Disqus - Latest Comments for Sebastian

Re: The Droid fails AS A PRODUCT when compared to Palm Pre and iPhone

Sebastian — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:07:50 -0000

This is an interesting review, thanks for writing it. From the very first picture of the Droid I couldn't really understand why anybody would call that thing pretty. It's as much "pretty" as my G1 (HTC Dream) was (not).
I can't add to the Android criticism - it definitely got better since the G1 (Android v1) but I can imagine it still being pretty geeky. My impression was always that technically, Android is very capable but they haven't spent time on making it pretty.
You can sea, on the start screen already, that Palm Pre & iPhone have the prettier operating systems. And we all know that prettier in operating systems most of the time also means more easy to use.

Re: The world’s dirtiest coastal ecosystem? – bet you guess wrong

Sebastian — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:04:22 -0000

Honestly: Did you REALLY expect any different result than that the world's most poluted [fill in environmental treasure] would be found anywhere else but the USA?

I mean ... that has nothing to do with anti-americanism. (I'm not anti-american!) But the US clearly lack any understanding (and mostly, any respect) for the environment.

Re: Why Bing is a stupid ass name for a search engine

Sebastian — Mon, 25 May 2009 02:42:03 -0000

You know, people said the same thing about "Google".

Re: Paris bike sharing program getting trashed.

Sebastian — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:43:45 -0000

In Vienna, theres a similar system in place and it was long before Paris. It had similar problems, but there, bikes simply weren't returned to the "bike stations".

The revised system works much more fool proof and stopped all these problems: When borrowing a bike, you have to register your debit or credit card. Borrowing the bike for up to one hour is free - after that, you pay. If a bike isn't returned, the debit or credit card is charged. If a bike is returned damaged, it can be charged, too, because the previous borrower is known.

Since then, there haven't been problems any more, at least not wide-spread.

Re: Tech News for Everyone? (Scripting News)

Sebastian — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:48:39 -0000

You should take a look at ReadBurner (a Google Reader Shared Items-aggregator). ReadBurner's problem is that there are too little people using it to share their links right now.
If you could get your top 100 bloggers to share their shared items feed with ReadBurner, there's a good chance ReadBurner would be what you're looking for, minus the problem of having to explain the elite factor to people, because it isn't.

http://www.readburner.com/

Re: Ist denn das zu fassen?

Sebastian — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:36:11 -0000

Gib hier deinen Kommentar ein.

Re: Bootstrapping thumbnails for photo apps (Scripting News)

Sebastian — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 11:40:34 -0000

Could you create a central place where you post these "bootstraps"? This would make finding and referencing them easier then on your personal blog.
Also, finding "bootstraps" could be "crowdsourced". You're interested in photos, other people could be interested in other things.

A central place for discussion would be useful.

Re: TechFuga makes it clear TechMeme is not innovating

Sebastian — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:20:09 -0000

I'll look at TechFuga later, but I definitely discovered that subscribing to a small number of tech blogs brings up most interesting news. If there's something I'll miss - well, whatever. I want to get 80% of the news in 20% of the time, I don't care about the other 20% I'd have to spend all day on retrieving. After all, I've got a job.

More important: Thank you for blogging again, Robert!

Re: Lessig starting to kiss some powerful butts

Sebastian — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 04:05:45 -0000

You didn't read the news that Lawrence Lessig joined Harvard University, right?

Re: Why it doesn’t pay to play nice with Google

Sebastian — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:25:14 -0000

This post makes absolutely no sense. Couldn't there be a different reason for RTM to integrate with Gmail than to be acquired by Google? (Like providing an useful service that enough people pay for to be profitable?) RTM is still much more than the new Gmail Tasks, and even though many people will likely switch from RTM to Gmail Tasks, those who pay for RTM are those who use the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberry and Windows Mobile sync tools, and they'll continue to use RTM.

RTM is a useful service, that's why it's loved by its customers, both paying and not-paying, having competition on one of the platforms they support won't change that basic fact.

Re: Ist denn das zu fassen?

Sebastian — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:12:59 -0000

Claudia Bandion-OrtnerGanz kurz hab ich nach der Wahl geglaubt, aber wohl mehr gehofft, dass diesmal alles anders würde. Ich hab der SPÖ unter Faymann mehr Selbstvertrauen und der ÖVP unter Pröll mehr Vernunft zugetraut. Sie können aus diesem Debakel nur gelernt haben, oder? Denkste!

Re: Ist denn das zu fassen?

Sebastian — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:12:21 -0000

Wie kann die SPÖ zulassen, weder das Justizministerium noch das Innenministerium zu besetzen? Macht korrumpiert fast immer und es wäre naiv zu glauben, gerade die aktuelle ÖVP wäre die Ausnahme dieser Regel! Die Judikative ist zwar relativ unabhängig, die Realität ist aber nie so einfach. (Das wissen SPÖ und ÖVP auch - deshalb hat es diese Situation das letzte Mal unter Bruno Kreisky gegeben.)

Re: Ist denn das zu fassen?

Sebastian — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:12:00 -0000

Die ÖVP ist aber nicht besser - sie ernennt die Richterin im BAWAG-Prozess, Claudia Bandion-Ortner, zur Justizministerin. Die Optik ist grauslich - nachdem die ÖVP in der Nationalratswahl 2006 die BAWAG-Affäre gegen die SPÖ auszunutzen versucht hat und Bandion-Ortner ein hartes (nicht rechtskräftiges) Urteil von 9,5 Jahren Gefängnis gegen Helmut Elsner ausgesprochen hat, wird sie dafür mit einem Ministerium belohnt? Das könnte man die Frage, warum Elsner noch immer in Untersuchungshaft ist, plötzlich in einem anderen Licht sehen.

Re: Next frontier: Voting (Scripting News)

Sebastian — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:57:34 -0000

That's not possible because votes aren't counted by one individual, but by several people together (each vote is checked by four people or so, representing the four biggest parties in Austria). It's not possible that someone invalidates ballots.

The biggest advantage of this system is, that it's trusted - fraud is nearly impossible.

Re: Next frontier: Voting (Scripting News)

Sebastian — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 04:11:59 -0000

In Austria, we have a very secure way of voting and counting votes. It's old school. No technology involved. Every voter gets a sheet of paper where they can make their cross (or more, if they want to cast an invalid vote). At the end of the day, these votes are counted by hand, with each party participating in the election having the right to send one representative to that. Through that, it's guaranteed that if a vote is counted, all representative agree on their vote. In the unlikely case that there are unclear votes, lawyers can still come and give advice (something that never happens, because in the end, these representatives aren't stupid and can see if somebody makes a cross or not).

This is a very fast process, we have a nation wide end result several hours after the polling station closes (of course except for people who vote by mail).

It's old school, there's no technology involved, but it's secure, fast and (most important) trusted!

Re: What the worlds most famous Muslim blogger, Robert Scoble, teaches us

Sebastian — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:04:27 -0000

The sad part is that actually some people unsubscribed from his blog because he "only writes about politics" - after this post, and not after one of the many other posts he wrote about that topic.

Re: The customers are gone, now what? Tent sale!

Sebastian — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:08:25 -0000

Boy, it's good to see you blogging again!

Your posts give much better (and more personal) insight in what's going on in the Valley than anything I read elsewhere.

In Europe, we're not hit nearly as bad for now. We're experiencing the slow-down in ad spending through a decline in quality ads (at least from Google Reader).

Re: Site Meter causing Internet Explorer failure

Sebastian — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:52:49 -0000

IE isn't "not perfect", it's a piece of crap. Just about every user of a different browser will tell you the same. Join the good side, join the productive side, join the Mozilla or Opera side!

This is a clear Site Meter problem, though. But nobody's blaming IE.

Re: Site Meter causing Internet Explorer failure

Sebastian — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:50:40 -0000

I have a similar issue with the latest Google Maps API code, which is online for about two weeks now. It broke access to each site that loaded the JavaScript-file, without any interference from my code. (I deactivated all JavaScript completely and just had Google Maps API activated.)

After I switched back to the stable version of the API (I used the "normal" versions, not the "sneak peak" versions), everything worked again.

Re: Cuil insults Helen Keller, is their target market adolescent boys?

Sebastian — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:26:29 -0000

Ahm, if jokes and quotes about/from Helen Keller, why shouldn't it be on the search engine? I actually think this shows that after all, Cuil has developed smart technology.

Re: You are an idiot if…

Sebastian — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:00:34 -0000

The reason why Microsoft won't do that is simple: It's too risky. They have about 50 million lines of code in Vista. You'll break a lot of stuff if you're completely rewriting it, no matter how hard you try to be compatible with old stuff.
Apple could do that because not a lot of people used it back then and the Apple brand is strong enough so that they don't need to care about their customers THAT much. If Microsoft would break only half the applications that Apple breaks with every new release, people would go crazy.

What Microsoft should do is to split their operating system up in separate components, a bit like Linux. That's a hell of a lot of work, but it would likely make the debugging and building process easier, which would make the development itself easier and probably less error-prone. Also, they could replace problematic components more easily.
The code of Microsoft is a mess - they have to clean it up. That would make solving many of their problems much easier.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Sebastian — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:19:25 -0000

@jere
The size of their index is part of their pitch to users. They said to the press that they have the biggest index size.
Sure it doesn't matter - relevancy is the most important thing. I wouldn't care if search engines had only 20 results for each query - as long as these were the relevant results! But Cuil advertises their index size - which doesn't seem that big after all.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Sebastian — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 04:22:46 -0000

Cuil has a problem that every technology-based search start-up (compared to Mahalo) has: Indexing is extremely expensive. Even though they found a cheaper way, it's expensive. Powerset "solved" that problem through only searching Wikipedia (which, well, also removed the need for sophisticated ranking), Cuil solved that through having an outdated index. At the last time Cuil crawled the web in huge amounts, Obama's tech policy very likely wasn't even available.

That makes it difficult to actually compare the quality of the results, because they could likely change that with a huge amount of funding (or an acquisition).

Me, I agree with your point that they are there for Microsoft's money. Microsoft would be intelligent to buy the promising search start-ups and give them all the resources they need. (Personnel, computing power)
Cuil could give them a cheaper crawling technology, which all other search properties (Live Search, Powerset) would profit from, Powerset could take this index and process it with their technology, Live Search and Cuil could do their thing with it.
Live Search is a dead brand, they should simply try several approaches and hope that one of them works. Cuil, like Powerset, wouldn't be very expensive. They could get it for 100 to 200 million dollars.

Re: Google Suffers Knol Geofriendly Verification Fail

Sebastian — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:42:14 -0000

You can't really say Google is that friendly to international people. Different to other companies, they offer everything in every country - but that's something I expect them to do. (Microsoft's new Live News website wasn't available in Austria, I only got the old site, and there was no way I could change that.)
Google was never fast in offering new languages for services except of search.

I wouldn't use Knol as an example for a product launch at Google, though. They completely fucked that one up. Posts didn't save, pages took several minutes to load, etc. Huge fail!

Re: Biking Around Berlin With Lukasz

Sebastian — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:11:37 -0000

Thanks - it's a really good read!