to do, like sitting around in large groups where they can chat with their friends and pull over cars to check for licensing and to collect bribes. But actually asking them to patrol this road 24 hours a day and to set an example by prosecuting those who clearly transgress the law and set a bad example is asking too much of our public safety workers.

 

 
3 Comments

Posted in South Africa

 
 
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