mycatharsis.com

In a way, I can see their point. Perhaps they could have squeezed a few more billion out of Verizon and AT&T by ignoring the calls for open access to the spectrum.  But the very fact they’re complaining about not being able to sell off this somewhat basic consumer protection is reason enough to not like their comments.

I just hope it’s their actual views talking, and not Verizon’s money in an attempt to change the rules they agreed to when they placed their supposedly ‘lower than it could have been’  bid.

The trick, I found oddly enough, is to download and run the Windows executable!  The people running the Wine project have really seemed to do an amazing job with it.  It’s been a couple years probably since I played with Wine, and in Gutsy at least, the integration is just incredible.  The install was flawless, the Windows dialogs are entirely seamless, for example, the Windows “Desktop” folder defaults to your Ubuntu desktop, the program seems to work fine without any flaws, that I can find at least.

The linux version of ChessDb would not even get past the configure script! Quite the irony to fix that by running the Windows version instead, in linux no less!

The wave of the future, charging you a little bit for every thing under the sun, as opposed to a lot for just some of the things (or , more accurately right now, in addition to charging a lot for just some things) is already irritating people.  Trustygamer vents, and rightly so.  His Elder Scrolls IV example sounds especially egregious.  Charging people $2.50 on top of the already increased $60 price tag for the game itself, for content that doesn’t add to the game, but merely fixes an error in the original release?  So not only are game prices increasing by $10, but now you can no longer expect a working game for that price either, but rather should be prepared to shell out even more just to make it workable?

Ugh.  In our increasingly plastic-dependent world, this kind of thing is only going to become more and more common.  When it’s used in creative ways, I think microtransactions can be a great thing, and a cost-effective replacement for standard pricing models.  My current web host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net, is a great example of that.  Unfortunately, the model adopted by video game companies, where it’s really taking hold, seems to see microtransactions as strictly a second revenue stream, with no reduction in base price for the consumer.  Instead of a way to save the consumer money, and thus bring in more customers in the long run, too many companies simply seem to choose to throw everything they can charge for into the ‘microtransactions’ pile and still soak the customer for the full price of a game.  Until consumers start voting with their pocketbooks on this, it’s only going to get worse too, I’d bet.

I’ve been looking for a program that would let me update my iPod podcasts and sync them directly from my Ubuntu laptop.  It’s been harder to find than I thought it would be, but that may have been because I was looking for the wrong thing.  Tried Amarok, Banshee and Rhythmbox, but none of them would grab my current list of podcast subscriptions off my iPod for me.  Maybe I was looking for too much with that.  Failing that, I decided to try GPodder, which is a podcast-only application for Gnome.  I still have to re-enter all my subscriptions manually, but I like it’s so-far seamless integration with my iPod.  The interface is nicer and quicker than iTunes on Windows, no doubt about that, and downloading and syncing is a snap so far.

I was wondering why GoDaddy was taking so durned long to change my dns settings.  Turns out once the domain is transferred, I had to sign in and change the name server settings myself.  So after a week of mistakenly self-imposed exile, the site is back up and on a new host! NearlyFreeSpeech.net seems like an awesome host so far, with prices that may actually be better than GoDaddy and an interface that’s simple but still perfect for my needs. Plus I get SSH access! Which wasn’t the biggest thing I missed with GoDaddy, but it’s sure nice to have it back.

Completely unnecessary, despite the assurances of President Bush’s head of the Office of the Special Counsel, Scott Bloch, that that was the ONLY reason he called Geeks On Call to wipe his hard drive.  A simple reformat/reinstall is enough. A 7-level wipe is only necessary to remove data you never want to be recovered.  However, if your first vocation is not computer support, I could understand someone’s natural reaction to a virus being to wipe your computer clean.   However, one thing you learn doing computer support is to first learn WHY someone wants something done, as opposed to just doing it.  Usually you’ll know a more efficient or better solution.

What really gets me, is why did he call an outside outfit in the first place? It makes very little sense. It was his office pc, so it’s not like he was working at home on his laptop and thought he couldn’t get his support people to help him out.  It’d be both quicker AND cheaper to call the guy two offices down than to setup an appointment with an outside company.  And frankly, you’d think he’d have had to do it without his IT staff knowing about it in any way.  At least in my experience, I’ll have to admit to having some territoriality about other IT staff working on computers that are our responsibility. If it truly was a virus, a logical first call would be to your own tech support team, usually because you’re not sure WHAT’s wrong, or the virus software installed by your computer people is reporting a virus exists. He’d have to have at least a passing knowledge that he had a tech support team available at work to do exactly what he needed.  And, as a lawyer, he’d also have to have an even stronger understanding of the concept of “appearance of impropriety” than suspicious bloggers such as myself.  Perhaps that appearance was what he was trying to avoid by doing an end-run around his own tech support team, and whatever reporting requirements federal IT employees have, and contracting that work out to a private outfit.

Either way, it clearly seems the ‘it’s a virus’ story is neither the real, nor full, story.

Wow. That was my first thought when I read that Verizon Wireless will be offering a “Bring your own device” service. That any phone company is offering it is surprising, but the fact that it’s Verizon is a little like Microsoft deciding to move to a Linux-only platform. Will it last, or is this a gimmick? The 700 MHz auction coming up must play a role, although I suspect Google’s apparent intent on bidding for and opening up that spectrum, perhaps plays a bigger role.

Yahoo and MSN have signed a ‘code of conduct’ that commits them to protecting the interests of the Chinese state. Just another reminder that these companies are not interested in promoting American values abroad, only in making money. I’m not condemning that necessarily, only stating it as fact so that no one is confused.

However, it should be useful to remember that by signing this pact, they are essentially agreeing to turn over to the Chinese state anybody who writes something that their communist rulers may not like. They are essentially agreeing to aid the Chinese state in jailing dissidents who speak out for more freedom, or anything else that may offend the ruling elite.

They may be American companies, but they apparently could not care less about such American (or just plain human, really) values as freedom of speech or the press. This is shameful, and they should be ashamed.

Is addiction to gaming a Family wrecking vice or convenient excuse? Argle bargle or fooforah? In all seriousness, considering how hard I find it to drag myself away from a game of Out of the Park Baseball 2007, I think I might have found a reason to be thankful for a horribly short attention span that lets me do very few things for more than an hour at a time. It might be the only thing stopping me from spending all night at that stupid game.

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These glass orbs were definitely the hardest photoshop tutorial I’ve done yet, but well worth it, at least for the sense of accomplishment I got out of it. thanks to the tutorial at Photoshop Cafe, I learned a lot about using gradients especially…