The Job Market in 2009

Many thanks to Phil Greenspun for pointing me to this:

The Greatest Failure

Every now and then, Dilbert is just too funny. See the full comic here.

AppleTV minor update

Apple pushed a minor update to AppleTV Take Two sometime yesterday. I haven't been able to find release notes, so here are the only obvious things:

1. A genre browser within the "My Movies" section. It is very slow when you move between genres.

2. The HDMI switching is still a huge pain. I thought it was because I have a really shitty cheap HDTV, but I am hearing complaints about it from people with really nice/expensive screens.

That's about it. Some people in forums are going all crazy about it, but it is mostly a halo effect. The one real constant is that the genre browser is slow. I don't think anything else in the AppleTV is affected.

My Way News - Gates Orders Inventory of US Nukes

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a full inventory of all nuclear weapons and related materials after the mistaken delivery of ballistic missile fuses to Taiwan, the Pentagon said Thursday.

Gates told officials with the Air Force, Navy and Defense Logistics Agency to assess inventory control procedures for the materials and to submit a report within 60 days.

Earlier this week, Gates directed Navy Adm. Kirkland H. Donald to take charge of a full investigation of the delivery mistake in which four cone-shaped electrical fuses used in intercontinental ballistic missile warheads were shipped to the Taiwanese instead of the helicopter batteries they had ordered.

[From My Way News - Gates Orders Inventory of US Nukes]

This is one of these things that you never heard of back when I was in the service in the 90's. From the day we put on the uniform it was burned into our brains that all of our equipment must be accounted for at all times. The company commander basically signs for every item within his command, down to each trash can, chair, etc.

One of the classic punishments for misbehaving lieutenants was to have them re-inventory everything, starting with the office supplies closet.

The more sensitive the item, the more controls are put into it. If they could get away with it, they would have us count spent brass before we turned it in before leaving a firing range. If the item was remotely classified, then you had to push a LOT of paper because of each individual item. This was institutional, you couldn't just say screw it, I am not going to document it.

Fast forward to the late 2000s, and suddenly people are fucking up, either by accident, incompetence or dereliction. How are we expected to believe that something as sensitive as these fuses can simply be misplaced during a foreign transfer? It is not like the damn things were sitting in a shelf at an airport and somebody picked the wrong boxes. Or maybe they were?

Test Shows Comcast’s HD Squeeze In Virginia - 3/27/2008 3:12:00 PM - Multichannel News

Comcast has said it can pack three high-definition signals into space typically used for two—without viewers noticing a drop in quality. But at least one viewer has.

A member of AVS Forum, a community site for audio/video enthusiasts, has posted the results of his comparison of the compression rates for 10 HD channels offered by Comcast and Verizon Communications’ FiOS TV in Northern Virginia.

The user, “bfdtv,” said his test showed Comcast is delivering certain MPEG-2 HD channels at bit rates as much as 28% lower than Verizon, resulting in lower-quality pictures.

[From Test Shows Comcast’s HD Squeeze In Virginia - 3/27/2008 3:12:00 PM - Multichannel News]

I can say from first hand experience that most HD channels in Comcast for Reston, VA don't look as good as one would expect. The problem is that sometimes the content is not exactly HD, instead it is up-converted, and many times this is done poorly. A&E is sometimes shown simply stretched to fit the screen.

There are always a couple of channels that look really nice most of the time. One of the local PBS affiliates always looks fantastic, and the network channels look fine as long as they are running proper content, like for example Heroes, House, Bones, etc.

Egg McMuffin inventor Peterson dies - Food Inc.- msnbc.com

LOS ANGELES - Herb Peterson, who invented the ubiquitous Egg McMuffin as a way to introduce breakfast to McDonald's restaurants, has died, a Southern California McDonald's official said Wednesday. He was 89.

Peterson died peacefully Tuesday at his Santa Barbara home, said Monte Fraker, vice president of operations for McDonald's restaurants in that city.

[From Egg McMuffin inventor Peterson dies - Food Inc.- msnbc.com]

Good night, sweet prince.

I know I am just one of many within the geek hordes that will mourn the passing of one of our food industry heroes.

The egg McMuffin is a thing of beauty.

Egg sandwiches rock, but they have always had a problem: they are messy. Greasy, delicious, godly messes. The egg McMuffin, on the other hand, is a neat little setup that doesn't skimp on whatever it is that makes my cholesterol readings get worse every year.

What about the croissandwich? Fuck the croissandwich.

Goodbye Jericho

In one of the worst blunders of recent television history, Jericho was cancelled again. The last episode aired last night, with an ending that made it painfully obvious that the show was nowhere close to a logical closing.

It was a great show, with a decent cast, a timely main theme, and plenty of thrills. It missed one thing: the support of its television network.

By the rabid reaction from its fans after the first cancellation, it is obvious that either the viewership statistics were wrong or that whoever is calling the shots at CBS didn't have a clue as of what to do with the show. This is the kind of bullshit one would expect from FOX, not from CBS.

No one was spared, not even the children

Please, I beg you, do not watch this video:

The 22-hour long Parallels Desktop Adventure

Sometime on Sunday night or early Monday morning, my Windows XP (Parallels Desktop, 10.5.2) started to run like ass. I usually brag that in my Mac Book Pro (Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz) I can have Parallels running with a bunch of crap open, through a VPN, while having another bunch of crap open on the OS X side, with no real hit on performance.

Not this time. XP was choking just trying to debug a project in VS 2005. Just horrible.

I blew a couple of hours installing every optional patch that I had missed in Windows, like the ASP.net 2.0 framework service pack and some other crap. Then I noticed that I had about 1GB of space left in XP, from the 32GB assigned.

First step was to use the Parallels image tool to expand to 64GB. No cigar, it still said 1GB left. Why? Because I was using an expanding virtual HDD.

Switching it to a non-expanding drive didn't work. After this I hit a vicious circle with the compress tool, which would waste 2-3 hours of my time at a time, only to find myself still at the same spot.

I spent my night waking up every hour or so, checking the progress of the damn compress tool.

At around hour 18, I found this post. It took me one hour to duplicate my 32GB virtual HDD, then a few minutes to get the drive extended properly and reassigned. The rest of the time was burned trying to figure out why I couldn't use the mouse (it had ditched the parallels tools), so I had to remember how to navigate in windows without a mouse.

Good times.

End result: XP now flies, I have two VS 2005 projects open, with VSS sources through a VPN, and everything runs beautiful. I also made a second virtual disk to use it exclusively for the swap file, so that probably has something to do with the performance boost.

Gamerscore Correction - Xbox Live's Major Nelson

The shit just hit the fan at XBL:

I wanted to follow up and let you know where we are on the post I made a few months ago on Gamesave Tampering. Today we took action on some of the accounts we have identified as the most serious offenders who have violated the Xbox LIVE Terms of Use by tampering with their Gamerscore and Achievements.

[From Gamerscore Correction - Xbox Live's Major Nelson]

About god damn time.

The Little Things

After a few more days using OS X 10.5 Leopard, things are starting to take shape:

1. Time Machine is the only backup application that I have seen in the past 15+ years that actually makes sense just by looking at it. Setup is basically automatic, restorals are simple: open Time Machine, navigate to the last backup with the file that you are missing, and click restore. Done. I have been working all weekend and I never get to catch the hourly backup while it is running, resource usage is very low.

2. I turned off Spaces, they were more annoying than useful. I know these have a use, but not for me.

3. Some of the networking changes are very clever. I really like the new shared folders menu and the ability to set permissions by user. I also like the built-in VNC client (not that Chicken of the VNC ever bothered me).

4. The parental controls are nice, but only if the application is compatible with it. This means that PJ is stuck using Safari instead of Firefox. The new options allowed us to set daily time brackets for his Mac usage, with a separate start and end time for weekends. If you would rather use a fixed amount of usage per day, it is available too.

Letter from the Editor: The Passport Breach Scandal

By now most of my readers have learned that some people within the U.S. Department of State have improperly accessed the passport records of some of the current presidential candidates.

Searching Google News for "presidential candidate passport breach" yields 2,239 results.

We would like to let our readers know that my passport records at the Department of State have NEVER been breached. Of this we are 100% confident, but we decline to disclose our source for this information since this mess is in full blast.

Mozilla CEO Says Apple’s Safari ‘Update’ Undermines Users’ Trust

Whether you want it or not, you may accidentally install Apple’s Safari web browser on your computer by doing a routine update to your iTunes. That sounds strange? It is, as it seems to be a rather pushy strategy from Apple to promote their new software.

After Joe Wilcox noted in his Microsoft Watch blog yesterday that an Apple Software Update window popped on his daughter’s computer offering a Safari download as “bonus” to the regular update, talks about Apples strategy began to emerge.

Mozilla CEO John Lily noted on his blog: “What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad – not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web.”

[From Mozilla CEO Says Apple’s Safari ‘Update’ Undermines Users’ Trust]

Jesus Christ, would you grow a pair of balls?

Is the Apple envy in the FOSS community so bad that everyone is going to get their panties in a bunch over a god damn installer? I saw the stupid installer, it had THREE things in it:

1. iTunes
2. Quicktime
3. Safari

There is NOTHING covert or unfair about it. It has a list of three things, clearly named, and each item has a check box. No surprises there.

And how the fuck is this a security issue? Vista was a complete flop, Firefox 3 is still not out of beta, yet big hats from both camps have the time to stop their hard work (whatever the hell is it they do) to bitch and moan about a pop up with an optional download/update?

IGN: Jericho Cancelled Again

March 21, 2008 - Last year Jericho got a lot of attention when CBS cancelled the series, only for the fans to rally behind it. The ensuing "nuts" campaign was a very impressive one, and resulted in the series achieving the incredibly rare feat of being un-cancelled, as CBS renewed it for a seven episode second season.

Unfortunately for Jericho fans however, the publicity surrounding the show's resurrection didn't result in increased ratings for Season 2, leaving its fate very much in doubt once again. And indeed, CBS has now announced that this coming Tuesday's Season 2 finale will serve as a series finale.

[From IGN: Jericho Cancelled Again]

Maybe this explains why the series seemed to be headed toward complete nuclear doomsday. This is too bad, the show was starting to get really interesting, especially since Rosseau was shot ...

uhm... nevermind, I mixed up Jericho with last night's Lost. At least now with the cancelled Jericho the network can replace that time slot with more suck.

Mac OS 10.5: First Impressions

It's done, I finally ran out of excuses for upgrading to Leopard. My basic issue was Parallels Desktop, if I kill it I basically lose my job, so I had to wait for the first Leopard-specific build. Once that build came, it was a matter of finding a hole in my schedule so I could spend a few hours just messing with the laptop.

It took a month.

I was finally able to upgrade the Mac Book Pro yesterday afternoon. It took less than three hours from the moment I started to the point I ran out of things to upgrade. I also upgraded the iMac G5, which I am absolutely convinced that it took less than two hours to do it all. I did not check the times, but it does feel like it was less time.

While talking to Alec Esotérica about it, I came out with a very quick review, which to my surprise covered almost everything:

1. Think evolutionary instead of revolutionary.
2. Spaces is only good to show off.
3. Stacks are handy as fuck.
4. The cover flow finder is nice when you are trying to find the right porn.
5. Remote desktop client is now built into the finder, that's nice.
6. iChat is still useless.
7. The dock is now worse: instead of an easy to notice black triangle, active apps have a tiny blue LED underneath the 3D dock surface.
8. I like stacks a lot.
9. Can't test time machine until the new drive arrives.
10. It did not break parallels, for that I am grateful and thrilled.
11. Safari is fast as fuck, but it isn't Firefox

That was within an hour of installing it. The changes to the finder take time to get used to, the one that was the easiest was the downloads folder, something I had done by myself less than 3 days ago, so I was already used to the idea that my downloads were no longer landing on the desktop.

I already got Time Machine running, but I won't see it in action until the first backup is done, which at this pace is going to take the rest of the evening.

Fuck You UPS, Part 2

More anti-UPS aggravation, courtesy of the good old United States Postal Service.

Here's how it goes:

1. On 3/18 I ordered two items thru Amazon: One copy of OS X 10.5.1, One 1TB external USB drive.

2. I was charged for next day UPS.

3. OS X was sold directly by Amazon. It took two god damn days for it to arrive. This is a small cardboard box with one DVD and a small booklet that is about 1/4 inch thick.

4. The USB drive was shipped yesterday, through USPS, not UPS. This is a box that weights maybe 2 pounds 4 pounds.

5. USPS delivered the USB drive, plus my daily mail, before 3 PM today.

It took UPS two fucking days to move a half-pound envelope from Laurel, Maryland to Reston, Virginia (less than 2 hours drive). They charged me for next day delivery.

It took the USPS one day to move my box from NYC, and all they were paid for was for priority mail rate.

Fuck you, UPS.

Leopard finally arrives

Beware of moonwalking bears

Many thanks to Paul for finding this:



Originally at Do The Test.

United Parcel Service

Once again UPS has proceeded to rape me over the payment of anything better than 3-5 ultra budget ground shipping. Every single god damn time I pay for better than that, they let me down. So does FEDEX. Right now Ivette is doing her little victory dance ("I-told-you-sooooo").

This is how absurd this whole situation is:

1. The item ordered was OS X 10.5.1, retail price $129.

2. Amazon discounted the hell out of it, then almost brought it back to MSRP once UPS Next Day delivery was added to the order: $127.47

3. The item was shipped from Laurel, MD. That's north of DC.

4. The UPS driver for the first leg did fantastic time, he/she made it to Chantilly, VA (which is south of here) in exactly one hour. That's about 46 miles according to Google Maps. I guess the traffic was nonexistent at 1:30 AM.

5. The box was scanned for delivery at 6:13 AM.

6. The box entered the twilight zone until around 7:50 PM, when its status was magically changed to what it shows on the screen capture.

Fuckers.

The sad thing is that at $127.47, even if it takes two days, it is cheaper than paying $129, plus sales tax, plus gas to drive to the closest retailer that carries it, a 15-mile or so round trip.

Comcast: FCC lacks any authority to act on P2P blocking

The man who spoke for Comcast at Harvard last month has told the Federal Communications Commission that the agency has no legal power to stop the cable giant from engaging in what it calls "network management practices" (critics call it peer-to-peer traffic blocking). Comcast vice president David L. Cohen's latest filing with the Commission claims that regulators can do nothing even if they conclude that Comcast's behavior runs afoul of the FCC's Internet neutrality guidelines.

"The congressional policy and agency practice of relying on the marketplace instead of regulation to maximize consumer welfare has been proven by experience (including the Comcast customer experience) to be enormously successful," concludes Cohen's thinly-veiled warning to the FCC, filed on March 11. "Bearing these facts in mind should obviate the need for the Commission to test its legal authority."

[From Comcast: FCC lacks any authority to act on P2P blocking]

In other words, "Fuck the FCC."
That's the funny thing about common sense: you can't teach it. If you find a loophole in federal law, why brag about it? All you are going to do is draw attention to yourself and the loophole, and before you know it, the loophole will be closed.
Do you really think that a government agency is going to let a private company give them that UFIA out in the open? And in an election year?
Of course not.
Here's what I don't understand: why act so bold when they are no longer the only game in town when it comes to broadband? Here in North Virginia they are still strutting around as if they own Fairfax County. Seems their suits haven't figured out that Verizon has been selling FIOS here for a while.
The other thing I can't understand is their billing. Every month the bill is different, and my tiers never come out straight. Are these people actually interested in making money? The one thing I know for sure is once I call them to tell them about my new FIOS line they'll start throwing discounts at me, as if it is going to make a god damn difference.

FCC spectrum auction is completed with $19.6 bln in bids - MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- A sale of communications airwaves by the federal government to the commercial wireless industry closed Tuesday, after 261 rounds of bidding and $19.6 billion in bids.
The end of the auction means that, within a short period of time, the Federal Communications Commission will reveal who the winners of the valuable radio spectrum licenses are, and where in the country they acquired airwaves.
The proceeding was conducted on a blind-bidding basis, which means that, throughout the sale, bidders have been anonymous. The FCC put this in place after some potential participants in the auction argued it would enhance competition.

[From FCC spectrum auction is completed with $19.6 bln in bids - MarketWatch]

As one of the many customers that made the jump from analog to digital, which is what allowed this bidding to happen, I would like to say the following:
"Where's my cut?"
And by cut I don't mean two discount coupons to buy ATSC tuner boxes.
Actually, I don't care, I was hoping they would make like bandits. Now I hope they can take that freed up bandwidth and do something creative with it, maybe solve the last mile problem for rural america once and for all.

Author Arthur C. Clarke dead at 90

(CNN) -- Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" and raised the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s, has died at age 90, an associate said.

Visionary author Arthur C. Clarke had fans around the world.

Clarke had been wheelchair-bound for several years with complications stemming from a youthful bout with polio and had suffered from back trouble recently, said Scott Chase, the secretary of the nonprofit Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.

He died early Wednesday at a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since the 1950s, Chase said.

[From Author Arthur C. Clarke dies - CNN.com]

Goodnight, funny guy.
While at this very moment hordes of douchebag blogger types are furiously scouring Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database for trivial bits of his career to fluff THEIR blog entries/obituaries, I will instead relish the fact that I have actually seen 2001/2010 over a dozen times, read the whole 2K series and many of his greatest short stories.
My favorite was of course The Sentinel, which is the basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey (note to said douchebag bloggers: 2001 was a novelization of the script). I also have the dubious honor of having had my very vintage copy of the 2001 novella stolen from me by an ex employer. It is sad because I know he did not even bother to read it, it is either in a dark closet or it was dumped into the trash years ago.

Is it safe?

I broke a molar on Saturday, right as I was enjoying my delicious, cholesterol-laden, heart attack-inducing Chicken Romano Fettuccini. Most of the rest of the tooth fell apart over the weekend, so I had it extracted today (too damaged for a root canal). I was hoping to see my usual dentist (who graduated in 1960 and would had made for one hell of a Marathon Man photo op) but I had to settle for one of his associates, who seems to be at least 5 years younger than myself.

The good news is that Junior more or less knew what he was doing, and managed to get my gums numb after just 75 Novocain pinches, which is probably the lowest any dentist has ever achieved since I was in the Army (Army dentists usually don't give a shit if you are hurting, Army dental hygienists are even worse, they take much pleasure in inflicting as much pain as they can).

The only thing I didn't like is that they charged me $15 for a bottle of mouth wash.

Now I have a hole in my mouth, and am about to partake in some Tylenol #3 as soon as Ivette can fill the prescription. Oh yeah.

Costs soar for Marine One fleet - Washington Post- msnbc.com

A year after Sept. 11, 2001, the White House set out to build a fleet of state-of-the-art Marine One helicopters for the al-Qaeda age that would be safer, faster and more reliable than the iconic white-topped aircraft that have landed on the South Lawn for decades.

But the al-Qaeda age has met the military acquisition process. Six years later, the cost of the new helicopters has nearly doubled, production has fallen behind schedule, and the bulk of the program has been put on hold while the government tries to figure out how to salvage it.

[From Costs soar for Marine One fleet - Washington Post- msnbc.com]

My very first reaction was that was just one more sign that the Republicans were going to lose the White House ("no shiny new helos for the next guy!"). The amusement at how funny I thought I was quickly went away once I saw that each of these new helicopters costs more than the last Boeing VC-25.

Yes, a helicopter that costs more than the most exclusive VIP airplane in the world. This is actually a good thing, because it shows, with extremes, how much dangerous helicopters are in comparison to fixed wing aircraft. This is of course a blanket assumption, but think about it: Air Force One is already ultra-secure, as secure as we can make it to protect the current President plus an entourage of hundreds, yet it costs more money to build just one helicopter to carry him and maybe a dozen people total with a reasonable degree of security.

If you would like a very quick explanation on why helicopters are much more dangerous than fixed wing aircraft, take a look at Phil Greenspun's take on the subject.

Photo Credit: Photo by culhanen, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

Firefox 3, Beta 4

I have been running Firefox 3 since beta 2 (OS X 10.4), this is the first time that (from what I can see), the add-ons are starting to fall behind. I don't give a shit about the Google toolbar and the minor stuff, but I really need Flash Block back. The only reason I ever have Firefox 3b4 crashing is because of Flash, otherwise it runs pretty damn nice.

Also, would somebody please get on with the god damn program and figure out how to write a bookmarks add-on for Google Bookmarks? If you don't take into account the Google toolbar, support for Google bookmarks is literally nonexistent. Everyone has a plugin for frickin del.icio.us, so how come there is nothing usable for Google bookmarks?

Except for those two basic nags, I like it a lot. It is faster and runs even better. So please, with sugar on top, Flash Block and Google Bookmarks.

Photo Credit: Photo by pigstyave, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

Where is your God now?

Chicken Romano Fettuccini, at Generous George's.

Now I need to wear sunglasses while in my home office

Joy of Tech: Why premium cables cost so much?

This is why Joy of Tech rocks. See the full comic here.

Microsoft and Yahoo met to discuss merger: report | Technology | Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) met on Monday to discuss Microsoft's takeover offer for the Internet company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The meeting was said to be the first since Microsoft made its unsolicited offer for Yahoo, worth nearly $42 billion, on January 31. Yahoo rejected the offer as inadequate last month.

[From Microsoft and Yahoo met to discuss merger: report | Technology | Reuters]

I love how they call it a merger, as if the end result of this mess is going to be a new company called MicroYahoo! or something like that.
The article goes on to say that the meeting was not a negotiation, that instead it was a way for Microsoft to pitch their vision of a combined company. If by combined they meant Microsoft as it is today, plus possession of whatever Yahoo! users don't jump ship between now and the merger, plus whatever other cool stuff Yahoo! owned that Microsoft has no use for it.
Yeah Flickr, I am talking about you. You are looking forward to very limited choices in the future:
1. As is. Flickr stays as is, with a redesigned logo that adds "A Microsoft company" to it.
2. Same as #1, but with the MSN butterfly instead of the word Microsoft.
3. All of Flickr gets migrated to some new Microsoft-centric platform.
4. Whatever Microsoft uses for photo sharing is migrated TO Flickr, plus the branding changes in either options 1 or 2.
5. Flickr is left alone, maybe even as a stand alone company owned by Microsoft but retaining its own branding.

And that's just one Yahoo! owned service. This drama is going to play out on every single one of their properties.

AOL to Acquire Global Social Media Network Bebo

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AOL announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Bebo (http://www.bebo.com), a leading global social media network. Together with its AIM and ICQ personal communications network, the acquisition will give AOL a premier position in the fast growing world of social media with a network of approximately 80 million unique users.

With a total membership of more than 40 million worldwide, Bebo is a global social media network which combines community, self-expression and entertainment to enable its users to consume, create, discover and share content. Bebo is one of the leading social networks in the UK, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand, and number three in the U.S. Its users are heavily engaged and view an average of 78 pages per usage day. Bebo has approximately 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, TX.

The deal comes just one week after AOL’s launch of Open AIM 2.0, an initiative that allows the developer community greater freedom to access the AIM network and integrate AIM into its sites and applications, and the announcement by Apple of a downloadable AIM application for the iPhone.

[From AOL to Acquire Global Social Media Network Bebo]

You gotta be shittin' me. First some morons want to add $5 to everyone's internet bill to pay for piracy, even if the user can't spell "P2P." Now AOL, a company that was the symbol of the Web 2.0 sinking ship until Microsoft decided to buy Yahoo out of existence, are blowing $850 million on a god damn website?

WTF is Bebo anyway? I spend pretty much my whole day online, so I expect to have a slightly higher exposure to new sites than say a guy that works at a counter for 8 hours then goes home and surfs for one hour. And I have no clue wtf that site is, except that from reading the press release it is obvious it is some kind of Facebook competitor.

Is it a full moon by any chance and all the dumbasses are coming out of the woods, howling for dumb deals? What's next?

BTW, AOL: I have another site, it is called Veraperez.com. I am willing to sell it to you for 1/1000th of what you paid for Bebo.com. I'll even give you a free USB wireless adapter for the Xbox 360 and an Airport Extreme wireless card if you send me your purchase proposal by COB 4/15.

Photo Credit: Photo by Grant Neufeld, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs

Having failed to stop piracy by suing internet users, the music industry is for the first time seriously considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users.

In recent months, some of the major labels have warmed to a pitch by Jim Griffin, one of the idea's chief proponents, to seek an extra fee on broadband connections and to use the money to compensate rights holders for music that's shared online. Griffin, who consults on digital strategy for three of the four majors, will argue his case at what promises to be a heated discussion Friday at South by Southwest.

[From Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs]

This is the stupidest idea in the still short history of stupid ideas in regards to online piracy. For starters, why is everyone getting taxed? What would happen if the feds said "you know what? Let's make everyone with a driver's license pay $5 a year to pay for people that don't get caught speeding..."?


There would be riots.

Here in the Commonwealth of Virginia we went up in arms simply because they asked us to pay more money as the moving violation got worse.

Also, wouldn't this legalize all online piracy? After all, if we are paying the $5, it means that the owner of the copyright is not suffering damages, right? Not so fast, because this piracy surcharge would only affect music piracy, they are not collecting the $5 to pay Microsoft for all of the Vista licenses being pirated, or Vivid for all of the porn sales that they lose to piracy.
Nope, it is all about the music.

How much do you want to bet that somewhere in a dusty desk drawer there is a music sales market research study that says that, with zero piracy, the average US household would consume $5 in music CDs every month?

Dumbasses.

Photo Credit: Photo by ndh, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

TiVo, YouTube to deliver videos to TVs - Internet- msnbc.com

SAN FRANCISCO - TiVo users will be able to watch YouTube clips on their televisions by year's end, TiVo Inc. said Wednesday.

That's the latest move by YouTube to reach beyond the Web's regular boundaries. Fans of the popular online video provider can view its videos on their cell phones and Apple TV, a box that streams movies from people's computers to their TV.

[From TiVo, YouTube to deliver videos to TVs - Internet- msnbc.com]

When I setup our AppleTV's I thought that the Youtube feature would just sit there unused. Next thing I knew, PJ was spending as much time browsing Youtube from his AppleTV than from his iMac (which is great, it means less bickering between PJ and Ivette about who gets to use the iMac). I also like it a lot, after spending just a half hour browsing videos on a 37" HDTV, you don't want to go back to your computer.
Of course, the feature needs work, but it is most an issue with searching and browsing. The videos look pretty damn nice.

The Faraday Cage

A real Faraday Cage is an enclosure that blocks electromagnetic radiation. Over the past few years I have been struggling with my condo because sometimes it feels like I am living inside of a Faraday Cage: my cell reception always sucks and I never get enough signal strength from my wireless access point.

Once we got the two AppleTVs, it got worse. Two AppleTVs streaming off two separate Macs, both on 802.11g is too much of a pain in the ass, and this is assuming the network is running normally. Mine wasn't, so performance for PJs AppleTV was always subpar when used in streaming mode. Because of that, his is setup to pull the actual content instead of streaming it.

Here's more or less what the network was like:

Red: 100MB ethernet.
Blue: 54MB wireless.
Green: Mac / AppleTV pair
I decided to hell with it, why bother with wireless when the condo is just 1000 square feet? I asked my friends around, and they all recommended the same: wire it yourself.
One of my coworkers lent me his crimping tool and his line testing gizmo, plus a bag of RJ45 connectors. I spent about $40 in cable, plus some really neat cable staples and a $10 5-port 100MB ethernet switch.
Last night was patch cord training, since I had not put together an ethernet cord since sometime in 1998. After two hours I had three completed patch cords that could actually pass the gizmo tests.
Today I wired my office, ran a line to PJ's room and made more patch cords. This is what the network looks like right now:


Red: VoIP line (off the Comcast Arris MTA)
Green: 100MB ethernet in my office
Blue: 100MB line to PJs room
Orange: 100MB ethernet in PJs room
There was virtually no benefit to the Mac Book Pro (which was never more than 10 feet away from the wireless access point), but my AppleTV is a little bit more responsive. The real benefit is that now there are no more networking issues with the stuff in PJs bedroom.

Cut Abercrombie name from ER, advocates say - CNN.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- A children's advocacy group wants to keep a children's hospital from putting clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch's name on a new emergency room.
art.hospital.ap.jpg

The children's hospital in Columbus, Ohio, is named for Nationwide Insurance Co.

Abercrombie, known for its racy marketing campaigns aimed at teenagers, has pledged $10 million toward the construction of the emergency department at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus.

The Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood on Tuesday urged the hospital to drop any plans to put Abercrombie's name on the project, pointing to research that has shown a link between sexualized images of teens in the media and mental health problems in girls.

The advocacy group made its position public in a letter to the hospital Tuesday that was signed by about 70 pediatricians and academics from around the United States.

"Given this company's appalling history of targeting children with sexualized marketing and clothing, no public health institution should be advertising Abercrombie & Fitch," the letter states.

[From Cut Abercrombie name from ER, advocates say - CNN.com]

Paraphrased: "Please let us keep the $10 million without us giving you any kind of god damn credit. Thanks."

Maybe this is all a communications disconnect, I bet they were confused by the difference between the Hippocratic Oath and Hypocrisy. This is what happens when people freak out over stupid things and don't bother to try to think them through. A smart person would had first tried to find an acceptable donor to match the $10 million, then worry about bitching and whining about Abercrombie & Fitch. This way the hospital only loses a little face, instead of a $10 million donation.

If I was running a competing hospital in the area, I would damn well be on the phone right now calling Abercrombie & Fitch and promising them to STFU if they even send the hospital as little as a quarter of that $10 million promised to Nationwide Children's Hospital. Dumbasses.

Photo Credit: Photo by drewcipher, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

Air Force's stealth fighters making final flights - CNN.com

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) -- The world's first attack aircraft to employ stealth technology is slipping quietly into history.
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Technicians service an F-117 stealth fighter after it arrived at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, on Monday.

The inky black, angular, radar-evading F-117, which spent 27 years in the Air Force arsenal secretly patrolling hostile skies from Serbia to Iraq, will be put in mothballs next month in Nevada.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which manages the F-117 program, will have an informal, private retirement ceremony Tuesday with military leaders, base employees and representatives from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The last F-117s scheduled to fly will leave Holloman on April 21, stop in Palmdale, California, for another retirement ceremony, then arrive on April 22 at their final destination: Tonopah Test Range Airfield in Nevada, where the jet made its first flight in 1981.

[From Air Force's stealth fighters making final flights - CNN.com]

Good night, funny guy. The coolest thing about the F-117 was that it was kept in secret so well that we spent years flying simulator games about the plane, and the shape was completely wrong (plus our games called it the F-119 or F-19).
At least they did not try to cover their asses about this being a money decision, which will let them route even more money to the F-22 and F-35 programs. It's actually amazing that the plane is already 27 years old.