Category: Commentary

Thursday night I was surfing the Internet and came across a still for the new chick-flick P.S. I Love You. The picture was shot in a kitchen and featured Lisa Kudrow, Kathy Bates and a couple of other women holding up posterboard signs that said “Happy Birthday”.

One of the women was an attractive brunette that had her face obscured by a noisemaker. I headed over to IMDB to find out who is was… and found out that it was none other than Gina Gershon. But then I got a shock: Gina Gershon will be 46 this year. 46! Here’s a picture of her taken in April, 2007:

Man, that woman just doesn’t age, does she?

As an IT guy, there are software programs out there that are a pain to install and maintain. As someone who uses computers, there are certain programs that make me want to pull my hair out. Programs that deserve a special place in hell… programs written by Satan himself. And here’s a quick list of them:

1) Windows Vista – Several years ago, several stunning “proof of concept” videos began leaking out of Microsoft’s headquarters. They were breathtaking. They made geeks like me salivate. They were the first glimpses of Windows Vista, and they were awesome. Sadly, Microsoft began cutting features from Vista – so much so that Vista went from “an operating system from the future” to “just a little upgrade from Windows XP”. And sadly, Vista fails in this aspect. It fails badly. Windows 2000 was a huge upgrade from Windows NT. Windows XP was a huge upgrade from Windows 2000. Upgrading to Vista seems like a huge step backwards for a lot of people… and in a sense it is. In my experience, Vista requires an 8-way quad-core system with 36GB of RAM just to work as well as a 1.5GHz P4 with 512MB of RAM running Windows XP.

What makes it all so sad is that there’s a lot to like about Vista. Explorer has had a much-needed face lift, and Vista’s icons are much more pleasing to the eye than XPs’. The built-in search feature is nice, as is the inclusion of Shadow Copies. Microsoft did a lot of worthwhile work under the hood – specifically, with DirectX and Desktop Window Manager – but the implementation of that work – Windows Vista – just sucks.

2) Adobe Acrobat – If I had to choose between living in a world without Osama Bin Laden or Adobe Acrobat, I’d choose the world without Acrobat… hands down! When people call Acrobat an “800 pound gorilla” it’s not a compliment to Adobe’s coding or marketing teams. The program really is an 800 pound gorilla – with all the grace of a brontosaurus thrown in for good measure. Acrobat takes forever to load of most people’s systems, when it’s not busy crashing Internet Explorer or Firefox. Previous Acrobat updates have taken 4 reboots to complete. Sadly, although there are alternatives to Acrobat, most of them suck for various reasons. FoxIt, for example, looks and acts like a Windows 95 program, and (most importantly) doesn’t render all PDFs correctly. If I could rid the world of Abobe Acrobat, I would.

Continue reading “5 Annoying “Programs””

Well, Christmas has come and gone. While I would have liked to have written this post a few days earlier, I’ve been busy with cleaning out my closet, going to parties, and several other things. However, as I type this post up, I’m doing so while looking at my new baby:

Yep, that’s a 22″ widescreen LCD monitor. It’s AWESOME! I feel like I’m sitting down as a space commander or something! EVen though my previous monitor was a 19″ SGI CRT, this one feels so much bigger than the old one! It’s HUGE in comparison! So I finally entered the 21st century with this new monitor, and for that I say “Thank you, Grandma!!!”

My folks also got me an authentic Hines Ward throwback jersey:

That’s pretty awesome! I have “replica” jerseys from Jack Lambert and Jerome Bettis, as well as an authentic Terry Bradshaw throwback jersey (that’s a bit too snug these days), so I’m excited to have a jersey from an active Steelers player… and one who is a Super Bowl MVP at that!

My folks also got me this t-shirt from founditemclothing.com. It’s a painstakingly accurate replica of the “I Love Toxic Waste” t-shirt Val Kilmer wore in Real Genius:

It’s friggin’ awesome! If you’re a fan of 80s movies, you’ll really want to check out founditemclothing.com’s site. They’ve done a lot of work in replicating some of the shirts from your favorite 80s films – like Caddyshack, Repo Man and Beverly Hills Cop – as well as shirts from newer films like Shawn of the Dead and The Big Lebowski.

I got several other presents too. Maybe they lack the “fun” of the previous presents… but that doesn’t mean they won’t be used or appreciated. My sister and brother-in-law got me a new belt, which was much needed and will be worn every day. They also got me Like An Icon, the new book about Madonna. I’ll be getting into that in the next few days.

But then there’s my “favorite present”. It’s hard to pick a “favorite present”. Sometimes you get things like a new belt or some new boots; these things lack a “Wow factor”, but you end up using them all the time. Then there’s things like a new vegetable peeler or flashlight. They’re inexpensive gifts, but often last for years. So when you pick them up five years later, you’re like “Man, my sister got me this for Christmas back in 2002!”, so there’s an endearing charm to them.

But then there are the things that people get for you that caused them a fair amount of grief. For the past couple of years I’ve put “British candy and cheeses” on my Christmas list. And my folks have come through with a handful of British candy bars and a hunk of Stilton and Cheshire, or whatever British cheeses were readily available at the grocery store. But this year, my Dad saw the “British candy and cheeses” on my list and decided to do something about it. I opened up this huge box and found it jammed full of delicious British treats:

 

I think that this is my favorite gift, mainly because my Dad read my list and took the time to track down a British food store in Atlanta. My Pop loaded me up! In addition to the huge box of candy pictured above, he also got me a galaxy of British cheeses, from Double Gloucester and Cheshire, to two types of Cheddar, Stilton and Wensleydale. Even though I always put “British candy and cheese” on my Christmas list (because I always eat it all!), he felt that I had been slighted in this regard, and it was so sweet that he tracked down a British food store just to hook me up! I don’t feel guilty, though: my Dad owned a wholesale food store in Atlanta for years, and I know that he can spend hours in exotic food stores. So he probably had fun just browsing the aisles!

Thanks to everyone for making this Christmas so special!

If you enjoy photography, you’ll probably enjoy Pizdaus.com. It’s a site that lets random strangers upload any picture they want to the site. And, surprisingly, the site works. You’ll see the occasional “goofy pic” you might have gotten via email, but for the most part, the site features hundreds of serious photographs. Some are travel pictures. Some are “artsy” kinds of things. But almost all of them are pretty darn good! Be careful with this site: it’s one of those sites that you could waste hours visiting!

For what it’s worth, I uploaded a pic of my own to the site:

(Click to enlarge)

This is a picture of the stone lions at the entrance to the Biltmore House in Asheville, NC. I took it with my Canon PowerShot S400, then loaded it into Photoshop, converted it to greyscale and played around with the levels a bit. I hope you like it!

Check out this picture (click on it to enlarge):

It’s a real picture of an Indonesian man named Dede. He cut his knee as a teenager and as a result became infected with a particularly prolific version of the HPV virus – the virus more commonly associated with genital warts. Locally known as “The Tree Man”, Dede has lost many jobs (as well as his wife) due to the disease. Dr Anthony Gaspari of the University of Maryland says that Dede has a rare genetic fault that keeps his immune system from stopping the spread of the growths, and that he could be treated with a synthetic form of vitamin A.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the collective name of a bunch of schemes that Big Content uses to try to keep people from listening to music or watching movies as they see fit. “Copy protected” CDs use DRM to keep folks from copying the audio tracks to their computers. Almost every online store uses DRM to keep people from downloading songs from, say, the iTunes Music Store, and uploading those files to a P2P network. DVDs have a DRM scheme called CSS that supposedly keeps people from “ripping” movies to computers – although CSS was broken so long ago that it’s trivial to bypass it.

The problem with DRM is that it doesn’t stop piracy and only inconveniences honest buyers. Pirates will always find a way to pirate content, but people that buy a product with DRM – such as a CD that cannot be ripped to a hard drive, and thus copied to an iPod – are screwed. For this reason, I’m vehemently against DRM in any way, shape or form. However, that doesn’t mean that I’m against accurate reporting too!

My case in point: Western Digital’s new My Book Network Storage System. It’s basically a portable hard drive that uses Ethernet to connect to your computer instead of USB or Firewire. Pretty cool so far, right? However, at the end of the “product features” section on the linked page, you’ll see this disclaimer:

Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using WD Anywhere Access. A list of the non shareable file types can be found here.

In the past couple of days, the Internet has blown up with stories (like this one from the BBC) about how the My Book is “crippled” with DRM and how it “won’t let you share MP3 and movie files!!!!!”. A bunch of “the sky is falling” reports have popped up everywhere, and many blogs are filled with comments from readers like “I’ll never buy a Western Digital product again!” and “I’m going to buy a Seagate and send a copy of the receipt to Western Digital to let them know how much business they’ve lost!”. Even better are huffy comments from “IT professionals” that claim to “order 96,000 hard drives a year through my job” and from now on they’ll “never buy a single Western Digital drive again!”

People, people… Relax! And while you’re relaxing, brush up on your reading comprehension skills, too!

This My Book drive comes with access to a service Western Digital offers called “WD Anywhere Access”. The service is somewhat similar to Orb, a free service that lets you access your movie and music files from any computer on the Internet. With Orb, you sign up for an account, then download and install a program on your computer. This program scans your hard drive for various movie and music files. When you’re away from home, all you do then is log in to your Orb account and you can watch the movies or listen to the music on your system. Anywhere Access works much like this, except that you can allow friends and family members to access the files remotely too… except for these types of files, which WD has banned on its network. YOU can access any file on the My Book using Anywhere Access, but you cannot let friends download your MP3s using the service. And locally – that is, on your home network – the device works exactly like any other NAS device.

So all of this anti-DRM hype leveled against Western Digital really is much ado about nothing. So you can’t use their network to share movies and MP3s. Big deal. Maybe WD’s lawyers thought the company could be sued for doing such a thing. Maybe WD doesn’t want to deal with the bandwidth costs of people sharing thousands of 700MB movie files. Whatever the case may be, at home the device works like any other hard drive. It also comes with a service that allows you to access any file on your My Book from any computer with an Internet connection. WD was nice enough to allow you to share certain types of files with others… but not all types.

What’s the big deal? Get over it already!

“Network neutrality” is concept whereby all data packets (and devices) are treated equally on a computer network. In laymen’s terms, a “network neutral” ISP would not discriminate between basic web surfing, email traffic, streaming video traffic, P2P traffic, VoIP traffic, podcast traffic, instant messaging traffic, and so on. Each and every data packet would be treated exactly the same, regardless of where it comes from or what it contains. If this sounds like the basic definition of “the Internet” to you… well, you’d be right.

As it stands now, most ISPs in the US are running more or less neutral networks. But this might not be the case tomorrow, or the next day. And although a few large US ISPs are currently experimenting with ditching network neutrality as it relates to illicit file trading, these same ISPs have, in the not too distant past, discussed grandiose plans for shattering the Internet as we know it. It’s called “tiered service”.

Basically, ISPs want to charge websites and content providers to allow “guaranteed delivery” of their content. If a content provider can’t (or won’t) pay these “quality of services fees”, then their data will be pushed to “the back of the bus”. While it doesn’t sound like a terribly bad idea at first, the end result of these fees would be a disaster for end users and content providers. Content providers would have to negotiate such fees with any ISP that wished to implement tiered service; although most US Internet users are serviced by a handful of giant ISPs, there are still thousands of small ISPs that content providers would have to negotiate with. Such fees would also cut deeply into the bottom lines of many content providers. So your favorite podcast or streaming audio\video site might simply choose to shut down rather than pay out the nose for something they’ve had for free for years. “Mom and Pop” Internet sites and blogs might cease to exist entirely. Start-up companies developing new and innovative Internet technologies would see their products langish for lack of funds to pay an “ISP tax”. Some companies might choose to leave the U.S. altogether for “network neutral” countries in Europe or Asia. And of course, ISPs could enter into agreements with certain companies that give them kickbacks… so Comcast could have a “preferred online bank” that loads much faster than some other online bank that doesn’t pay the ISP tax or enter into a licensing agreement with Comcast. Imagine a world where Google refuses to enter into such an agreement with an ISP and refuses to pay the ISP tax… now imagine all your Google searches timing out and giving you errors while “Yahoo! Search Brought To You By Comcast” works beautifully. Or imagine if iTunes were to resist jumping on the tiered service bandwagon… suddenly your iTunes purchases take hours to download instead of seconds as they did before, and Comcast’s only solution is for you to sign up for their “ComcasticMusic” site… where tracks cost $2.99 each instead of 99¢ and have more draconian DRM than their Apple counterparts. THAT’S tiered service in a nutshell.

Continue reading “Why We Need “Network Neutrality” (part 1)”