Disqus - Latest Comments for pyrmont

Re: Episode 9 – Apple’s MVNO, the Law of Large Numbers, Apple Music subscribers

Michael Camilleri — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 09:06:48 -0000

I really appreciated the Question of the Week discussion on this week's episode. I actually thought the Law of Large Numbers was simply that reaching multiples becomes increasingly difficult as numbers get bigger (ie. that as iPhone revenues get massive increasing those revenues by 2x becomes harder and harder to do). It's terrific to have had this mistake corrected. Thanks guys! I'm looking forward to next week!

Re: Ripeworks

Michael Camilleri — Wed, 08 May 2013 03:31:40 -0000

I gave it a whirl and it did appear to work better, however once I refreshed enough dashboard pages the problem returned and now occurs every time. I didn't investigate as deeply today but it appeared to be being caused by the same issue. I'm going back to using absolute paths but thanks for trying! :)

Re: Ripeworks

Michael Camilleri — Tue, 07 May 2013 02:21:03 -0000

I started having this issue again but noticed that there was no problem if the built-in server was run without any routing file.*

I looked more closely at the output from the server and observed that the problem always occurred after load-styles.php was served. I opened up that file and it became apparent that the exit() command on the final line was causing the issue. If that was commented out, no problem occurred. A similar line is at the end of the load-scripts.php (which is usually the next file called up by WordPress when displaying the admin dashboard). If both lines are commented out, the dashboard loads without any issue.

My guess is that the exit() function is causing the routing script to terminate and that the built-in server then attempts to restart the routing script from the wrong directory. Hence the message that it Failed opening required 'router.php'. Indeed, if you use an absolute path for the location of the routing file (eg. /Users/{username}/.../{website_directory}/router.php) it works fine. (Unfortunately, neither ./router.php or ~/.../{website_directory} works.)

I had a brief look online and couldn't work out why load-styles.php and load-scripts.php exit. I prefer not to edit the WordPress core files and so my solution is to use absolute paths (although I don't really like this as an alternative).

If any one finds a better way to fix this, I'd love to hear it.

* I would have just avoided using a routing file altogether but the site I'm developing features PDFs and the built-in server doesn't serve these correctly yet (I think because it's not setting the appropriate MIME type). This isn't a problem for Firefox, which allows you to access the PDF, but in Chrome it just does nothing.

Re: Ripeworks

Michael Camilleri — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 03:25:23 -0000

This worked great for me.

I had one issue with updating the database. I kept getting the following error:

PHP Warning:  Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0
PHP Fatal error:  Unknown: Failed opening required 'router.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/Cellar/php54/5.4.11/lib/php') in Unknown on line 0

I was able to get past it by restarting the server and then refreshing the page where PHP had crashed. I had to do this two times (in essence manually advancing through the autoredirects).

I'm not knowledgeable enough to appreciate exactly what was going wrong but since getting past this point, it all appears to be working fine now. Thanks :)

Re: No iPhone without Samsung’s wireless patents

Michael Camilleri — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 23:54:23 -0000

Is anyone aware of any reports that Samsung's has 'essential' patents that aren't FRAND? Everything I've read suggests that those are the only ones they have.

Re: Sparrow to Challenge App Store Rules

Michael Camilleri — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 04:48:00 -0000

Would love for this to come to iPhone. Am incredibly dissatisfied with Mail for my Gmail needs.

Re: Learn how to Create a Retro Animated Flip-Down Clock

Michael Camilleri — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:44:31 -0000

I've just put one up on a website I'm working on: http://launch.smash.org.au/

The code is basically unchanged from the tutorial so it should be very easy to modify if you want to change the date it's counting down to. Hope that helps!

Re: Learn how to Create a Retro Animated Flip-Down Clock

Michael Camilleri — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:33:30 -0000

Thanks Alexandru! I used the tutorial as a base to construct a countdown timer with the same look and feel :) Couldn't have done it without your hard work :)

Re: In The Age Of Realtime, Twitter Is Walter Cronkite

Michael Camilleri — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 02:16:15 -0000

I think what you'll find is that journalists/agregators will increasingly use Twitter as a source of information.

The general public -- who don't have time to trawl through every message on Twitter to find the new information -- will still utilise major news services and/or trusted journalists/aggregators who do have the time to go through the information and find out what's important.

Re: Humanize Microsoft? That’s impossible!

Michael Camilleri — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:05:09 -0000

http://valleywag.com/505145...

Re: Humanize Microsoft? That’s impossible!

Michael Camilleri — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:19:16 -0000

Two things:

First, I think you miss the point of the Apple commercials. Unlike what the Microsoft ones are trying to do (or perhaps trying to do since no one knows for sure) the Apple commercials have a single objective: make people think Macs are easy to use. Whether you like Justin Long after the commercial or whether you'd rather have a beer with John Hodgman is beside the point. None of the ads leave you in any doubt that using Windows is a pain and that things would be so much easier if you just owned a Mac. These ads are particularly effective on people who do not own a Mac and assume that it really will be as good as they make it out to be.

Second, the trouble with the Microsoft ads is that they're not addressing Microsoft's actual problem. This problem is not that their company is perceived as inhuman, it's that their products are perceived as bad (or at the very least poorly designed). This campaign may well be successful in humanising Microsoft (certainly they're helping Bill Gates seem cool) but if Microsoft thinks people aren't flocking to Vista just to stick it to the man they're sorely in need of a reality check. Vista's problems are the hardware requirements, compatibility issues (or perceived issues), and it's 'helpfulness'.

To be fair to Redmond, I do think part of the reason people aren't flocking to Vista is that with XP they actually created a pretty good operating system that does what most people want it to do and which everyone's quite used to after 8 years or so. But the ads don't address this problem either.

Finally (OK, so maybe there were three things), I think it's quite legitimate for people who may not be the target audience to look at what a marketing campaign should be aiming at achieving and say whether it is falling short of that mark or not. It doesn't matter whether I get the ads or not, it's whether the ads address the problem or not and in the case of this campaign they don't.

Re: Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld Commercial #2: I Remain Confused

Michael Camilleri — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:14:16 -0000

I think Michael almost nails it. The problem this ad threw up as far as I could see was if over a billion people use your products and you've been so ludicrously successful at reaching 'real people' doesn't it suggest that the reason people don't like your current product is because of the product? Not because they're too stupid to realise how awesome it is?

Re: Microsoft Ads: First Phase To "Engage Consumers, Spark Conversation"

Michael Camilleri — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:18:49 -0000

That was a terrible ad. If they can't make a simple advertisement extolling the virtues of their product maybe it's time to redesign the product.

Re: How Disney Mobile Is Succeeding In Japan (After Failing In the U.S.)

Michael Camilleri — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 07:29:16 -0000

Any proof they are actually succeeding? I'm in Osaka and I don't know anyone that has a Disney Mobile-branded phone nor do they have much of an advertising presence around the place. I might just not know the right people but is there any information about the number of subscribers they've managed to snag, for instance?

Re: Blatchford pines for the monologue

Michael Camilleri — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:23:25 -0000

I think you mischaracterise her argument slightly, Matt. The first thread of which is not an attack on the democratisation of journalism (that comes later) but instead a theory of why the act of blogging is bad for journalists:

Most important, Michael Farber is right. We all have a limited number of things to say, informed opinions, funny lines, quirky observations. We have only so many words in us. Do we really want to spend them on something as ephemeral as a blog?

Her point is that blogs, in encouraging and rewarding a near-constant stream of new material, set up a situation where it is all but impossible to consistently ensure quality journalism. Consistently good journalism requires time. Time to do the research, time to talk to the people involved and, most importantly of all, time to write. Blogging, with its emphasis on post now, ask questions later, all but precludes this. Moreover, the increasing pressure newspapers put on their reporters to churn out content is turning them from journalists into bloggers and from producers of quality writing to producers of poorly written drivel.

While I think you do correctly identify the second strand of her argument (the democratisation of journalism is bad), with all due respect, I think your counter-argument is a little weak. First, if you're looking for someone let me be the person to say that journalism is not supposed to be a conversation. Just because a technology has come along and created a related field doesn't mean the related fields are equivalent. Journalists may now be bloggers but that doesn't mean that bloggers are journalists.

Second, that we now have the ability to have a two-way dialogue is great and I'm all for celebrating that but let's call a spade a spade. A two-way dialogue? That's a conversation. It's people putting forth different points of view and modifying their position (or not) based on what the other person says. Journalism is the act of investigating a story (often one that's topical), doing the research, and writing it up in a way that informs the reader. Does that make journalism and the Internet mutually exclusive? No, of course not. What it means is that you can't just call any form of writing about current events journalism.

Re: Delicious 2.0: Who bookmarks any more?

Michael Camilleri — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:10:53 -0000

I guess I don't qualify as 'hard core' user (I only have 272). I use del.icio.us to bookmark two types of things: interesting things that I might want to refer back to at some point (http://delicious.com/pyrmon... and long-form articles I come across but at that moment don't have time to read (http://delicious.com/pyrmon....

The new del.icio.us redesign doesn't really impact upon either task so I'm happy insofar as they didn't break anything.

Re: Was Hasbro right to kill Scrabulous?

Michael Camilleri — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:08:34 -0000

Right, I'd agree that there's a case to run of trademark infringement but that's quite different from what's being alleged here (at least in what I've read). I tend to get (perhaps overly?) concerned whenever anyone seeks to expand the ambit of intellectual property through legal intimidation. I believe in intellectual property but as something that strikes a balance between creators and users; not something that's just for the advantage of copyright holders.

Re: Was Hasbro right to kill Scrabulous?

Michael Camilleri — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:52:45 -0000

Maybe this is a silly question to be asking at this point but what exactly was infringed? The idea of a game cannot be protected under copyright. According to the US Copyright Office:

Some material prepared in connection with a game may be subject to copyright if it contains a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression. For example, the text matter describing the rules of the game, or the pictorial matter appearing on the gameboard or container, may be registrable.

Can the Scrabble board be said to contain a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression? I'm all for upholding intellectual property rights when they've been infringed but it's not clear to me what Scrabulous has done wrong.

Re: CrunchBase: Now With Maps, Advanced Search, Jobs, And Milestones

Michael Camilleri — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:50:18 -0000

Looks fantastic. Great job!

Re: New Scandal At MediaMax Gives Us Excuse To Embed A Video Clip From The Office

Michael Camilleri — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:55:19 -0000

Not everyone who reads TechCrunch lives in the US.

Re: The Mouse That Roared

Michael Camilleri — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:09:30 -0000

Duncan -

It’s not that I am more coherent, but that Google’s strategy is.

I can't work out if you're a brilliant satirist, Steve, or in need of fourth grade.

Re: Why Microsoft will never win (again)

Michael Camilleri — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 01:14:24 -0000

This is related more to the title of your post than the actual article itself so I hope you'll forgive the indulgence. It seems to me Microsoft has been beset by four major failures in the past ten years or so:

1. The failure to establish a dominant OS in the consumer electronics market.

2. The failure to capitalise on their OS position in the cellular market.

3. The failure to capitalise on their OS position in the Internet market.

4. The failure to develop a vision for their desktop OS.

Whether they can ever win again will be determined by whether they can turn any of these mistakes around.

Developing a successful consumer electronics OS is perhaps the easiest since no one has else has much of a foothold yet (Take 2 of the Apple TV doesn't seem to have set the world on fire any more than Take 1 did) so it's not as if Microsoft has to compete with a dominant player. Moreover, their experience with the Xbox should have taught them a great deal about this area. The move to allow Xboxes to easily playback codecs used for video on the Internet is a promising step but it does make one wonder why we even had to wait? Is Microsoft worried about how to make their products attractive to consumers or how to cosy up to the media industry?

Apple's iPhone demonstrates things that Windows Mobile should have been doing years ago. Microsoft's failure in this area is disconcerting because it seems to indicate that even with all the money that was available to work in this area nothing even close was produced. My concern would be that this implies a systematic breakdown in the design, engineering and the business sides of this division and one that won't be easy to fix.

Their failure in the Internet era seems to have been in part a lack of adequate planning. Banking solely on proprietary standards and overwhelming market share looks as if it were the beginning and end of how Microsoft planned to make money online. I'm not so sure the NetDocs failure is as big a deal as some of the others have suggested. Microsoft's problems with the Internet aren't that they lack popular products (MSN Messenger and Hotmail), it's that they haven't been able to turn any of them into major alternative revenue sources. NetDocs might have eventually made them a lot of money but it's 7 years later and despite the existence of plenty of other web-based word processors no one seems to have worked out how to turn much of a profit with them.

Finally, their failure with the desktop OS is in part the result of having developed too good a product. There are problems with Windows XP, to be sure, but for many people it represents the end-point of the WIMP OS. It simply works well enough that Microsoft has been unable to present a compelling reason to upgrade. Perhaps what Microsoft needed with Vista wasn't a further honing but a radical departure. Perhaps a new paradigm was needed (eg. multitouch). Perhaps they needed to realise they have two separate customer bases (consumers and corporate IT departments) and focuses on one or the other of those groups. I'm not sure but then I'm not being paid to come up with a vision for where Windows needs to go.

I don't think any of these problems are insurmountable, however, the concern must be if Microsoft has gone this long without being able to fix them are they simply incapable in their current incarnation of coming up with the necessary solutions?

Re: It's Time To Rethink Copyright Law

Michael Camilleri — Tue, 27 May 2008 02:50:25 -0000

I agree with those above who question what 'natural behavior' is supposed to mean.

Re: FriendFeed kill Twitter? Not going to happen

Michael Camilleri — Sat, 24 May 2008 14:12:36 -0000

Nooo! You fell for his link-bait!

Re: Taking notes online: Still looking

Michael Camilleri — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:43:04 -0000

The biggest problem for me with Google Notebook is integration: it needs to allow you to 'paste' files into it (both offline files and ones from other Google applications). If it could do that it'd have me completely on board (although you're right that organisation is another area someone needs to start paying attention to).