communication. community. cognition.
From the same chat with Mike Driehorst
(Statement of Full Disclosure and Transparency: I do not have a non-working iPhone. I do not have a working one. I have been informed by my wife/CPA/CFO that I am not going to own one. At least not until we are out of debt and dropping crumbs in the kitchen on new flooring. I am an impartial spectator, and have not been bribed to blog in any way.)
Apple and AT&T almost had it all figured out. The iPhone launch went off on time, and there seemed to be enough in the stores to satisfy the people who waited in line. There was enough frenzy and worry that by mid-afternoon, iPhone bids on eBay were topping $1,500.
But now the iHoneymoon is over. Already there are several reports of melancholy technohemes who have an iBrick: a shiny paperweight, devoid of cell service and functionality. Is it possible that Apple and AT&T were a little naive to think that Verizon, T-Mobile, AllTel, and the rest would ramp up their call centers in anticipation of losing business? Not only that, there have been internal issues lingering from the (old)AT&T/Cingular merger. Some are reporting that they can’t activate online because their number used to be a business line. That sort of obstacle should have been anticipated and eliminated. If nothing else, a separate web-portal to work around for those people.
The sword cuts both ways. Live by the iHype, die by the iHype. Assuming AT&T/Apple break every sort of record for establishing accounts in 24 hours, all it takes is a few well-placed high-profile complaint stories to be the one rotten apples in the barrel. (Anyone know if Jeff Jarvis got an iPhone operational?)
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Apple, iPhone, AT&T, Steve Rubel, Josh Hallett, Jeff Jarvis, salacious namedropping[/tags]
I’ve now been on with User Support for more than an hour on a Friday afternoon, to fix a Java dysfunction with my payroll application.
Net result: sitting in my office, while a helpful tech support person controls my machine remotely. We’ve got to be pushing speeds of 7 or 8 baud. Seriously. That’s the Speed of Sephamore.
Thanks to the fine folks at RIM and Opera, for making this post possible sans computer.
[Update: We've got it fixed. It was a newer version of Java that did not like to play nicely with the others. We voted it off the island.]
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, computers, java[/tags]
From a chat with Mike Driehorst
You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. And that goes for good spam protection.
It’s been an interesting day at the office – I got a lot done, but I dare say I might have done even better without the deluge of spam that came my way. I even called it a “SpamStorm” to a co-worker.
Given that spam is more annoyance than anything else, who in their right mind would spend the time on such a low-payoff activity? Someone who understands the rules of internet business: volume, volume, volume.
The odds of actually generating revenue from a spam e-mail are quite low. Probably something on the order of 1-in-5,000,000. So, the proper thing to do is send out 20,000,000 messages. Sometimes the spammer gets paid based on an actual sale, sometimes just for getting enough people to “click through” to the checkout page.
The scary part is not just the increase in numbers of e-mails sent (one estimate calculated that 94% of e-mails sent in December of 2006 were spam.) Now the content is getting beefier (if spam had beef, that is.) The average size of a text-only spam e-mail is around 5500 bytes. That includes all of the biblical passages and random literary quotes they toss in to throw off the content-based spam filters. However, an increasing amount of spam is image-based: instead of putting the sales pitch in words, they are embedded in a picture file that averages more than 18,000 bytes. Not only is there more spam, it is even more unhealthy to “teh internet pipes.”
What provoked today’s spamstorm? A couple of co-workers thought our firewall might be down. More likely, it’s just the natural progression. Spam comes in waves.
So, what can you do about it? Here are my recommendations.
Turn off the preview pane in your e-mail program. Outlook, Thunderbird, whatever. The moment your computer tries to render the image in the spam e-mail, it sends back a request to the host server. In other words, by viewing the spam-pic, you have verified for the spammer that your e-mail address is valid. Just turn off the preview pane, or look for an option that blocks the images from unknown senders.
If you do happen to open an e-mail from a spammer – for everyone’s sake, don’t click anything. The act of clicking might just put a few pennies in a spammer’s pocket – and given the high volume of traffic they are dealing in, a few pennies here and a few pennies there add up to a ticket out of Mom’s basement.
Feel free to add your spam-stories or spam-suggestions below.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, spam, internet[/tags]
The Apple marketing machine is in the final week of a fever pitch. (Ordinarily, a phrase like “fever pitch” is just lazy cliché, but in this case it fits. Marketing does involve “a pitch,” the product is considered “hot,” and the collective drooling of the tech press accounts for “dehydration,” if not outright “illness.”)
Already, the mainstream media is heralding the arrival of a single device that replaces a cellphone, a Blackberry, and an iPod. Lost amid this excitement are several lesser-known features of the iPhone:
If you “discover” any others, leave them in the comments below…
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Apple, iPhone, parody, humor[/tags]
