Disqus - Latest Comments for iphigenie

Re: Budget 2021: Chancellor slashes alcohol duty in major overhaul of tax system

iphigenie — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 03:22:57 -0000

it was 2023 in the budget speech - I assume because the project is still at consultation/impact stage

Re: A glimpse into the future of TTNC

iphigenie — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 12:49:29 -0000

The logo gets my head spinning, but that's OK, I don't need to watch it all day. It's certainly different.
We use a large number of ttnc features here at Alpine Wines, but I still haven't figured out if I can record my own voicemail welcome message, or whisper message... if it can be done, that's a blog post i want to read :) Very pragmatic, i am afraid...

Re: Ageism and categories of irrelevance

iphigenie — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 10:28:36 -0000

Ageism has always bugged me as a big "blind spot" - possibly from when I saw it hit my father in the 80s (before 50!). It seems we are better now than we were even 20 years ago but we still have lots of automatic preconceptions that we integrate without thinking. About young people, about middle age, about older age. All of them are easy narrative shortcuts. And when applying for jobs or pitching for funding, it's all there in the subconscious.

Assuming all young people are "as standard" not patient enough, superficial, won't listen, not yet responsible enough to carry a company is absurd... and yet it is in the narrative in the back of people's minds. As is assuming they are automatically more mentally energetic or totally clued up on technology just because they are 20

And assuming that someone with graying hair is somehow going to be less
curious, unable to keep up, less creative, less interested in picking skills up, or that they will be slowing down... is absurd. As is thinking that they are automatically more psychologically mature or a calming influence or will write better.

Some yes, but not all.

I enjoy working with young people, and I enjoy working with people 20
years older than me too. As many diverse backgrounds as is possible. Keeps you from groupthink, and I believe it brings resilience.

I have my own biases, work on them - but one I have and probably will never shake - any company whose board is too monolithic (2 or more of gender, ethnicity, age or education near identical) is not doing their job as well as they could be.

Re: Trading places….

iphigenie — Fri, 10 May 2013 01:32:49 -0000

What you hope for is a hard ask indeed - costly to put in place, loosely organised by definition, hard to control, and no easy money (so hard to finance). The semantics of context in human writing are already difficult - context is hard - but the same semantics of place and of behaviour and interactions. We're a long way from this.

For me the only way it will happen is a distributed grid of grassroots, community efforts of people about their places, because there's just not enough short term promise for it to get funded commercially. And for that we need the tools and standards (there are many pieces but it's hard work to piece together still) so all these small efforts are interoperable and layer on top of each other to create a whole ecosystem. Been hoping for this for 15 years and we're not closer to it now :(

I keep dreaming and being disappointed that what is built and made is so skewed towards the mediocre, the gimmicky - and the same type of usages that always were: classified ads, dating, coupons, and stamp (status) collecting. So much of it adds so little value, just noise.

On a mobile front, enhanced connected reality is so different from what it could be. When I am somewhere with a half hour to kill I'd like to find things of value that enhance my experience of the place, not coupons. I'd like to hear of the artist that lived around the corner (or still does), what happened here, I'd like to see what it looked like 50 or 100 years ago, I'd like to know of quirky places (including shops) and what the menus in places nearby are today. That there is a little park around the corner that is such a great place to relax for a break, someone's favourite carrot cake in the café a block away... and that there is a unique bookshop, or food shop, or gallery

What I find instead usually is a lot of apps that are small minded and mediocre and single serving - if you try a dozen in one place you might get 1 thing of interest on a lucky day. The net will give me generic offers from franchises, embarrassingly stupid marketing push offers, and the social media equivalent of dogs pissing on trees - actually I think dogs get more communication from piss than we do from most social/geo apps (so and so is mayor, so and so was there, but no shared information or comment)

I hope that in the middle people always will find ways to use the tools in ways that work for us, that leaves us in control (VRM not CRM), that allow serendipity and discovery and real encounters and experiences, not just lunch deals.

PS: not sure where the thing comes about generation Y uninterested in personal connection, as it is not my experience at all.

Re: Doing animals right in Guild Wars 2

iphigenie — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 05:08:54 -0000

" it sometimes seems that human character models are the exception rather than the rule." I think that is actually a desired effect linked to the lore, the humans have fallen so low, most of their nations gone etc.

Re: SugarSync

iphigenie — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:21:09 -0000

The app seems to have vanished from the store. Anyone know the drift on this one?

Re: Our Broken Democracy, in One Headline

iphigenie — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 03:21:07 -0000

voting 3 or 4 times over a 4 year cycle was never much of a democracy in the first place...

Re: (think) - The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

iphigenie — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 12:53:03 -0000

I have had the same kind of pain and problems with drivers, hardware, things that suddenly break etc. on GNU/Linux in the past 10 years. But I have also had the very same kind of pain and problems on windows - and if you buy new hardware and/or the newest versions of windows you will find the same crap. The diversity in the ecosystem is just as large and the issues just as many. On both GNU/linux and windows it can be avoided by staying behind the cutting edge. There are exact opposite of your post listing the same kind of crap as happening to them on windows and hence they switch to Linux... It's not the number of distributions that is the problem, it is the diversity and complexity of all the pieces in computing, no matter what the OS

Re: Beluga App Connects Japan Quake Survivor With Pregnant Wife

iphigenie — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 05:11:58 -0000

I'm sorry but this is not up to your usual questioning standard - Very cute story but how is it somehow to Beluga's merit that the mobile internet continued to work when the mobile phone spectrum was overwhelmed (and/or had its spectrum reserved for emergency communications)?

The internet-over-phone continued to work, so web sites, forums, web services, email continued to work and allowed people to check on others when they couldn't over the phone. It is not as if twitter or beluga or any of them had any infrastructure put up on the fly to help people in Japan communicate, and yet here they are with the press releases going "we help people when phones fail them".

Now what would be an interesting thing to look into is how come the phones in Japan could continue to use the net, what was done by the providers and infrastructure to make this possible. Because with what I know of 3G in Europe for example, it would NOT happen that way here, the phone bandwidth and the internet bandwidth are not that separated.

Re: The Real iPad Review

iphigenie — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 10:02:41 -0000

"I genuinely believe as FastCompany does, that kids today will benefit from tools like the iPad." Don't you think that kids today would benefit more from a device they can tinker with, program for, interact with as an actor not consumer? I'd say your daughter will soon deserve more than a device that says "sorry you're not allowed, just buy something" to most of the ideas she can come up with to do with the device?

Re: Perl projects for newbies

iphigenie — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:38:44 -0000

The donationcoder.com community has built a list of possible projects, as well as per language exercises and puzzles to learn - some languages are better developed than others, but this is a place that is friendly to newbies

Re: Why Facebook and Twitter Can't Ever Make It Big

iphigenie — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:21:06 -0000

Online advertising is still a caterpillar - especially in business-to-consumer. (an ugly, fat, loud, dumb and patronising caterpillar). I think, though, that there is a lot that hasn't yet been imagined - the moth or butterfly that will be one day (all right, enough metaphors). We like to think we want to be "immune" to marketing, but most of our decisions are about how our choice makes us feel as much as any rational evaluation. I'm a very rational person yet even I buy things because I "like" them better.

Re: Why Facebook and Twitter Can't Ever Make It Big

iphigenie — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:16:52 -0000

I really like your point about ads - they work with content (magazines, TV, editorial web) but they just get in the way of services. (although people seem to put up with it on thngs like webmail, paradoxically. I don't, I pay for my email). On the other hand, usage fees are totally normal in services offline, and unlike what you say, infrastructure services are actually raking it in! Telephony, broadband, mobile, connectivity - they are all cash cows. So is providing email services, domain names, hosting etc. There are free ad supported options for almost all of these (including telephony) but the majority of people just pay. When there was cash thrown around we got a lot of things for free, but I suspect we can get used to paying $10 or $20 a year for many services - especially if it comes with accountability