Maszman Speaks!

Thomas Hawk is post­ing some of the com­ments from Flickr users none too happy with the new restric­tions imposed by Yahoo! man­age­ment. I got the noti­fi­ca­tion but didn’t pay much atten­tion as I also have a Yahoo! account. If I had I might have noticed why there are some seri­ously annoyed peo­ple right now. Flickr is well-liked but it doesn’t take much to get folks upset and have them move some­where else. Will this be the end of Flickr and the begin­ning of some­thing else?

N.B. Thomas Hawk is the CEO of a Flickr com­peti­tor so this link might be con­sid­ered to be biased. How­ever, the com­ments posted are from real peo­ple so you can make up your own mind.

Insider Box #26 shows you how a New Yorker says “par­don me”.

Photo_013107_002, orig­i­nally uploaded by tom­masz.

My neme­sis, the sink at work. You’ll notice that the faucets require you to push them down. There’s one for hot and one for cold, but there’s none for warm. To get warm you have to hit both taps and hope for the best.

The prob­lem is that the hot water takes a while to get hot and each tap stays on for a dif­fer­ent amount of time. Most of the time you either freeze or scald your hands. And you end up hit­ting both of them again, because you never man­age to fin­ish wash­ing your hands the first time.

TeeVee tack­les the inter­est­ing issue of trun­cated ver­sions of pop­u­lar TV shows being broad­cast while the uncut ver­sions are released on the web. Hey, Lanni, where you aware of this?

Al Shugart, regarded as the father of the disk drive indus­try, has died, aged 76, in Mon­terey, Cal­i­for­nia, fol­low­ing heart surgery. He helped cre­ate the first hard disk drive at IBM, founded both Shugart and Sea­gate and helped make the per­sonal com­puter truly use­ful. Shugart’s busi­ness style was a bit unusual:

…a for­mer col­league, Finis Con­nor, called him in 1979. Con­nor saw that the new per­sonal com­puter mar­ket needed a small cheap hard drive. Together they started Shugart Tech­nolo­gies, to sup­ply one. By May 1980 they were able to unveil a 5MB 5.25-inch hard drive at a break­through price of only $600.

Shugart hoped to be sued by Xerox, which owned Shugart Asso­ciates, gen­er­at­ing world­wide pub­lic­ity for his new ven­ture. Alas, Xerox was slow off the mark.

This may sound cruel, but most peo­ple are stu­pid. Cruel or not, what else would you call some­one who steals gas meters and gas pipes from houses where the gas is still on?