Microsoft discontinued the Zune (i.e., their unpopular iPod clone that, despite coming in brown and being able to “squirt” songs at other people) back in October of 2001. So why am I still getting the same braindead Zune-related comments spam I’ve gotten for the past two years?
“This is getting a bit more subjective, but I much prefer the Zune Marketplace.”
“The new Zune browser is surprisingly good, but not as good as the iPod’s.”
“Hands down, Apple’s app store wins by a mile. It’s a huge selection of all sorts of apps vs a rather sad selection of a handful for Zune.”
My theory is that someone out there sells a ScriptKiddie Comment Spamming Kit that includes pre-loaded Zune comments as the example payload text, and most spammers never bother to switch them out.
Now if I could just figure out why I keep getting comment spam promoting a washed-up rapper…
Yesterday Google managed to break uploading attachments in Firefox, so that it doesn’t do anything when you click the Attack a File Link, and it’s still broken as I write this. I am not the only one having the problem.
Worse still, Gmail used to have a work-around for the problem, instructing people to go to Settings page and disable “Advanced attachments.” Well, guess what? They’ve removed that setting from the settings page, so you’re just stuck with it being broken.
This may be a simple screw-up, but it follows more user-hostile actions from Google, such as not carrying search strings over from the main Google search to the Google News search, and removing the Google Blog search from both the main search bar and the More menu as well. It seems like Google is trying to make their system less usable to…what? Force them to use Chrome and Blogger? Whatever the reason, it’s extremely annoying.
Updated: As of just after noon today, the upload attachment problem seems to be fixed.
It’s not a particularly good version, but I’m sure they’ll have time to improve before the final enslavement of humanity. Now you’ll have to excuse me, I have to write a quadrotor heist novel…
Although I usually let Dwight cover the catastrophic failure front, my visit to the Norwegian Petroleum Museum made me want to discuss something that wasn’t covered there (only mentioned in passing): the Piper Alpha disaster. Piper Alpha was not only the worst disaster to occur in the North Sea oil fields, it’s the worst oil-related disaster ever, with 167 men killed, and is an important lesson in cascading failure.
Also, it blew up real good:
That’s what happens when you start pumping 15-30 tons of natural gas into an existing fire every second.
Because the rig was completely destroyed, and most of the personnel on it killed, exactly how the disaster actually unfolded is unknown, but the official report reconstructs events.
Piper Alpha was originally an offshore oil rig that was converted to natural gas production. On July 6, 1988, technicians took one of two gas condensate pumps offline for routine safety valve maintenance, but weren’t able to complete repairs before a shift change, and thus left a temporary plate in place. Though they had filed paperwork to this effect, the information was not communicated properly to the next shift, and when the other pump failed, the crew activated the pump being repaired. This resulted in a high pressure gas leak when the temporary plate failed, and shortly thereafter by an ignition and explosion.
Though the rig had firewalls, because it was a former oil rig they were designed to contain fire, not explosions. Fire and smoke blocked access from the rig accommodations area to the lifeboats. The switch for the automated firefighting system was below deck and not activated, and the two crewman sent off to activate it were never seen again. The fire got so bad the control room was abandoned and no evacuation announcement was made over the rig’s loudspeakers. The fire would have gone out after the rig’s emergency shutdown switch was activated, except for the fact that Piper Alpha was being fed oil from two other nearby rigs. Worse still, Piper Alpha was still being fed pressured natural gas from two 24 to 36 inch pipes, which melted and burst in the fire, resulting in the huge fireball in the video above. (The gas feeds from the connected rigs hadn’t been shut off, but even if they had been, the lines were so pressurized that it would have taken hours for them to bleed off.) The explosion was so powerful it killed five rescued rig workers and two crewmen on the rescue ship, and guaranteed the complete destruction of Piper Alpha.
Time between the pump being switched on and the giant fireball: 25 minutes.
Only 59 rig workers survived.
Lots of factors contributed to Piper Alpha’s demise: multiple elements of poor design, an inadequate retrofit, inadequate lockout/tagout procedures, and insufficient safety and emergency training procedures. Together they resulted in a devastating series of cascading failures, creating a disaster far more deadly than any single one of them could have produced.
Piper Alpha changed numerous design and safety practices in the oil industry, ensuring that the series of failures that destroyed Piper Alpha can’t reoccur. But offshore oil rigs still remain one of the most dangerous and demanding working environments in the industrial world.
Who is Bello De Soto, you ask? Oh, nobody important, except for the fact that she designed the worst website in the history of the world. It’s like the The Star Wars Holiday special of web design; you can’t understand just how bad it is until you’ve experienced it.
I had a friend who tried to load this on Safari, and it crashed so hard he needed to reboot his iPhone. (Loading it in Firefox seems to create no harmful effects, other than aesthetically. Then again, I have enough memory to load the 503 MB of horror without problems.)
The original website is no longer up, presumably because web designers carrying pitchforks and torches destroyed the evil laboratory in which it was created…
Suppose you came to the Internet sometime after the year 2000. You may take a certain level of taste and restraint for granted, even for porn sites. You may never have beheld the web design wonderland that was Geocities.
Geocities! Where Good Taste Went to Die!
But now you can relive those halcyon days of yore with the Geocitiesizer! Just input the URL for any web page, and the magic of rotating gifs, cluttered backgrounds, inappropriate font choices and auto-play 8-bit pop tunes can be yours!
1. Search for something in Google.
2. At the top of the search results page, click on “News.”
3. Instead of showing the news results on your search term, as it did every single day up until now, it blanks the search field and just show you a regular search page, rather than carrying over the term you just searched for.
Why, Google? Why you gotta play me like that?
(Note that I refrain from listing irritating Facebook changes, since those seem to occur every single day…)