Online shared intelligence

Alaska Airlines distributes religious material in their food trays. They know you may not be a catholic, or christian, but they don’t care: if you don’t like it so be it. I say NO, I don’t like it and I choose not to spend my $12,000 a year with Alaska any more. You should do the same, even if you ARE religious. The principle of being respected in your beliefs is at stake.

Apple is becoming more and more Big Brother and less and less the innovator; that is wrong, and outbalances their ability to deliver well-packaged functionality. It’s time to start favoring other challengers, and the phone market is full of them.

COX Cable censors some numbers and you cannot call them. That has nothing to do with content, or porno, or any other convoluted excuse. They do it because they don’t make sufficient money on those numbers. So, I will cancel all their services, and walk away happy that they won’t have my $60,000 every ten years.

Silverlight, Microsoft’s latest piece of bloatware, is here to compete with Flash, a slick, multi-platform media delivery platform. Just to convince you that it is needed (why, oh, why, would we need another plugin), it will bomb your machine mercilessly. Unless, of course, it is running Windoz… Typical Microsoft.

This has to be one of the finest anecdotes I have heard in a long time. Perhaps everybody knows it, but nonetheless it’s excellent.

All fantasies of ethical behavior die a slow death in these hyper-commercialized days. The process is familiar, you like a hungry startup because you are hungry for empathy, the hungry startup likes you because… it’s hungry for your attention. You love each other, admire each other, and everything works until the hungry startup makes it. Then, class conflict replaces romance.

Google’s “do no evil” was just a stretcher, a smart tactic to make us think the other way while the company helped the Chinese government censor its people (and probably helping ours censor us as well). But let’s admit it, the romance is gone; Google crossed “to the other side” long ago.

Lately, however, something is starting to happen more and more frequently, which would suggest that the corruption of principle is getting deeper and deeper into the architecture of this money-making machine: search SPAM. Check the search below: can anybody suggest that the Google engine does NOT know the difference between this SPAM result (offering cheap cash) and the technical results I was expecting from an OBVIOUSLY technical search? How many people would you expect to Google for specifications on a software integration and come out saying “Hey, that was cool, getting cheap cash was exactly was I needed for my integration needs!”?

Do you know of any innovative search provider that is still hungry enough to love me? If so, let me know… And if you see Google around, please ask them to come pick up their things or I’ll throw them out of the window  :)

Let me state very clearly that it is not my intention to pick up a zeallot fight. I am NOT a hacker, I am not an expert, just your regular user who has found a couple applications he/she depends on, and uses them regularly. I expect thousands of such users to be in the same situation as I am now, and thus I decided to share my experiences.

I use a quad-processor Mac G5, 2.5 Gb memory, Quadro 4500 Video Card driving two Cinema 30 inch monitors. The machine has 750 Gb internal disk, plus 4 Tb of external disks. Not a low end system, not one that can “barely run” the OS. Further, with OS X 10.4 the machine was a screamer, running Aperture with thousand of pictures of 20 Mb each, and at the same time flying through three or four other simultaneous heavy-load programs like Photoshop.

So, one day Safari breaks.