P-platers: A Much-Loved Talkback Topic

From the SMH website, originally heard on ABC 702 Radio.

"So you think junior is a little too lead-footed when he drives the family car? Starting next year, Ford Motor Co. will give you the power to do something about it.

The company will roll out a new feature on many 2010 models that can limit teen drivers to 80 mph, using a computer chip in the key."

I've only had a couple of crashes in my short driving life as a p-plater and none of them were at high speeds (We are not counting scraping the rear vision mirror of my mothers ENORMOUS Ford Farlane when reversing out of our tiny driveway when I was on my Ls, but again, it proves my point, as I was only going about 2-5km/hour). The fastest I have ever been travelling during an incident was 55km/h in a 60 zone, and some bitch pulled out in front of me and I nearly soared over the edge of a cliff in my boyfriend's BMW. A kindly tow truck driver rescued me for $20 and I returned to the road, to arrive at my uni's enrolment day a little bit shaken but fine.

I cannot stand the way this issue is misrepresented in the press. Yes, young drivers are over-represented in road fatalities. But not in high-speed road fatalities! My father is far more likely to cruise around at speeds upwards of 120km/h, because he feels he has the 'mad skillz' to handle it. I'm not even allowed to go over 100km/h, and I honestly didn't do it much. No one has the reflexes to handle a sudden change in conditions when travelling over 120 and when the maximum speed limit in most of this country is 110km/h, I can't understand why they make cars that go faster than that.

If you are going to limit the speed at which young drivers can cruise around, why not take a look at limiting all cars, and therefore all drivers? Stop singling out the highest profile group of drivers just because it sounds good in a press release and the media can rail against the filthy youth of today and all their high-falutin' hoon driving.

Apple announces MobileMe subscription extensions

Following my previous post about the poor performance of MobileMe, users today received an email from Apple Support offering a 60 day period of free the service, in the light of the disastrous launch and the numerous problems encountered.

The Support article is understated in the admission that the launch was hasty and bug-ridden. Apple claims "[t]he transition from .Mac to MobileMe was rockier than we had hoped" and that MobileMe is "still not up to our standards", and announced an extension to any free trial period users may be taking advantage of.

This is the danger with early adoption, and it is great to see Apple acknowledging the issues, and promising to work them out. However, I hold out very little hope that the computer manufacturer will actually address the concerns of users. Apple has a long history of ignoring the glaringly obvious (MMS and video recording for the iPhone spring to mind, not to mention a character counter for SMS length).

MobileMe users wait with baited breath to see if Apple can redeem themselves, but any free time extension offer does little to ease the pain of having already sunk money into the crippled service.

Do I Hate the Cloud?

A post over at Lifehacker has been sitting in my mail for about a week now, waiting for the article that is in my head to get written. It's called Do You Trust the Cloud? and focuses on the risks and benefits associated with having a web-based presense. That's email, calendars, contacts, photos or data storage, that is primarily accessed via an online service like Gmail or MobileMe.

The "cloud" refers to the system of what Apple calls "push", which is where your mobile device or computer speaks to a "cloud", which is connected to the internet, so you're informed of updates like a new email, without the need for your email application to be actually open. The LH article focuses on recent outages and what you do when your entire digital presense just disappears whenever there's a hitch, but it prompted me to think more on a recent dilemma I have been experiencing lately, and that is: Do I Hate the Cloud?

I spent four hours in line for an iPhone, and I knew ahead of time that I was also going to get one of those fandangled MobileMe accounts, because I really liked the idea of using a web-based email program that looked like a native OS application. All things considered, it was not a problem I really needed to spend approximately $100 solving.

And now, instead of using Gmail, I use MobileMe. Or at least, that's the plan. My iPhone certainly beeps at me when I have a new mail, Blackberry style, but when I'm at work I tend to just have gmail.com open. Here's why.

At my work, we hotdesk. It is unpleasant for many reasons, but one of them is differing levels of insane user restriction. Some computers will let you install your browser of choice (Firefox 3) but not the flash plugin, some will let you install flash but it won't run with sound, some will let you do nothing of the sort, etc etc. I used to solve this by running Firefox Portable from a USB stick but MobileMe and FP did not get along. Not even a little bit. Seems that MobileMe needs a little too much juice than the USB stick can provide.

But apparently it is also taxing for some of the computers at work themselves, so I never know when I sit down what my day is going to look like. I also hate that MobileMe does not automatically filter messages into folders, like every other email solution has been doing for the last five years. Oh, and it hasn't got any web-based chat option like Google Talk, which is a great way to waste time in between news bulletins.

Apple needs to at least get folders and auto-filtering working, ASAP, as well as working out whatever causes all the hanging and freezing. It is a laughable to call this a syncronised or mobile solution to email.