Disqus - Latest Comments for Fazal Majid

Re: RussellBeattie.com - Old Corp, New Logo

Fazal Majid — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 22:58:14 -0000

The old UPS logo and the IBM logo were both designed by Paul Rand and were/are iconic. The new logos are for the most part bland and derivative, although it could be said Kodak's new logo accurately reflects the company's increasing irrelevance to the post-film world.

At least the Xerox redesign did not switch to boring blue, corporate America's favorite color...

Re: Dear Netflix: Fuck You - RussellBeattie.com

Fazal Majid — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:49:49 -0000

Let me guess - you still have Flash enabled in your browser?

Re: The Tao of Mac - The Silver Surfer

Fazal Majid — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:41:52 -0000

You have clearly never used a MacBook Pro connected to a 30" LCD (a HP LP3065 in my case). It is a sight of beauty that makes grown men weep. You can find plenty of compact DVI-VGA dongles, in fact pretty much every gamer -oriented video card ships with 2 of them.

Like the PS/2 port or floppy drives, VGA ports belong to the dust heap of history. Most non-crappy projectors I have seen include a DVI port, and makes for a much stabler and sharper image from lack of generation loss.

Re: Starting a High Tech Business: Getting Five Clients

Fazal Majid — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 02:42:11 -0000

One caveat - large clients tend to be slow to actually pay, and often ask for Net-60 or even more extravagant terms. A spurt in clients can easily wipe out a small company's cash flow and take it down, simply because the cash from accounts payable lags the expenses in accounts receivable from implementation-related expenses.

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » FM/Toshiba Battle Royale Is A New Kind Of Marketing, Happens To Be Fun

Fazal Majid — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:09:55 -0000

It looks like a reprise of the slimy Microsoft ad campaign (see link) that made waves some time ago. You would do well to disassociate yourself from FM, they have no clue what the limits of the acceptable are.

That reminds me, I need to add "Federated Media" to the list of keywords to filter out in my aggregator...

http://gigaom.com/2007/06/22/on-the-microsoft-a...

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » Dual Bladed Clam Shell Opener Saves Your Fingers

Fazal Majid — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:40:57 -0000

I have one. Save your money, it's not very effective because the front tip is too big to be maneuvrable.

What I found to be the best solution to this problem is the cutting hook in the Leatherman Wave XTI. Punch a hold with the blade, slide the hook in and just pull to rip the clamshell apart.

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » Got MPx? Seitz 160 Megapixel Handheld Camera Is Still Not Enough

Fazal Majid — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:25:38 -0000

Scanned slides from a Fuji 617 panoramic medium format camera similar to this one weigh in at 250 megapixels, not 100, and they don't have the shutter speed limitations or weird motion artifacts of a scanning back. Better Light makes much more affordable scanning backs for 4x5 large format cameras.

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » From the road

Fazal Majid — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 03:05:19 -0000

Test-drive a GM car? I would rather stay in the snow than endure that...

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » Goodbye, F-117A. We’ll Miss Not Seeing You

Fazal Majid — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:12:17 -0000

It's doubtful they will ever fly again. They have a very limited payload, and need costly maintenance after each flight. The real reason why they are not going to be sold or given away is to preserve what is still leading-edge stealth technology.

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » Question Of The Moment: How Do You Back Up Your Data?

Fazal Majid — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:09:35 -0000

I am probably far more paranoid than you as I back up my data to 4 different drives or arrays, two of them are RAID and thus already redundant. My home server runs Solaris and ZFS, then I back up overnight over my DSL line to a machine at work, and from there to a DLink DNS-323 configured in RAID 1 with 2 1TB drives.

If your backup set is less than 1TB, the DNS-323 is an excellent choice - cheap, relatively fast, very compact, quiet and power-efficient. As a side benefit, since it has an iTunes-compatible DAAP server, I can listen to my backed up music collection at work using iTunes sharing.

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » THX Chief Scientist Says Blu-ray Is “Too Late”

Fazal Majid — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:28:57 -0000

I wish it were the case. The whole idea of single purpose physical formats is an anachronism in the digital age.

That said, there is a problem with distributing movies on flash: I/O bandwidth, not capacity. 32GB flash cards are already available, if expensive, but the best cards have write capacity in the low tens of megabytes per second. A 10MBps card would take almost an hour and half to transfer a 50GB movie. People sometimes hand over their film or memory cards at the photo counter to process and/or print while they are shopping, but the delay would certainly put a crimp on mass-market adoption.

There are ways to deal with the problem. For starters, DVDs or Blu-Ray contain a lot of redundancy: multiple soundtracks in various formats and languages, extras, and so on, that could be stripped if a hypothetical machine knows the capabilities of the target device. Flash write speeds will improve, driven by the emegrence of SSDs as hard drive replacements, but there is still quite a ways to go.

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » WaterField Designs SleeveCase For The HP Mini-Note

Fazal Majid — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:58:56 -0000

I have owned a few of the SleeveCases and other Waterfield Designs products, and love the fact they are made in my adopted town of San Francisco. The quality of manufacturing is top-notch and they are a very friendly company to do business with.

That said, they are thickly padded with neoprene. That's good for a full-sized laptop like a MacBook Pro, but with a compact laptop like a MacBook Air, Eee or Mini-Note, the resulting bulk would negate the thin and light advantage.

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » From The Road: Radio Shack Alternatives

Fazal Majid — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:10:30 -0000

The SF Bay Area equivalent is Weird Stuff:
http://www.weirdstuff.com/

Re: Why enterprise software isn’t sexy

Fazal Majid — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 04:00:08 -0000

The fact the person who makes the purchasing decision means vendors can get away with the cruddiest user interface you can imagine, but that's not the root cause.

Enterprise software will never be sexy just as accounting will never be sexy, and for exactly the same reasons.