March 26, 2008
Net Neutrality Hits Home Hard
It looks like the great overlords at Bell have decided to start Über-throttling internet traffic on the lines that they resell to smaller ISPs all across Canada.
As an Internet user who specifically chooses to go with a smaller ISP to avoid throttling activities, I find this kind of behaviour on the part of Bell to be completely egregious and quite irksome.
Oh course, with all issues in the business world, things may not be quite as they seem. If the comments section for the article above is to be believed, it seems that what Bell is really attempting to do is protect it's own proprietary ADSL2 service, the rollout of which conspicuously coincides with their decision to start throttling traffic on re-sold lines.
Only time will tell what will happen with the entire Net Neutrality issue. With more and more data getting slung around the 'net for the purpose of providing entertainment content, such as high definition movies, we are unlikely to hear the end of this debate for some time to come!
February 19, 2007
Steve Ballmer Shovels it on Thick - Beautiful Technobust
Normally, I wouldn't bother to comment on an already well "dugg" story on Digg.com, but I just couldn't resist this one.
Apparently Steve Ballmer (the "other" "voice" of Microsoft) issued a statement blaming poor sales of Windows Vista on computer pirates, the second most vilified group of computer users (right behind the ubiquitous catchall of "hackers" and "terrorists"*).
Anyhow, things being as they are, Digg.com users aren't fooled by Ballmer's line of B.S. in the slightest, which makes the comments in the above article absolutely priceless.
Here's my tip of the day for Microsoft: Visit the above site, make a big list of every single issue that has been mentioned by commentors and fix them, now.
Here's my tip of the day for all other O/S developers: Visit the above site, make a big list of every single issue that has been mentioned by commentors and for the love of a duck, don't make the same mistakes! In fact, if you can avoid these mistakes, you'll probably make more money than Sir Bill himself.
*Which brings to mind the old saying of "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", which, in the case of factions that actually do pirate software, especially Vista, may in fact be just that. As they allow the general public to find out just how horrible software like Vista is before we actually give our hard earned gold over to the Evil Sheriff of Microsoft.
Honestly, all Microsoft cares about is selling you the software, after that, they don't give a flying fig whether it actually functions or not. You've opened the box, you can't take it back and get a refund, they've made their money and now they can add another notch to artificially skewed "installed user base numbers". Why else would they shuffle customer support calls to call centres on the other side of the world where you don't have a snowball's chance in the Mojave's of actually communicating with tech support personal?
February 11, 2007
Ranting with a Great View
WARNING: The following is a major rant, if you don't like rants, then read a different post, because I need to rant and this is the place I'm going to do it.
So, what is the subject of my rant? Windows Vista, which I will now officially dub the worst Microsoft Windows operating system since ME, but not including 3.0 or anything prior to that.
First on my Vista hit list is the new "Aero" theme, sometimes referred to as "Aeroglass", which I had been hearing about for ages, but didn't experience first hand until this weekend, while installing a modem in a new Dell for a client.
Perhaps my expectations had been really built up, as I really was expecting some sort of awesomely beautiful interface, kind of like the faux computer interfaces that have been cropping up in Hollywood movies for the past 2 decades. Something beautiful, new, fresh and functional!
Instead I was presented the ugliest heap of steaming donkey dung of an interface that has ever been conceived. Who came up with this crap and then sold it? Microsoft must have an amazing marketing department, because I can't imagine how anybody who has actually used "Aero" could have written all the glowing reviews that I've read in the past couple of months. Surely such writers just skimmed provided advertising copy and picked out appropriately fluffy descriptions, it's the only explanation!
Continue reading "Ranting with a Great View"
January 6, 2007
High Definition Format Wars – Blargh!
I found this article about frustration over the current high definition movie wars and was compelled to add the following comment in response to some of the other comments. It definitely belongs under the heading “Technobust”:
“VHS may have been convenient, but it surely wasn't any more stable than DVDs, I certainly experience my fair share of tape glitches and other VHS anomalies over the years.
I agree though, DVDs are far too fragile and unreliable.
A flash RAM solution would be much more practical, for cripes sake, we're almost a decade into the new millennium and still using mechanical data storage methods, how long are we going to be forced to relay on such inefficient and unreliable technology ? HD-DVD and Blu-ray are both colossal wastes of time, resources and money.
Here's to the hope that technology like Sandisk's SSD and backlash against the Hi-Def DVD Debacle are the final nails in the coffin for mechanical storage methods and media.”
December 1, 2006
Psiphon (Philterproof)
The University of Toronto is set to release a piece of software named "Psiphon" today which is designed to help people in countries with Internet Censorship bypass internal Firewalls in order to access banned websites, such as Wikipedia.
Now, from a certain perspective I think that this sort of thing is fabulous, as censorship in any form is simply unacceptable! (Eris would be very pleased that Canuckian universities are working so hard to spread discord.)
However, this effort also strikes me as very ironic in a number of ways:
1 - Hackers have been using proxy tools to circumvent firewalls forever. The technology is definitely neither new nor original.
2 - The entire effort assumes that a user in a censored country can access a website that they can either log in to or download software from. By publicly promoting their effort with a fancy website and a publicized released date they have given time for censors to block their website as well. The file (literal and proverbial, as the case may be) isn't much good to the prisoner if you try and smuggle it into the prison while announcing to all the guards just what's hidden in the cake.
3 - The news has been filled with stories over the past couple of weeks that indicate that Canuckian ISPs are going to start filtering certain content. I cannot express how deplorable such content is, however, I also cannot accept censorship in any form. Once a single webpage is banned (*oops, it's already happening... let's see, 1984 was... hmmm... 22 years ago, oh dear...) for our "protection" it won't take long for more and more content to follow. Which leads me to wonder if Internet users in Canuckia are soon going to require a tool developed in our own universities? (My advice is to download this program as soon as possible, just in case you ever need it! Do some research on "proxy servers" while you're at it, you never know when such information may suddenly become unavailable.)
4 - How many kids are going to smuggle this program into schools to help circumvent school network security? (Every darn one of them I should hope!)
*This only works if you attempt to view this site with a non-american I.P. address.
November 30, 2006
Pass It On
There are precious few times in life when I feel truly clever, tonight (eerrrr, make that this morning), however, happens to be one of this times.
A few days ago I saw a cool little addition on a blog that I was reading. Basically, it was a little automatic set of links that allowed readers a simple way to submit the blog post to all the various social networking sites, like Digg and del.icio.us.
I instantly decided that I simply must have this feature on my journal! (If for nothing else than figuring out how it worked from a technical standpoint.) A quick scan of Movable Type plug-ins on the Six-Apart website turned up an interesting plug-in called "Promote This!", which appeared to add just the functionality that I was looking for.
The installation instructions were sparse and thank goodness I knew about the little addition that's required for running MT cgi scripts on Version 5.0 of Microsoft's IIS server (Linux users may stop snickering now!):
use File::Basename;
use File::Spec;
use lib File::Spec->catdir(dirname($0), "lib");
(Trust me, that's vital information right there!)
Anyhow, after a little fiddling around, I got the plug-in up and mostly running, one of the news service links didn't work and there were 3 services that I wanted to add to the list.
So, after taking a deep breath, I jumped head first into the actual PERL script of the plug-in. You must understand, of course, that I know almost nothing about PERL, but after swimming around in code for a little bit the basic structure of the plug-in started to make sense.
In the end I was actually able to correct the problem with the NewsVine link and add the 3 services I was interested in: Linkroll, StumbleUpon and BlogMarks.
Pretty sweet for somebody with no functional PERL coding experience! I passed the updated version to the original author of "Promote This", here's hoping that the updated version goes public!
In the meantime, if you visit permalinks for my posts you will find a new section called "Pass It On", which, if you deem an article to be of worth, you can use to instantly submit the article to your favorite service.
Thanks and Enjoy!
April 2008