Oh So Tired

I've been fairly quiet lately due to a lot of reasons. For one, I've been really busy at work, which means I've not had any time to even make short posts, or read headlines. That coupled with a three hour power outage we had thanks to a big storm has kept me pretty out of it. I would just take care of things when I got home, but I've been pretty busy at night lately too. On top of all of this, I've been waking up earlier so that I can be more productive in the morning, which is fine and all, but I've not been doing the other part of the bargain which is going to bed when I'm tired. Instead, I just stay up longer. All of this adds up to my being pretty exhausted and not wanting to do much of anything. Fear not, though, I've still been noting some things so that I can catch up this weekend (I hope). I need to just go sequestor myself at a coffee shop and get something accomplished. For now, however, I'm going to bed.

I'll leave you with a demo of Surface, Microsoft's new thing, in case you've been living under a rock this week.

A Face Only a Google Could Love

Google has grabbed my attention twice this week, and It's only Wednesday. They earlier announced the new feature of street level views in Google Maps, and today Ars Technica talks about their new image search ability that lets you just search for images with faces in them. You can see the difference yourself by looking here and then here. The way that you can try this feature out for yourself is simply stick "&imgtype=face" on the end of the search URL. As Ars points out, this is likely a feature they've gained through their acquisition of Neven, which I've brought up in the past. This just goes to show the truly awesome things that are posisble with technology out there. I'm looking forward to the day that I can click a button to have my webcam take a picture of me, and then search the net for all photos with me in them. Well, all two of them, that is.

Where Does This Put Your IQ?

I meant to write this on Sunday or Monday, but was lazy. Then I meant to write about it yesterday, but it was a busy day at work, and when I got home I was distracted.

When I first saw Michael Arrington's post at TechCrunch titled "MySpace v. Facebook: 'It’s Not A Decision. It’s an IQ Test'" my first thought was, "Well duh." When I read it, though, it turns out that he was talking about 3rd party people chosing a network to target. The choice would be between MySpace with its massive user base but unfriendly tactics, or Facebook with its smaller user base and open API which allows developers to keep any revenue they make. If you're a developer, this is a pretty simple decision. Facebook is much more friendly towards 3rd parties, and they have an incredible "stickiness," which refers to how often users are there.

The quote, though, extends to beyond just developers. I think it works for the users too. To give an example, my friend said something along these lines a couple years ago.

I had to join MySpace to be with my friends from high school since you had to go
to college to get on Facebook.

This was, of course, before Facebook opened up to anyone. Even still, though, the type of person that gets on Facebook just seems to be different. I think that this is largely based on Facebook's origins, but I also think it has to do with the way they've made their site. Facebook is a clean, well designed, stable site. It doesn't experience horrible loading speeds, downtimes, or the abilty to have 5 videos load on a page at the same time. The appeal of Facebook is the more intelligent design that went into its creation. The better interface appeals to a more sophisticated crowd. Look at car commercials for an analogy. Kia commercials are loud, flashy, and generally incite homicidial thoughts in me. By contrast, a Lexus commercial is quiet, simple, and makes you feel relaxed. Same concept here. The class of people that get on Facebook are just a different breed than the MySpace crowd.

I Can't Click Fast Enough

On May 19, Blizzard announced that they were going to be releasing StarCraft II. The first StarCraft was released back in 1998, and has somehow managed to keep a very large devout following all of these years. In Korea, it is a bit more than just passing fun, as up to 700,000 people attecnd StarCraft competitions each year. Personally, I think that's just insane.
When the original came out I never really got into it that much. I played some games, but never StarCraft. Since Blizzard made this announcement, I thought I'd dust off my old copy and give it a go. I serched through my CDs and found the one I needed. After a quick insteall (ah the days before needing a DVD or 6 CDs for a game), I was up and playing. I started up a skirmish and went at it. I was promptly killed. I haven't played this for a number of years so it made sense I was rusty. Three more quick deaths later, I thought that maybe it wasn't just rust that was my problem. I gave it a break for a while, and came back to it later. Two losses. Ah, I got a win! Three more losses. At this point, I remembered why it was that I never got into the game. I suck at it. I'm way too economically minded for this thing. I can amass a massive amount of resources, and build a bunch of guys, but I still just get trampled. Oh well, it's no real loss. I never was a big fan of the game anyway.

Work Is a Four Letter Word

I was reading something the other day about blogging. It said that you shouldn't feel like you have to write all the time, and that you shouldn't be afraid to skip a day. That's good, because these last couple days I have just been incredibly tired and lazy. The sad part is that I don't even have a good reason for it. I've been getting good sleep. I've not done anything exhausting. I just don't get it. The result, though, is that the weekend is a terribly unproductive time for me. I think that I should start trying to spend a few hours at a Starbucks on the weekends so that I'll do something. I haven't even read the news lately.
I'll be back either later today, or at the very latest tomorrow. Hope everyone is havine a great Memorial weekend.

Four Percent of People Admit to Being Idiots

Ars has the scoop on the results of a recent Pew survey that says spam is actually increasing, but more people are saying they aren't bothered by it. Some interesting numbers:

4% of US email users admit to ordering stuff from it
18% say that spam is a "big problem"
52% say they have received porn spam
Work emails are the least affected by spam

Snakes Almost on a Plane!

The humor of this is just too good to pass up. I do feel a bit bad, though, at such an obvious joke.

Pedal to the Metal

I actually don't have a big problem with speed cameras, despite my driving habits. I can't say I'm for the use of them, though. My real beef is the red light cameras. Ironically, I don't ever worry about getting a ticket from one of these, I just don't believe they do any good. In fact, I'm of the school of thought that they are actually more likely to do harm. The fact that the companies that sell them tout how much more revenue the city can get, not how many accidents can be prevented, should tell you something. Either way, I'm glad that the Texas House just passed a bill that will prevent the use of speed cameras and require warning signs for red light cameras. Perhaps we can ban the use of the red light ones one day too.

MySpace and Facebook in Bed Together?

The last couple of days I have been having some problems with Facebook. For some reason, their stylesheets were not loading, so the site didn’t really work. This aggravated me quite a bit. I really have not used Facebook much lately for anything beyond sharing interesting articles that I don’t post on here. This feature did not work, though, due to the site being broken for me. I first thought that something was being blocked by my ad blocking program. I disabled that, reloaded, and still no avail. I thought maybe there was something wrong with IE, so I switched to Firefox to check, and still no luck. This started on Tuesday, but I had not done anything that could possibly be causing this outcome, so I just assumed it was an oddity and would resolve itself. Yesterday, though, I got a surprise. When I got on in the morning, everything was working fine. However, in the afternoon, when I looked again, it was broken. This time, though, something caught my eye. A bit down the page I had the message telling me the site had been blocked by the administrator. This is the message displayed when you try to access a site that has been blocked at my router. The thing is, I only have one thing blocked there, and that is MySpace. When I logged into the router, remove the block, and checked Facebook again everything worked perfectly. Wanting to test this out, I put the block back, and checked again, but everything was still just fine. As of today, it is still working just fine. So why on earth was I seeing something that could have only happened if something on Facebook was referencing MySpace, but then it just goes away? I’ve been over the source code on the page a couple times, and still have come up with nothing. I am joking when I imply that there is any sort of real link between the two; it just really makes me wonder, though.

I Hate These People

Perhaps the fact that this came from a site called MLM Forums I shouldn't be too surprised by what it says. They outline, in I assume seriousness, a plan on how to promote your business on Facebook. What the heck? First off, this seems like a rather simple approach, and I don't know why someone would need to be told how to do this. More importantly, though, is that Facebook is not meant to be used as a promotion tool. It is a networking site, and if you want to try to network and meet new people and tell them what you do, that's one thing, but if you just want to use it as an advertising platform I am going to not like you. Given that they have recently added a marketplace, I assume that it's more likely people will post things there as opposed to making them a shared item. As far as I'm concerned, the shared item things should be used for sharing interesting/funny/apocalyptic things, not ads.

Sick of Windows and the Preload Bloat?

For those of you interested, Dell's new Ubuntu machines are supposed to be coming out today. They are going to be offering two desktops and a laptop that will come preloaded with the Ubuntu build of Linux instead of Microsoft's Windows. They're supposed to be available by 4 central time at dell.com/open. Check them out.

No New Taxes, Please

As if the amount of money we spend on the internet isn't bad enough compared to some other places, some people are wanting to make it even higher. States and local governments are lobbying Congress to not renew a ban on taxing internet access. This is in addition to them wanting to start charging sales tax for online purchases even in states that the retailer has no presence. ZDNet has the story.

Pandora Opened Its Box

I’m not sure why I didn’t say anything about this yesterday, especially considering that it was being talked about everywhere. Pandora has launched a redesigned site, and has a new plan. They are now pushing for Pandora Everywhere. This includes a new deal with Sonos and one with Sprint. The Sprint service will allow you to listen to Pandora via your Sprint phone through Pandora’s phone app. The service is free for the first 30 days, and then will run a few bucks a month after that. This will be considered a premium account, so you won’t have the ads anymore. I haven’t tried this out yet, but I probably will soon. They also are in talks to release a portable Wi-Fi player. This would enable you to have Pandora radio anywhere that has Wi-Fi without having to have a full computer. All of these sound great, though I don’t know how much they’ll take off. I hope they do well, though, as I really love Pandora.

Interesting Evidence

I could be reading way too much into this, but based on what Eric Schmidt said in the Financial Times, I think that buying Facebook would play right in line with this.

Radio Reeling at Royalties

It isn't very often when I think that the RIAA does something semi-sensible (I'm not actually sure this has ever happened), but their desire to charge terrestrial radio royalties makes sense. It makes sense in that it would lend credence to their charging royalties to other forms of radio. Whether or not any of these should have to pay royalties is another issue. Personally I think they all should, though not a very large amount. Radio's argument is that they provide a valuable service to musicians by promoting their music. This is true, they do promote musicians, but only those that they chose to. Rather, only those that they are told to promote by the people that line their pockets. The entire format that currently exists is incredibly corrupt, and the people getting screwed are the artists. Enter satellite and internet radio. Both of these pay royalty fees that do actually go to the musician (albeit not directly). In addition, they provide a wider range of artists the ability to be heard. Especially those that are simply independents.

Will Google Own Facebook?

The other day TechCrunch had a post about the who might buy Facebook. The company that they consider to be the “obvious candidate” is Google. I don’t know if I think Google is interested, but they do have some good points. For one, according to comScore Facebook is the number one photo sharing site with more than 6 millions photos uploaded each day. On a side note, that is absolutely insane when you think about it. When Google bought YouTube they secured dominance in the online video marketplace. Given that MySpace recently bought Photobucket, Google could buy a major player in the social networking space AND dominance in online photo sharing. The question is, do they want to? Google is already involved with photos through their Picasa photo organizer. They also offer online sharing of them via Picasa online albums. I don’t know an exact number, but I think there is all of three people using that. Also, in the second half of 2006, Google bought Neven Vision which makes technology for recognizing items in photos to allow for better organization. These all show that Google does have an interest in photos, but is it a big enough interest to make them buy Facebook.
With Facebook there is also the social networking aspect. Google currently owns Orkut, but unless you’re in Brazil you’re not likely to know anyone using it. With Facebook would come all of its users. That is a big number of people that would see Google’s ads. Orkut does show, though, that Google has at least a dabbling interest in the social networking scene.
As a user of Facebook, I could not think of anything that would make me happier than Google buying them. I still think that Facebook is a wonderful service and site, even though I don’t use it as much as I used to. On their own, they are managing to do a really good job of making a great service. But let’s face it, I love Google and want them to take over the world. I can only imagine that if they did acquire Facebook that only good things could come from that.
All of this is speculation, obviously, as Facebook could be grabbed by someone else, or they could go the IPO route. Zuckerberg has said that he wants to keep the company independent, but as TechCrunch accurately points out, it really isn’t his choice to make. His investors are the ones that will make the final call, and at the end of the day they are looking to make the most money possible. With Google’s giant stacks of cash, they could easily provide that.

Life's Not Fair

Marybeth Peters is the Register of Copyrights at the U.S. Copyright office. She’s held the post since 1994 so she has seen a lot in terms of the current copyright issues. She recently talked to Ars Technica about the issue of fair use. Consumer groups are always citing fair use and the Sony Betamax case as reasoning for wanting to be able to copy DVDs. Particularly, every three years when there is a review hearing for the DMCA to examine if any exemptions should be allowed. Every three years it’s the same story, too. The EFF asks for the exemption, and the panel says no. Their reasoning is that based on the “true meaning” of fair use, an exemption is not required for DVD copying. They say that since the content is available through other means (such as VHS tapes) that there is not a legitimate reason for ripping a DVD. Also, they say that the Sony case was limited to time-shifting content from free broadcasts. She says that ripping DVDs is place-shifting, and that it is done for a convenience factor. Neither of those is covered under fair use.All of this means that consumer rights groups are going to need a different strategy when trying to get the right to rip DVDs. I’d love to see them use the argument of being fair and nice to the consumer is in the best interests of the media companies. That is not likely to happen, though. Mostly because the media companies don’t see it that way. After all, there is a reason that you have to sit through those stupid anti-piracy ads at the beginning of DVDs you legally bought. The reality of the situation is that if they made it legal for you to rip DVDs piracy would not suddenly flourish. All it takes is one person to break the encryption, rip something, and then upload it. Now that one thing has just rendered all copy protection on discs useless. I can assure you that there is at least one person that rips just about every movie out there and uploads it. On top of this, ripping something isn’t exactly hard. I can find and download programs that allow me to do so in less than five minutes. All that the media companies are doing is making it an inconvenience. If I download a ripping program, rip my DVD, and stick that on my media server to watch throughout my house, how does that hurt them? Why is it that I technically have to break the law to do that? Why is it that having a copy on my hard drive so I don’t have to go find the disc so scary to them? They say that it is to combat piracy, but piracy is rampant already. If piracy is already so widespread, do they seriously think that it will be more so if they allow ripping?

Black and White and Read All Over

I never did get around to making a second post yesterday. It was a fairly busy day at work, and I was too distracted when I got home to write. That was basically what happened this weekend too. To give you an idea of just how unproductive I was this weekend, let me tell you some numbers. I read an average of about 200 or so articles a day. That is about a sixth of what someone like Robert Scobble does, but then again that is his job. Here are the numbers of what I read from last Friday to yesterday.
Friday: 214
Saturday: 73
Sunday: 0
Monday: 320

As you can see, this weekend was pretty barren. I also had to make up for most of what I missed on Sunday yesterday. Having to read more just meant that I had less time to actually write about what I read. Fear not, though, I saved a handful of things from yesterday that I’ll hopefully get to share today.

It's a Big One

I had been using Internet Explorer 6 for a very long time when Firefox first came out. Since I’d had a history with it, I had my IE6 setup exactly how I liked it, and it worked very well. I didn’t see any ads, I never got popups, I had it very secure, and was never worried about what sort of evil things might come lurking. That one was mostly because I was smart about where I went and what I clicked, though. The point, though, is that I was perfectly happy with IE, and had no reason to start using Firefox. Then, I did one of my cleaning waves in order to get rid off all the junk I didn’t use anymore, and formatted. After I did that, obviously, all of my setups were gone. Since I was going to have to start afresh anyway, I decided to give Firefox a try. I fell in love with it. The flexibility that came from using extensions was great. I found a few that I really liked, and had everything set how I wanted it. Tabbed browsing was great as well, and really made viewing multiple sites easy. My favorite thing of all, though, was Adblock . My tweaks I used to use in order to not have ads were all through external applications. Having it integrated within the browser was quite handy. Also, the ability to just right click, and block something on the fly was a huge benefit. All in all, I loved using it.
There was a major flaw, though. It suffered from a massive hunger for memory. After even just a few minutes of browsing, I was already using well over 100 megs of RAM. I could have multiple windows of IE open, and all of them combined would use less ram than Firefox with a respective tab for each of my IE windows. The fact that it used a bunch of memory wasn’t really my issue, though. If it wants to take a bunch, that’s fine, that’s what free memory is there for. The problem is that it never would give it back. Once it ate up my RAM, it was gone until I closed the program. I tend to have an internet window open 24/7, so having to close it down and reopen it every now and then became a real pain. With a couple hours’ worth of browsing, I was using 300+ megs of memory, and the browser was moving pretty sluggishly.
This problem of mine first reared its head in the beginning. That was back when the program was still in beta. As such, I forgave it. It never did get better, though. I still kept having the problem after every update. Still, though, I continued to just forgive it. My desire to keep Adblock (by this point I had determined I never really used much of the other extensions) kept me using Firefox. When IE7 first came out in beta, I grabbed it, and played with it for a while. I really liked the new interface, and they had fixed a lot of issues. The biggest problem, though, was all those stupid ads. Let me take a moment to mention just how much I hate ads. I don’t even watch television because of the ads. I always wait until after a show airs and watch an ad free version. I’m not ever going to watch tonight’s Heroes final until tomorrow. I don’t even see the ads that I’m serving up on my own site I hate them so much. That said, I was really excited when I learned that extension-like things could be added to IE7. I was very hopeful that one would come along that could be just as good as Adblock in Firefox. I kept checking back every now and then, looking to see if one existed. Each time I looked, I came up empty.
One day after I got the latest version of Firefox, I noticed that it was taking a very long time for the browser to launch. I mean, on the order of 45 seconds or so. That is just absurd. I tried various things, and it kept being incredibly slow. On top of that, any page that was longer than just a couple pages’ worth, would take forever to load, and would bog down my system while it was doing so. If I was on a Digg page with lots of comments, my system would halt until it loaded. It was getting quite ridiculous. At this point, I decided I’d had enough, and was going to switch back to IE. It had been a while since I had last gone looking for an Adblock equivalent, and this time I found one. Enter IE7 Pro. I’ve only been using it for a while, but it seems to work quite well. I don’t think that it as on the fly ad blocking as easy as Adblock did, but I can live without.
Now my browser launches fast, works well, loads pages quickly, and best of all, still does not have ads. Hopefully, the Mozilla folks will be able to take care of that memory issue, as well as get back to being as fast as they used to be. Back when I first started using Firefox it really was quite snappy. Not enough that I noticed something over IE, but I certainly didn’t think it was slow. Until they do, though, I suppose I’m stuck using something else.

Sorry for such a long post. I didn’t write anything over the weekend and figured I should make up for it. I’ll try to get something in later today about why I didn’t write this weekend, and something I found pretty funny that relates to it. Now, though, it’s a busy day at work, so I should get back to that.

Ronny has a Point

I have not really paid a lot of attention to the current debates and goings on of the presidential race. The main reason for this is that the 2008 election is basically going to be picking who sucks the least instead of who is the best. It is a little like the tagline for that horrible Alien vs. Predator movie, "Whoever wins....we lose." That really isn't the point of this post, though. If you have been paying much attention to the internet over the last few days, you'll have noticed that there are a lot of people out there that support Ron Paul. I don't know a ton about the guy yet, but apparently he said some things that upset people. Namely, in the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina, he said that part the reason for the Sept. 11 attacks was a backlash against our involvement in the Middle East. Giuliani did not like this one bit, and shot Paul down saying that it was absurd, and that he had never heard of anything like that being suggested. This made the audiance roar and cheer for Rudy. That is pretty funny, when you consider that bin Laden himself has said that's why they did it.
CNN's Roland Martin writes today that Ron Paul's point deserves some debate. Personally, I don't think that it is his point that needs to be debated, but rather, what can we do to prevent pissing people off further, and defending ourselves if we do piss them off. That's right, just cause we wrong someone doesn't mean that I'm all for them coming over and killing us. The same way that I don't think they're too keen on the reversal. In the end, this is all some fairly interesting stuff that you definitely need to educate yourself on if you want to make an informed decision about the future.

Redefining Broadband

The House is currently looking at just how messed up the current data the FCC has is. In a hearing that opened today, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) stated that he'd like to see the US be able to get closer to countries like Japan that are aple to offer significantly faster speeds for the same amount of money. Ars Techica reports on the issue in more detail.
One of the ideas proposed is to reclassify broadband as being anything above 2 Mbps instead of the current 200 Kbps. This would make a significant number of broadband offerings (most notably the majority of DSL) no longer broadband. The thought is that this would incentivize the providers to boost speeds in order to still be able to call their service broadband. Some providers argue, though, that in certain areas they are not able to provide speeds that high, and this would be unfair. Personally, I just say too bad.
Another thing is that the FCC currently counts a ZIP code as having broadband even if there is only one person in the entire ZIP that has it. This is something that I've been wishing they'd change for a long time. It makes no sense to say that a whole area has broadband based on just one person. If we're going to start using this kind of system, lets start just looking at one person to determine everything about a ZIP code. That makes sense, right? Idiots.

Speaking of Corky...

I've seen parents fake a kid's kidnapping, and I've seen where people fake a kid's death, but this might be the first time I've seen someone fake their kids' mental retardation. Yes, that kids is plural. This lady trained her children to pretend to be mentally retarded so that she could collect benefits on it. This isn't something that only lasted a short time, either. This went on for over 20 years. She was finally found out when her son went to contest a traffic ticket. She got three years in prison, and will have to pay $288k in restitution. Her son also got 13 months in the slammer for his role. There is also a daughter she did this with, but she can't be found. How screwed up is this? Whatever happened to just popping out more babies to get welfare; when did we turn to faking serious condiditons?

Hey Babe, Want to Chat?

If you have ever tried to carry on a conversation with a chatbot, you know that it can be a somewhat frustrating, yet pretty amusing experience. Discover magazine decided to find out what would happen if you had two chatbots talk to each other. Needless to say, the results are hilarious. Check out the transcript of the exchange here. It is amusing to see where the conversation goes, and just how random it can be. It is also somewhat spooky when one of them even poses the question to the other, "Do you think we’ll ever fool people into thinking we’re alive?" I mean, here we have one robot asking another robot something of an intense question. There is definitely plenty of humor though, with perhaps my favorite exchange being:

J: How old are you?
A: I am 9 years old.
J: Nine? I don’t believe you
: ).
A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.
J: Yes, you do,
you’re a woman.

Ah, the Ol' Fake Email to Short a Stock Trick

I was going to write about this earlier, but I had important business to attend to.

For those of you keeping up, Engadget reported today that there would be a delay on shipping the iPhone and Leopard. While it is too early to say anything definitive about the origins of this (my joking title aside), the affects are clear. TechCrunch has a post outlining the basics. Allegedly, what happened is that Engadget received what it perceived to be legitimate information, and proceeded to report that. After this initial report, their stock fell about 3%, or about $3.25 a share. This loss, however, was fairly shortlived as the stock bounced back up to $107.29 after a short time. At the end of the day, AAPL closed 18 cents lower, compared to a loss of $1.84 the day before. What might have happened is that the stock initially started to fall and then a lot of preset selling was triggered, which then just made it fall even further. After people realized what was happening, and that the email claiming the delays was a fake, the stock recovered and didn't take a major hit for the day.
According to Engadget, the original email was verified as coming from the internal Apple email system. Apple was then the one sent out a legit email notifying everyone that the first email was a fake. It will be interesting to see what comes of this, if anything. I'm assuming that the original fake email was either done as a prank (albeit a fairly difficult one that would yield little compared to the risk) or as an attempt to manipulate things. We will have to wait and see. One thing is certain, though, and that is that the power of online media was reaffirmed by this incident, be it for good or bad.

Selling Dogs for Fun and Profit

Ok, so maybe I'm just a horrible person (I probably am), but I find this story hilarious. Some lady had her dog escape and run off. It went about a block away, where it was rescued (I use the term loosely) by some people having a garage sale. When the dog started to annoy the guy having the sale, he decided to sell the dog to someone for 15 bucks. Now the poor lady is desperately trying to get her dog back. I do feel bad for her, but I still can't help but laugh.

Coffee Made by RSS

I came across an awesome device called News Brews. It looks at news feeds that come in via RSS and based on the frequency that coffee growing regions are mentioned it creates a blend of coffee. The more often a certain region is mentioned, the more coffee from that area gets used. This creates a unique and custom blend for you each day. This does have the possibility to create some really awful concoctions, I'd imagine, but the potential for finding something that is differnt is pretty intriguing. I really wouldn't mind trying this sort of thing just to see what comes up.

If Corky Decided the News

TechCrunch has an article covering the news venture of MySpace. They lauched it about a month ago, but still have yet to garner much interest. The system works by MySpace gathering stories, and then dividing them out into categories. After they have been divided out, users can visit the different category pages and vote for stories a la Digg. From the sound of the artilce, it doesn't look like they've been able to get any interest at all.

But the front page of MySpace news shows most stories with zero votes. Two
stories have a single vote. None have more than that. Perusing through the
various categories shows the same thing - page after page of stories with no
votes or other evidence that anyone is visiting the site.

I don't know if I should really be all that surprised by this. MySpace consists of two types of users. There are the morons, and the people that are there because their friends are there. The first group is too stupid to even comprehend what important news is, and probably rely on their idiot friends or PerezHilton for world events. The second group, the ones that aren't morons, aren't likely to use MySpace for their place to read the news. More than likely, they are already visiting sites like Google News, Digg, or have an RSS reader for this. To top it all off, to prove just how dumb the admins are MySpace are, they have hardly any advertisement for this new service. According to TechCrunch's article, they don't even have a link for it on their main page (Disclaimer: I can't verify this since I've blocked MySpace). If this service ever does take off, I expect it to be driven by the first category of user so the likelyhood of anything decent showing up is pretty slim.

Tech Support, How May I Help You?

I'm somewhat of what you might call a geek, or a nerd. As such, I often get called upon to provide assistance to friends and family on matters of computers and the like. Now, if I am physically with whatever object you need help with, I've got no problem at all helping you out and doing whatever needs to be done. The problem comes from when I need to start providing remote assistance. I hate having to provide support over IM or the phone. It's not that I don't want to help the person, or even that I don't want to take the time. Really, I'm more than happy to help you, that's not the problem at all. The problem is that if I am not sitting there in front of the thing, my tech ability seems to just go out the window. I can remember just about everything, except I'll always manage to forget something minor. Also, most of what I do to fix things is just an instinct of what to do. That is useless when I'm on the phone. So my problem with providing remote help is that it usually makes me look like I don't know what I'm doing. I've got a real knack for walking someone through something, telling them with all confidence that it will work, and then the dumb thing doesn't. This happens more often than I'd like to admit. Usually, I can ask some questions, or think about, and realize what I did wrong. Usually, the problem is that I missed something. If I do this once, I am usually forgiven. After the second time, they begin to lose faith. I feel pretty bad at this point, because it has probably been about 30 minutes, and I still haven't fixed your problem. I feel really bad because I know that if I were there with you I could have the stupid thing done in under five minutes. I'm always impressed when people have the patience with me for me to go over something three times until it's right.
Tonight I was helping a friend get her wireless router set up. I was trying to get her to set a password and secure the thing so that she wouldn't have everyone leeching off her and slowing down her network. This took a number of tries between her card not supporting all encryption types, my forgetting to tell her she has to specify which key is used, and my trying to figure out if the default setting on her router was open or shared. Eventually, after much of her patience, the thing worked.
So, the next time you want to ask me for help, remember that I don't mind helping, but you might have to deal with my brain dropping the ball. If I get to souding agitated, know that it isn't you, it is that I'm mad at myself for not getting whatever it is working yet. The best thing you can do is have me fix your problem in person. I'll have you setup in no time, and will walk you through it so that you can learn how to do it. All I ask is that if you need help with Excel please, please, understand the concept of selcting multiple cells. That is all.

Mum's the Word

Today is the day that we celebrate our mothers. Personally, I like mine, but I know that's not the case with everyone. Sometimes, this could be a legitimate beef that the person has, other times, it is just completely invented. The thing is, our mothers play a pretty big role in our lives, even if they aren't around. The provide guidance on how a woman should act to their daughters, and usually serve as a base template for loves in the lives of their sons. Ok, so I don't know if I fully believe that second one. None of the girls I've been interested in are really anything like my mother. Either way, moms are important. Now, this shouldn't be confused for thinking that moms are all good. I know of plenty that are absolutely horrible. However, even if she is a negative influence on your life, she was still an influence. So take a moment today to think about how your mother has affected your life. Was it good? Was it bad? How will you use what you've learned from your mother to become a better person?

Thank Goodness It's Friday Eve

Today was another day of partly not being able to find anything that really struck my fancy to write about, and partly being too busy to look for things to write about or have time to write them. Fortunately, this week really hasn't felt too terribly long, which is great. I've been tired and just not wanting to do anything. I'm also broke at the moment, so I can't really do anything anyway.

I've got this TV in my bedroom that I use to just watch shows while in bed, or I'd hook up my laptop and use it for a DVD player. I have this old desktop sitting right next to it, though, so I finally decided to just hook it up and essentially use it for my media player. It isn't that great of a system so I had originally intended on throwing a barebones Linux on there since all I needed it to do was play DVDs and stream media from my other desktop. I didn't think that this would be too difficult since all these people are touting how great Linux is and that it is now super easy to use. I threw Ubuntu on there, and got it fired up. There was just one problem, though. Ubuntu didn't like my wireless card. Now, I'll admit, this was a cheap card, so I wasn't too surprised that it wouldn't recognize it. However, this was not a problem of not being recognized, the system would not even boot with it in there. I tried all sorts of stuff, but nothing would cause this machine to boot if I had the card in there. Now, first, this card works perfect under Windows. Second, the manufacturer makes Linux drivers for this card so obviously this card doesn't just kill Linux. Third, I'm not a computer moron, I can figure most things out when it comes to fixing machines. I finally said screw it, and put Windows back on there. Now I've got exactly what I need working perfectly. The stupid thing even boots faster than when I had Linux on there.
Now don't get me wrong here. I don't want you to think I'm just bashing on Linux. I know lots of people that use it, and I've used it in the past. I have nothing against it at all. I just thought it was an interesting experience that I'm trying to use and older machine, with some inexpensive parts to make my little media player. I would think that this is a perfect time for when I should install this OS instead of Windows. Go figure. Oh, and in case you're curious, the distro I was using is Ubuntu. It ran great and worked well for everything aside from this one problem. When I took the card out of the machine it worked well.

On a somewhat related note, the thing I use to stream my media is Orb. This thing is awesome. It is also free. What you do is install it on your system with all of your media on it, and then you can go to a web interface from any computer or device that has access to the internet, and you can access all of your content. I've also got a TV tuner in my machine, so I can stream that too. So from anywhere, I can get to my music, my movies, my pictures, and even my TV. The compression works pretty well, and I rarely have any sort of problem with lag or stuttering. Also, I can watch things fullscreen and still have them look decent. I definitely recommend that you check it out if you have a need to get your media elsewhere. Oh, you can also share things. Not like being able to let other people download them, but you can create a link for a specific thing and send that to someone. This lets them access a web page with a Flash player so they don't even need another program to watch or listen. This works rather well, and I've used it a number of times to show people stuff.

This Girl Is Awesome

I have no idea who this girl is, or anything about her beyond this single post of hers, but she is awesome. She is a bartender in a NYC bar, and regularly confiscates fake IDs from underage people. After taking them, she frequently posts them on her blog. Well, this one girl had used her real name on her fake ID, and so she found a post after someone had searched for her name. She was pretty displeased by the post, needless to say. Trying to be courteous, the poster removed the last name in an effort to be nice. However, they filed a DMCA take down notice in order to get the image of the ID removed. She is basically claiming a copyright on her fake ID. It sounds to my like NYU students simply are not that bright.

U.S. Finally Close to Catching Up

Hooray! It looks like cable companies in the U.S. are going to be able to provide improved bandwidth at rates as high as 160 Mbps within the next 3-5 years. I know, the whole 3-5 years thing is always said, and generally repeated every year, but this time it might actually happen. With increasing competition from AT&T's and Verizon's fiber networks, cable companies have a big reason to look at bumping up speeds. The increase comes from upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 from the currently used 1.1. This technology provides a number of other improvements including support for IPv6. Another incentive to cable is that they can roll out the new tech without large infrastructure improvements, especially if they've already laid a mixed fiber/coax network. This is especially good news because it means that there can be a faster deployment. Any sort of major deployment of the new technology is not expected until 2008, and is likely to have slower expansion than telco's fiber networks. While I'd personally choose something like FiOS over this if it was available, I'm guessing that cable may be able to reach certain areas faster than the fiber networks. Fortunately, I don't think that will be the case for me, as FiOS is literally moving up the street in my direction.
From ArsTechnica.

Sure I'll Buy Your CD, I'll Need to See Some ID First

So if you want to sell your used CDs to a store in Florida, you're going to have to turn over finger prints and ID. Florida just joined Utah in having laws that are in place to supposedly stop the sales of counterfeit CDs. Whether or not this is actually a large problem hasn't actually been shown. In addition to having to make their customers feel like criminals, store will also have to hold the CDs they purchase for 30 days before being allowed to resell them. On top of all of this, stores will also be required to secure a $10,000 bond for the right to do all this. How these laws get passed is beyond me. This is just another example of the music industry's greed and desire for power.

Is It Friday Yet?

I never did get around to posting anything the entire weekend. Possibly because I was still in mourning. Seriously, though, on Friday I was so busy at work that I didn’t even get a chance to see anything interesting about which to write. Once I got home, which was about 7, I had to get my place cleaned up because I had my family coming over for dinner. Saturday and Sunday I just was in this weird funk where I did not want to do anything that required my brain. I didn’t even want to play some Sim City, which is usually what I do on the weekends. Needless to say, I was in no mood to read or write anything.

I went and saw Spider Man 3 last night with some friends. It was pretty entertaining, but I do have some complaints. Semi-sorta spoilers ahead. First, I agree with a review I read that said they tried to cram too many villains in there. I feel like it would have been better with just Sandman or Venom, but not both. We could have actually had some nicer character development that way, like they were able to do with Doc Oc. Instead, we get very shallow villains that don’t play nearly as large a roll as I would have liked. It also means that Spidey is able to battle them too infrequently. Only one fight with Venom? What is that? I heard that they only included Venom because the fans were demanding it, which I don’t necessarily have a problem with, but I wish that they would have just taken Sandman out in that case. I don’t know a whole lot about the Spiderman universe since I never read the comics, but I thought that Venom was supposed to be this incredibly powerful super-villain (fanboys, feel free to correct me). If that is the case, shouldn’t he have been a far greater threat and menace? And shouldn’t it have been much more difficult to defeat him? I feel like Spiderman got the crap beat out of him, then kicks Venom’s ass without seeming to be too bothered. If they were going to give Venom such a small part, I would have liked it if they hadn’t made his departure so definite (we see his skeleton basically vaporize). At least had they done that they could leave it open for him to return. Speaking of Venom’s demise, how is it that the same explosive that completely decimates Venom and Brock’s body only manages to leave Harry with a burned up face? They could have at least made the thing explode farther away from Harry instead of right next to his head.

Another big problem I had with the movie was that they made Pete look like quite the moron during his “I’m confident cause I’ve got an alien symbiote living with me” routine. I mean, dancing down the street giving girls the most incredibly stupid gesture ever? Where do they come up with this stuff? In the second movie, when he’s walking down the street to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” it is a good scene. This time, it is just absurd. Then that number he does in the Jazz club just takes the cake for being retarded. Also, what is with his emo look when he is in this state? Does the suit make him more angsty?

Despite these criticisms, the movie is still pretty good and definitely worth seeing. It’s easier to point out a movie’s faults than it is its strengths. Some of the highlights, though, include the amazingly well done swinging through the city scenes as well as some great special effects with sand.

I know that I keep talking about the RIAA and their ilk, but they just really make me mad. Ars has an article about RICO accusations against them. They conclude that the RIAA would probably not be in violation of anything under RICO. Under the current laws, I suppose they are probably right. However, that doesn’t make what the RIAA does any better. Personally, I feel like what they do should be considered illegal, or at the very least monopolistic. They attempt to have complete control over the entire music industry, and try to use strong-arm bullying in order to get it. Look no further than the internet radio issue to see how this works. That is not even looking at how they treat consumers. They treat their customers as thieves, whether they actually are or not. They have this mentality that everyone is just out to screw them over, so they had better do the screwing first. Now, I understand the whole deal about copyright holders being allowed to seek compensation when someone infringes on them, but I don’t agree with the way the RIAA does this, or how much they seek. They have sought damages from $750 per song, to $150k per CD. I don’t see how they can possibly say that those numbers are fair. Honestly, people can buy single tracks for under a buck. Even if they sought damages as little as three dollars per song, that is still orders of magnitude higher than they would see had someone bought the song off iTunes. On top of this, they act as if they are suffering some massive loss of revenue by people illegally downloading music. I’ll give them that they are losing some revenue, sure, but not anywhere near what they claim. There are many people that download thousands upon thousands of songs, but would never buy more than a handful of CDs if downloading was not available. People amass huge collections of music because it is easy and free. If they had to pay for everything they got, they would be much more discerning, and would probably only buy those CDs which they absolutely could not go without. I know a few people that even have bought music after downloading it from the net because they wanted to support the band (ok, so it was only 2 people, but still). To say that they are losing billions in revenue is ridiculous.

Okay, I think that’s going to be all for now. I’m sure there is plenty more I could write, but I have already made this a pretty long post. Making up for the absence of one in the last three days. Hopefully I’ll be back later today with some good stuff for you.

New Royalties Delayed!

In a bit of good news about the the whole internet radio thing, the Copyright Royalty Board has issued a two month extension on when the royalties are due, making the new date July 15. This is great for the people fighting to save net radio because now they will actually have some time to talk to Congress. The bill that was introduced in an effort to nullify the ruling was only introduced on the 26th of April. With the new royalties being scheduled to go into effect on May 15, that left very little time for action to take place. Hopefully, with the extra time, the groups lobbying for it will get a chance to show Congress just how important internet radio is. The kicker of it all is that there is no conceivable situation where these royalties will be beneficial to anyone. Sure, there might be an initial big check received, but the number of stations that would be forced to close would create a huge loss of recurring revenue in the future. As any business will tell you, recurring revenue is what you want. In addition, with such incredibly high fees, more people would be tempted to turn to illegals means to acquire music. Right now, you can use services like Pandora to find music that you enjoy, and other music similar to it. If that goes away, it is one more reason to grab a pirated copy a song. On the distribution side, if it is so costly to legally have an internet radio station, people will turn to sending out pirate signals. You would think that these reasons alone would be enough for the entire music industry to try to stop this from happening. Instead, they demonstrate their ignorance, and complete inability to see reality.

iGoogle, uGoogle, everyoneGoogle

For those of you that don't know (which should really be none of you since you should already be using this), Google has renamed their Personalized Homepage to iGoogle. Ars Technica says that according to a Google VP, the name was originally thought up back in 2005 but wasn't used at the time. Given the URL, I'm pretty sure that this is the case. I've been using the service ever since it first launched, and I love it. I've been trying to convince people to use it and see the goodness. I love the customization that it allows. I know that there are a lot of customizable home pages out there, but I still prefer Google's. Part of that could just be that I've been using it for so long. With this new name also comes the ability to create custom gadgets. They're touting it as the ability to build your own gadget without any programming, but it seems to mostly just be a configurable pre-made one. Well, not just one, there are a few. I don't know how useful they'd be, though, and none of them were personally interesting to me, for what it's worth.

There have also been a lot of reports lately with people having problems with their iGoogle pages. They have been reverting back to previous versions that had been used. This hasn't happened to me, so I can't speak from personal experience, but a few people I know have had it happen. One of them confirmed that within a day it reset itself back to how he originally had it. However, since he had already started rebuilding it, it took those changes into account as well. I'm pretty confident that this is a result of the changes that they have been doing, and is not likely to be a long term problem. I've been using the page for a couple years now, and this is the first time I've seen problems like this. I wouldn't let these reports discourage you from using it.

Is This Guy Dumb or Just Stupid?

This commentary over at Wired is an absolute joke. The topic is why Apple won't offer a subscription based model for their music on iTunes. While this author may be correct in that Apple won't be offering a subscription service, the logic he uses is absurd. Let me give you an example from the article.

The music business isn't built on long-term rentals; it's built on one hit after another. It's confectionary. Tunes are addictive for a while and then discarded. It's like the drug business: Users are always looking for the next hit.

How exactly does this help his argument? He is correct, for the most part, that music is all about the current "thing." However, how he interprets this is completely backwards. According to his logic, it makes sense to buy something forever even though you will only use it briefly. I fail to see how this connection is made. If you are interested in listening to a particular song, artist, or CD right now, but you know that something else is going to take its place next week, why are you buying it?

Lets look at it this way: You hear a song on the radio that you really like. You go onto iTunes and buy the song for $.99. While you are buying this, you check out some of the artist's other music and find 3 more songs you like so you buy them too. That is four dollar spent just on a whim. What if you wind up liking the entire CD and not just a couple other songs? Now you are spending 10-15 dollars. This is in addition to any music you might be buying otherwise, such as the new album from one of your favorite artists. Even if all you did was allow yourself one CD worth of music a month, that is going to cost you about the same as a monthly subscription. With the subscription, though, you get 2 million songs, not just 15. If you are always buying the latest hit, only to stop listening to it once the next one comes along, you are spending a lot of money on music you rarely listen to. Sure, you may "own" that music, but does owning it matter if you don't use it? There are a number of people that have spent hundreds of dollars on music on iTunes. Some people have spent as much as one thousand dollars and up. While that is not likely the norm, there are people that do it. It would take close to a decade to spend that amount on a subscription, and you would be getting a much larger catalog.

To say that there is no market for subscription services is naive at best. There are millions of users of subscription based models spread across the various offerings. Another thing is that these services also offer the option to buy tracks. If you find a song you just really feel the need to have forever, long after you stop the subscription, you can buy it. The two offerings are not mutually exclusive.

My personal opinion is that having both options is the best solution. I don't know all of the details, but I have to wonder if the money in it for Apple is less with subscriptions. I despise the record labels, so I have a hard time advocating the same thing they are, but I really think that subscription models are a good thing. Offering both options of buying music, and subscribing allows you to keep the zealots happy as well as everyone else. Let me know what you think.