Facebook shares. What did you expect?

The Facebook "debacle" is a term much bandied about today. I find it very difficult to imagine how anyone thought an IPO for a company based upon the whimsical fads of users could be an investment of any kind. This is just another example of post 90's dot-com fever that people should have looked at and said "Once bitten-twice shy"

One of the big problems is that Facebook's attempts to monetize a free web-app has been to open up the system to intrusive and frankly egregiously pushy applications. When one uses an app these days the first page says "MyCrapApp will have the right to see your personal data, access your friends lists and post on your behalf" I tried this for a couple of days with the SchoolFeed application which became so annoyingly free with posting on my behalf that it was difficult for friends and family to decide what I was actually doing in amongst all the carefully constructed spam.

Facebook now has vast restrictions, having to satisfy shareholder demands. Unfortunately, the demand for shareholder profits will be nearly impossible to realise because as popular as Facebook is, it cannot compete in the same space as Google for advertising revenue.

It won't be long before the shareholders boot Zuckerberg from the board, the "team" who takes over will never be able to drive the worlds greatest white-elephant in any meaningful direction so Facebook will become the next (or next but n) MySpace.

I give Facebook three years before it becomes a cheap buyout for Google or Microsoft to gain a few hundred million hang-on users. Mark had better put his billions in a nice interest earning account someplace and learn to live a frugal life.

Lacking in tech

I've spent twenty years posting wildly about tech issues. I had a CompuServe account and was very active on those forums, Later my bobpowell.com site became popular as a support site for Stingray products I had written, then my "External Monologue" and bobpowell.net sites became well used by people looking for help with graphics and Windows Forms stuff.
Lately I have become jaded. My dad died a short time ago, my children have had problems that absorbed all my time and I'm a bit short on enthusiasm.
I'll continue to post and you can continue to look but please accept my apologies if the content doesn't meet with your exacting standards. Maybe I'll have a burst of energy soon but don't hold your breath.
Bob.

Wildly off topic but here goes...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120523200749.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

I am a father of eight and have been present at all the births of all my children. Childbirth is a perfectly natural process that most women could comfortably handle on their own or with a few wise grandmas around to push things in the right direction.

Laying a woman on her back is the worst thing that can be imposed upon her in labour. It restricts the movement so vital to ease the baby on its way. Women naturally stand, wiggle their hips, crouch, crawl on all fours and move into more comfortable positions during labour they NEVER EVER lay down unless forced to do so.

Pain relief methods such a Pethidine slow what might otherwise be a quick process and of all the births I've seen that had no intervention whatsoever were the ones that passed the quickest and with least trauma to mother and child.

Ok. Birth is a messy business. Amniotic fluid, blood, and shit all gets mixed up. When a baby crowns, the child is usually face up, nose toward the mother's belly but as it progresses through the cervix and down the vagina, the child turns so that its face is towards the mother's arse. With all that pushing going on, the mother usually craps at the same time and the baby's face passes within an inch of the rectum. This is enormously important because it is at this time that the child gets a good smear of mum's excrement across his lips, injecting him with her gut flora and kick-starting his own life-long friendly bacteria culture.

Of course, in the clean-room environment of the Cesarean operation where mum's that are too posh to push have the child torn from their uterus with scalpel and rubber glove, no one imagined that a great medical procedure would be to take a rectal swab from the mother and pop it in baby's mouth before they get wheeled off to their nice clean little lives.

Violent Action

How strange that my blog post of the other day should coincide so neatly with the problems of Sea Shepherd leader, Paul Watson who seems to be embroiled in an attempt to extradite him for attempted murder of crew members of a boat that was involved in shark finning for sharks fin soup.
I wholeheartedly support the Sea Shepherd mandate and would even encourage them to spend money on a well-armed submarine rather than a flashy gin-palace style boat.
Get serious, buy something with which you can sink the filthy bastards that destroy our ocean heritage.

When does a minority become a majority?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18100457#
This article kinda suggests that the nice stable world of white middle class America just became a significant minority.
The current birthrate figures suggest that in just twenty or so years, the USA will become a place where white people are the minority. This may be a good thing and teach them to get along with their neighbors a little better.
As a "wetback" myself, or at least, that was the perception I had as an H1B Visa holder in the US, I can well appreciate the prejudice that can be levied upon one if "y'all ain't from around here are ya?" Perhaps a majority of people who don't follow the conservative white ideals will breathe a breath of fresh air into a nation so set upon it's quasi-aryan supremacy.

Computer science degrees overrated

The recent article about the demise of Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo! serves to highlight the fact that degrees in computer science are massively overrated and, like degrees in Business Studies, they only serve to fill out the CV to get you to something better.

I can honestly say that I have never met a raw graduate of Computer Science who was good for anything in a commercial programming job. Everything important in that field comes from experience after some period of learning has been finished. Likewise, no good company would appoint a raw business studies graduate as a CEO right off the bat.

People are penalised too much today. Even blatantly lying about a CS degree is something that many many job applicants do. What should really matter is did the guy do the job better than anyone else available? More fundamentally, can they do the job at-all?

Being harangued out of a great job by a smart-ass hedge fund manager is ignominious indeed.

I urge anyone who has dirt to dish on Daniel Loeb, perhaps a disgruntled ex-girlfriend, perhaps a high-school teacher with a story about his personal habits, to dish that dirt to the world in the hope that justice can be done when something insignificantly embarrassing pulls his world out from under him.  

411 is not dead

The time wasting shitheads who sit around in internet cafes on the Ivory Coast sending out e-mails to steal from honest trusting people are still very much in evidence. This clown Guy Louis Dechaumes <dechaumes.louis@gmail.com> is one such shit-for-brains who wasted my time agreeing to purchase a car that I had advertised on ebay. These scum troll the internet for high value advertisements, promise to pay and then say "Oh, I'm on holiday at the moment and running short of cash. I can send you a certified check for the 8000 no problem but can I ask you to pay the courier fees and insurance which comes to 350 dollars. My son will reimburse the cash when he comes to get the car. I spotted the scam only after three days of being convinced I'd sold the car but my suspicions were raised when he proposed this "you pay the carriage" scheme.

Luckily I knew how to find the IP address of the sender in the mail and sussed out his Ivory Coast origins.

Please feel free to bombard the asshole with insulting e-mail.

The polite form

Modern language has lost a great deal in the Internet age where a letter, that may have been hand-written with a quill pen and upon paper that was made by manual labour, transported by horse through wind and rain and bandit ridden territory to the sad recipient who may have died of consumption in the interveneing period, can now be dashed off in a few moments by hammering some keys and pressing "send"

Today, written communication has been reduced to the easy form of Hi, blah blah, cheers! and there is very little care taken by the author to convey a sense of respect in e-mail.

In the last hours, I have been the recipient of communication written, obviously by a Gentleman of letters, who uses the polite form of address, even in the oh so immediate e-mail format and I've found myself having the same sort feelings that I had when reading Dickens. Feelings that there really is a correct way of addressing one's peers or that respect can indeed be transported via the medium of text and be recieved with good grace at the other end of an IP packet stream.

Even more surprising to me is that even though the aforementioned Gentleman sent me an e-mail in French and used the polite form of address reserved for letters that are designed to inform you of adverse court judgements or the impending arrival of a baliff, I still felt respect at the other end.

Perhaps the polite civilised manner that men such as Peypes and Darwin used to communicate is not lost and a revival of polite forms of address on the Internet would engender a new era of chivalry. We can only frikkin 'ope.

In any case, Madame or Sir, I pray that you will kindly accept my humblest sentiments of devotion.

Robert.
















PS. Hey Ricky, how's breakfast? ;-)

Massive marketing cock-up!

If you ever think you've done a wrong thing selling stuff to a customer, don't be disheartened, it can't be as bad as this!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18004097#

The cost of the public holiday

Public holidays in Portugal have just been reduced as part of the austerity measures imposed by the financial bailout package currently in effect. Four holidays, mostly Catholic religious observances, have been removed from the calendar. Of course, Anyone can chose to take time off to observe whatever holiday one desires but the ones that close a country down for a day cost businesses a vast sum when taken as a whole.
I have, in the past, been an employer and had to suffer the cost of bank-holiday that employees expect to be paid for.

I did a quick calculation for France where I live; a country that particularly likes its bank holidays and that chooses to place them on a tuesday or a thursday, giving employees the possibility to make a four day weekend out of a single day off. Remember, bank holidays apply at a national level for most employees so the actual cost to business could be calculated as:

No of employees * average wage * holidays

In France this works out to: about 15375000 employees on an average wage of 120 euros per day for 14 days per year so: 25,830,000,000 That's twenty five billion euros.

Vive la vacance!

A close run thing...

Democracy and politics are about ideas and passion. Passion in anything will usually engender a strong reaction and in politics, this is traditionally marked by a landslide victory of one side over another. Victories like that of Roosevelt over Landon in 1936 or the victory of Jacques Chirac over Jean Marie Le-Pen in 2002. These elections are the result of a population who demonstrate their wishes in the most vociferous manner. In the case of Chirac for example, the French did anything possible to vote against Le-Pen simply because he was, and still is, essentially an ultra-right wing wannabe fascist and Chirac, even though not enormously popular, was the insurance policy the gently conservative French wanted to counter the threat of a hard-line nationalist leader.

Close run elections are entirely different. I believe strongly that even though the media portray these polls and elections as "hard fought" and exciting, in reality they show nothing more than the total apathy of the electorate for one candidate or another. Close run elections amount to what is essentially a coin-toss result for the winner. Prime examples of this sort of election is George Bush's victory over Al Gore which was too close to call and Bush only won by forcing a change to the numerical system and increasing the number of votes to more than he was actually given. The current French presidential election which will take place this coming Sunday is another example of electoral apathy at work. Sarkozy and Hollande will be France's coin-toss election. One cannot say "May the best man win" but should probably say "May the most widely beneficial candidate have sufficient good luck to gain the upper hand".

Correct spelling is the mark of an intelligent human!

Wired magazine recently published this article by Anne Trubek who once again gives credence to the idea that the usage of language should be fluid, unstructured and we should not care about incorrect spelling in the digital age.

In this benighted article, the author once again harks back to days of yore in which phonetic spelling was used and, before standardisation of the language by first Samuel Johnson and then The Oxford English Dictionary, I refuse to call that rag Websters a dictionary, made English into a recognisable and repeatable method of communication.

While a “professor” of language, and I remind the reader that a “professor” is someone who “thinks” that they know something and not necessarily someone with actual valuable knowledge, may believe that they know far more than their predecessors; change, especially in written language, is not necessarily a good thing. Some people might consider that a language which changes quickly due to social pressures is cool and exiting, it really just shows that the lowest common denominator applies and that pig-laziness on the part, usually of children, who think that textspeak is cool, enables any number of spellings to be valid and that if you’re inclined to just go back to reading phonetically again, all will be well.

Language, and more importantly, written language is what advances our civilisation from dirt, disease and brutality towards understanding, health and betterment. A written language that is eminently repeatable and understandable is an absolute requirement for the communication of scientific ideas across the barrier of generations. Our knowledge of all things scientific and technical that our ancestors learned has been passed to us, even across the gulf of ignorance presented by the dark-ages, by written texts in Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Latin, the list is too great to mention. Our very civilisation has been accomplished by enabling children from different villages to communicate in one standard way and to have at least one common root from which their experience can grow the tree of knowledge.

On my facebook page I accept friend requests from people all over the world. I am open to all points of view but the ones that I remove or ignore quickly are the ones whose posts are habitually rendered in textspeak. It is so tiresome to read and so variable that it becomes hard work to even look at. When there are four, six or even many more different ways of spelling the same word or conveying the same meaning, even trying to accept the ideas put forward, however interesting they may be, becomes a chore not worth doing.

I truly hope that the crackpot ideas of people who pollute a language that is designed to enable communication for the betterment of mankind are quashed by the continued demonstration that a concise and understandable written phrase flows into the conscious mind far easier than one which breaks the rules of comprehensibility just to be “cool”.