Category Archives: Rants

‘Say ‘Five’ After The Tone If You Want To Curse One Of Our Customer Service Computers’

The good news: We don’t have to use those silly touch-tone menus anymore when we call our friendly utility. Now we can speak to a real computer. A report by Chartwell, an industry research service, says that more and more utilities “are implementing or investigating speech recognition for their interactive voice response units, and advocates say… Read More »

Valentine’s Day – A Humbug Approach

It’s that time of year, and the marketing folk are back with lame Valentine’s promotions. My first is from Audible.com, where I must have registered at some point, because I got an email with the subject field ‘Someone has sent you a Valentine!’ along with the following message: ‘Get a special Valentine’s day wish (and… Read More »

Google News Discovers There’s A Reason Why Journalists Exist

Here’s an interesting take on Google News I hadn’t thought of before, from Dana Blankenhorn, an Atlanta-based writer. He’s mad at Google for apparently allowing in to its news trawl clearly partisan sites that aren’t news, but opinion. At the same time, he says. Google is separating out blogs from its news searches — possibly… Read More »

Are Computers A Waste Of Our Time?

Here’s a story to illustrate a conundrum: If computers are such productivity boosters and time savers, how come we spend huge amounts of time trying to make them work? Marshall Brain, a writer, former teacher and consultant, tried to figure out how much time we spend on fixing computer stuff but timing it: Last month… Read More »

Goodbye To The Browser?

Here’s some more interesting end-of-year stuff from Nielsen//NetRatings: a report issued today (PDF file) says that three out of every four home and work Internet users access the Internet using a non-browser based Internet application, particularly media players, instant messengers and file sharing applications. “With 76 percent of Web surfers using Internet applications, functionality has… Read More »