Syllogism

Last month I wrote about Cyberdyne here.

Strangely almost an entire month later, their site still has the same notice about only working in Internet Explorer. The notice is still as accurate as ever.

I'm guessing, as I pointed out, it's not that easy to address browser compatibility after you've "launched" your site.

Yet another embarrassing and misinformed blot on the South African internet...

I guess it's a difficult thing to complain about after all mobile telecoms is the fastest growing and largest market segment, especially in South Africa.

Still, the lack of balance is making me bored of the show. There was only very vague commentary on things like the new sub notebooks. Somehow it was claimed that the Eee PC had low battery life, which is contrary to every other report I've heard as well as my own experience. I guess it's too easy to wave off subjects in a pod cast.

Still, for the last month and then some every episode has had at least 50% of the length of the show consumed by talk that was either entirely about the iPhone or was derailed to it.

If it isn't phones though (which like all wireless technology bores the pants off me) it's DSTV which is something I find even less interesting. Perhaps people enjoy it though, but there are also various other interesting things going on that seem to get no mention. One subject was the LHC, which while half the world was talking about ZA Tech show was consumed once again with the iPhone.

It's disappointing but I guess popularity is not something that comes with a genuine technology show. I think they call that "sell outs" in the music industry.

There's been a great deal of paranoia about security of the Internet's most fundamental protocols lately. Some of that has lead to people giving big media statements and conferences, which naturally becomes media FUD.

There is a lot to be said about DNS cache poisoning and BGP AS path forgery, but people seem to have missed the boat. The question is of course what this means to the average user.

On the one hand, combining DNS forgery and hijacking AS paths means that at a very fundamental level you can gain complete control of specific internet traffic. Scarily enough, this allows among other things the total undermining of one a fundamental things most people trust their web security to. That is SSL.

These kind of attacks require very some incredibly difficult steps though, and the ability to be discovered increases at all these points. With the proactive monitoring of BGP information that goes on, the chance of someone injecting bad data into the global routing table for long is small. The chance of them being able to do so and remain anonymous becomes even smaller.

They are all valid concerns, that are unfortunately attracting quick fix solutions. It seems more and more like the internet has a giant dam full of toxic waste, and that dam wall is riddled with cracks that have been mended with sticky tape and plasters.

Something simple and subtle seems to have been overlooked though. Is it not far easier, cheaper and safer to just write a trojan? I can't see the numerous internet misfits out there gaining anything more than they already have with a simple email being read by a gullible user.

Since it's politics, I figured I'd sling mud at Jerith's personal world views ;) [Or you could read that as me explaining why I disagree and hence appear far FAR more right-wing than him]

Jonathan has written about Cyberdyne as from a customer perspective.

I'd just like to add to his points about corporate suicide, if knowledgeable people approach you and quietly tell you that you're doing something wrong then the worst mistake you can possibly make is to throw it back in their face.

A couple of days ago, Cyberdyne (A hardware supplier and online business) decided to replace their website. What they created was an abominable mess that didn't just "not work properly" in anything other than Internet Explorer but is downright broken. You get lots of sites that render slightly poorly in Firefox or Safari, but seriously this is something else.

Myself and some others decided to email them to try and convince them that they should probably realise that this really is a Serious Problem, and they should probably do something about it like fire whoever is responsible.

The responses were so defensive I just felt like replying "Don't worry, I found what I needed somewhere that does respect internet standards".

I checked on it today to see if they had reverted back to their old system, or something half-way sensible and saw the following error.



When people are arrogant enough to do that instead of fixing the problem it irritates me.

I sent them a simple screenshot before this happened, the screenshot clearly depicted Firefox running on E17 - how you could confuse this with a Microsoft offering I'm really not sure but the response I got was as follows

"Thank you for your eMail.

In reply, both our Web Site and Price Guides are designed and optimized for use with Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). Non-Microsoft browsers are not currently supported and neither our Web Site nor price guides will be correctly viewable using a non-IE browser. Should you not have a copy of Internet Explorer (IE), you may download the latest free version from: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx

We do apologize for this, however cross browser support will be implemented in due course to resolve this issues. Since this is a new deployment, we first wish to ensure the system is bug free running on Internet Explorer (IE) and once we are satisfied the system is working according to our high standards, we will then address cross browser support.

I trust this answers your question and should you require anything further kindly advise.  :-) 

Yours Sincerely,
(Customer Services)"

I replied to this trying to explain that browser compatibility is not simply something you wave off and "address later", and anyone with half a clue knows that the current statistics show a diverse browser market. Simply put, having an IE7 only site means you wave good bye to almost 75% of the IT market.

"As a company operating in the IT sector one would think your customers
generally come from it, as well as whoever was tasked with developing
your site. I can offer some free advice: Bug testing and new
developments should never be tested on your live website. I suspect you
will realise quite quickly that addressing cross-browser support needs
to be an up-front concern, not an after thought and I suspect it will be
quite difficult to correct the issues you have.

Certainly, targeting IE only is a bad idea. Especially considering most
of us don't even run Windows, so installing IE is simply not an option
(especially on my Solaris workstation).

Perhaps you may or may not be aware of browser usage statistics
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Oh well. Thank you for the honest and prompt response.

--
Colin Alston"

The response to that was even more defensive and clueless

"Thank you for your email.

In reply there is a misunderstanding from your side which I need to clarify:

(a) The site is not being run live for bug testing purposes. It actually was already tested in-house and debugged several weeks before the product went live - however as with any computer product - be it software or hardware, small glitches / bugs etc. are picked up once the product is in the market for which these are addressed through Service Packs (e.g. Windows) or Firmware upgrades. Ultimately it is the customer who often finds those annoying little glitches and this generally only occurs once a system has gone live. In the history of the world and computing there is yet to be a single product that has ever come off the production line in Revision 1.0 without having certain problems. In our case we are aware that this system has known issues for which we are addressing them as and when they come to our attention.

(b) Non-IE browsers are hardly an afterthought. Kindly re-read the email I sent you for which, and I quote: 'once we are satisfied the system is working according to our high standards, we will then address cross browser support'. What this is saying is that CyberDyne, its staff, its management, its owners i.e. everyone here is well aware of the fact that the current system is not working correctly on Non-IE browsers and is attending to this in Phase 2 of the development project. We first would like to reach the end of Phase 1 i.e. ensuring that the product is totally stable and useable on IE based browsers and will then move to Phase 2 for which cross browser support is already one of the upgrades that will apply to this site.

I trust this clears up any misunderstanding on your side and should you have any further issues or questions kindly advise.

Yours Sincerely, (Customer Services)"

I cannot believe that in this day and age people are still clueless enough to do this. There have been literally thousands of case studies of why it's an insanely bad idea. The banks lost the fight and even Microsoft lost the fight! How can an IT wholesale company be this insane? "small glitches" just really doesn't do justice to how badly they have screwed up...

It's difficult to be anywhere near the IT industry for any length of time without hearing about "Silicon Valley". This fabled place of rainbow termination where the dreams of a few geeks turned into million dollar fortunes. Perhaps the the real success story lay in how people at the time said it couldn't be done, and how they turned this sleepy hollow into a hub of technology. For some reason though, the buzz at the moment is how Cape Town is becoming South Africa's "Silicon Valley".

It's a natural progression for people to associate locality with wealth, it has happened since the beginnings of time. Texas and the UAE found oil, Gauteng found an abundance of gold and long before those people were fighting over salt. These were physical things though, those resources were actually only in those locations.

If the internet has brought us anything it is the irrelevance of geographic location. People now do business with each other in relative harmony, and people all over the globe collaborate on projects of all kinds.

What is this notion of a "Silicon Valley" then? There's no reason Cape Town is currently being any more successful than anywhere else. There may be some good and modern ideas coming from them at the moment, but I see lots of good ideas coming from all over the country. In terms of financial success, Gauteng based companies are still leagues ahead of the start-ups in other places. Most of those companies are de-centralised though, the monolithic idea of a single company headquarters that the company relies on entirely is becoming increasingly redundant. As companies grow, their decentralisation moves from a national to a global scale.

There are good things about this, thanks to the abundance of technologies available now, employees can be reasonably free to move around geographically and still maintain their same team and position.

So why do we want a "Silicon Valley"? I certainly don't want to live in Cape Town at this point in time. Does that mean my skills are somehow irrelevant to the expanding IT sector in South Africa? It's certainly hard to ignore the density of successful technology start-ups in Cape Town, but in terms of scale it's very hard to compare it with the success of Microsoft, Sun, IBM and others who forged the real Silicon Valley.

Try as I might, all I can put it down to is a finite social-networking set that has developed in Cape Town which is slowly being abused into a xenophobic clique, and the more I read the associated Cape Town blogs, the more uncomfortable I feel. Sorry.

Surely the emotions behind "Web 2.0" were to bring communities together through web technology though?

There's a problem with higher education in computer science. The problem is arrogance.

Kids walk out of varsity computer science with a finite set of abilities thinking that their chance has come to change the world and rival Bill Gates. They usually get spewed some garbage about how XML is revolutionary and Java is the "enterprise" language, and have yet to really experience other languages, how they interact and why XML should be used in small doses for the purposes it was designed.

Why am I complaining about this? Well because Linux-HA used to look really good until some feeble minded buffoon decided to replace the entire configuration system with a horrible and illegible mash up of XML garbage.

I'm tempted to just stick with version 1...

So two cool things, the first of which is that I upgraded to 4Mbps ADSL. While I was at it, I decided to move my line entirely to WebAfrica which means I only had to deal with them through the whole process. It was great, all in all it took about 3 business days to move the line and upgrade. 

Gentlemen:

The purpose of this Letter of Intent ("Letter") is to set forth certain non-binding understandings and no certain binding commitments between me, an irritated individual and SAPPI, owners of 100% of the capital stock of SAPPI, with respect to a disagreement in which I, or my successor, was maliciously slandered by the defendants product. For purposes of this Letter, SAPPI, each of its shareholders, and I are sometimes collectively referred to as "assholes" and individually as "an asshole".

Basis for intent.
Following recent precedent in the case of Linda Twala v. Facebook. Where the plaintiff was found by social network participants to be "IQ challenged". A mean letter was delivered to myself by an anonymous party on paper assumed to be manufactured by SAPPI. I feel SAPPI must thereby be responsible for the physical manifestation of this letter.

On more serious matters, faith in humanity has been destroyed once again.