Mike Nally

Recently retired computer mogul Bill Gates filed patents that propose to be able to save the United States, and elsewhere I presume, from the devastating impact of large hurricanes.

While scientists seem both skeptical and encouraging:

“There is no way to stop it. The storm might weaken in the center, but the outer areas wouldn’t be affected much.”

and

I don’t think this is anything that’s going to be done in the next few decades in a practical sense, but maybe further down the line.  I would love to see Bill Gates, with all his money, use some of it to experiment.”

Gates seems to have forgotten one critical thing: If there isn’t a financial return, there won’t be a financial investment.  Saving New Orleans from suffering $5 billion worth of damage by investing $10 billion dollars worth of research and effort is a noble task and one that would be most appreciated by those of us living in the path of such devistating storms.

The price of life?  Priceless of course.  Assuming that a stranger is willing to spend if for you.  And even Bill Gates with his $40 billion dollars worth of software loot can’t afford to save us all.

When Apple announced their game-changing iPhone in 2007 there was immediate concern over their choice of a touch-screen based keyboard.

While somewhat inconvenient as it tended to take up 40% of the screen real estate when in use, it was explained away as a powerful future proofing opportunity to developers.

Unrestricted by a physical keyboard designers would be free to innovate and customize the keyboard to best fit their purpose.

Sounds good. But where are the custom keyboards? I can’t remember ever seeing one.

Most developers have stuck with the standard set-up instead of a custom keyboard layout as far as I’ve seen. Something that would have been completely possible with a physical keyboard naturally.

Let’s be honest. The virtual keyboard has always been about sacrificing function for design. Otherwise I’d be complaining about having dozens of virtual keyboards to learn instead of complaining about Apple’s singular creation that helps the phone look pretty but can be frustrating as heck to use.

Hey Apple. We’re adults. We can handle the truth. This virtual keyboard continues to be an unnecessary struggle just so the phone can be 1/5″ thinner. Food for thought if you’re actually developing a touch screen tablet. Just sayin’…

(written on an iPhone – with significant effort)

While vanity surfing on the new Microsoft search engine Bing.com I found the following link:

Fair enough I guess.  But the more I thought about it the more I found it strange that I couldn’t remember making the comment.  Naturally I followed the link to see when I said such a thing.  Here is what came up:

It turns out that since I commented on Dave Winer’s statement on FriendFeed, a comment I have since deleted thanks to this little discovery, Dave’s thought on Facebook from over a year ago was appearing on a aggregated page of all of my FriendFeed comments.  Bing found that page and indexed it. Fair enough.  However, the way Bing lists the data makes it appear as if I made the comment myself!  Agree or disagree, Bing lists the original quote from Dave Winer in such a way that it appearing to have been written by me instead.

A misattributed remark on the relative value of Facebook isn’t going to destroy me or anything.  But what if I had commented on something more ugly?  What if it hadn’t been an R-rated tech rant from Dave Winer but had been me taking a stand against a racist?  Stand up against hate speech and Bing tells the world I was the one that wrote the hate speech in the first place?!?

Not good Microsoft… Not good at all.