Micro$oft has been pushing their pathetic little ‘plays for sure’ campaign (to try and convince people to buy a WMA compatible MP3 player), with little to no success.. turns out… they can’t even convince their own employees to go out and buy WMA compatible devices…. according to Wired, an estimated 80% of Micro$oft’s employees are sporting iPods around the corporate campus…gotta love it when even M$ employees won’t support M$’s stuff
Category Archives: Tech
DSL/Cable Alternative
Looks like everyone who lives in areas that aren’t served (and probably never will be) by DSL and Cable hi-speed providers are going to have a reasonably priced alternative this year. Wildblue is expecting to start nationwide rollout this year. The speeds are lower at the entry level then dsl or cable’s entry level speeds…but, since its targeted at people who can only get dialup.. its still much faster! From what I’ve seen online, it looks like they will end up being a reliable, cost effective hi-speed option to alot of people. If you’re looking for high speed and don’t want to go through your phone company or cable company, head over to their site and sign up to be notified when its available in your area
My kind of sunglasses
These look cool. Of course…there is no information available from either vendor yet as to what kind of cool tricks the sunglasses will do. I’d like to see an integrated headset, with the phones display (caller ID..etc..) appearing on the lens of the glasses.. like a HUD display…
New Host
Yes… again… After spending awhile (read that as since I switched to GoDaddy for hosting). I’ve been unable to get parts of the website (really, just the blogs..since thats all thats really hosted outside of .Mac) working properly.. the typekey logins wouldn’t work for the commenting system, I couldn’t install MT-Blacklist to help prevent comment spam (apparently, this blog hasn’t made it to the bigtimes yet, as I have never suffered from comment spam). I also didn’t like the fact that GoDaddy limited my server access to FTP only (and not even SFTP at that). Pricewise, GoDaddy still offers the best prices for domain registration services, so I’m going to keep renewing my domains through them. But, today, I switched over to Dreamhost for the hosting of theteppers.net. So far, I like their services – I get shell access, easy to configure domain/sub domain information, SQL databases that don’t seem to time out (another problem I had with GoDaddy).
I’ve got 91 days to decide if I like them enough to stay for good (after day 92, I can’t get my money back). Hopefully, this will be the last server hop for the site for awhile.
Comcast DVR: The Review
Friday, Comcast sent a tech out to swap out our HDTV cable box, for the new HDTV/DVR box. Since my big complaint about my TiVo Series 2 is that I can’t record HD in HD, I figured I’d give the Comcast box a try for a month or two, to see how it stacks up against the TiVo.
My first complaint – Comcast had to send a tech out to do the install… I would have preferred to just go into one of the local offices and swap hardware myself..I hate having to let the install techs play around with my stuff. According to the rep I ordered it from, its because the DVRs are so new to the area they are in limited supply. With that out of the way… read on for the actual review…
Vivendi Universal/Knowledge Adventure
Kael’s gotten a little bored with Baby Banger, so last time we went buy our closest Apple Store, we decided to pick him up a new game or two. Now, knowing like I do that the kids edutainment titles are WAAAY out of date (there are kids’ titles out there, still selling, that will run on System 7!) I made sure to check the system requirements very closely. Since I don’t run ANY OS 9 software, I don’t have the classic environment installed on any of our computers. When I purchase/trial/use software at this point, if it doesn’t run natively under OS X, and its a ‘new’ (meaning less then 3 years old) title, I don’t buy it.
We decided on Jumpstart Advanced – Toddlers for him, and the system requirements don’t make any mention of Classic. Here they are as listed on the box:
PowerMac G3 266 Mhz, OS 9.2.1 OS 10.1.5 OS 10.2.3, 64MB of RAM (128MB RAM for 10.1.2 and up), 16x CD-ROM drive, 16 Bit Color
Spammer Lawsuit
Any of the recent lawsuits regarding Spammers have been good lawsuits, in case you missed them, they’ve been filed by states against spammers who violated the incredibly weak “Can-Spam” act.
This lawsuit however, falls under the ‘not good’ category. A notorious spammer has decided that people reporting him as a Spammer is malicious and he has filed suit.
Surprisingly, the courts didn’t throw this out right off the bat as a frivolous lawsuit. Hopefully, once it goes to trial, it will get thrown out. This is a good cause to donate to, so feel free to throw the guy a few bucks via paypal.
Comcast DVR take 2
From looking at the referral logs, I know a lot of people end up here by looking for info on Comcast’s cable box/DVR unit. I’ve requested Comcast get me one, and they’re sending a tech out later this week with it (apparently, it requires top secret, special cable guy training to plug in and turn on their DVR) since they don’t allow people to go into any of their locations and pick one up themselves. After I have a chance to play with it, I’ll post a review, and compare it to my TiVo.
New Year, New Blog
Back on the first of the year, when I renewed our domains, I made the decision to switch to hosting them with Godaddy instead of just having them redirected to my .Mac space. So, I registered for hosting, spent a week trying to get Movable Type to run properly on GoDaddy’s servers (not as easy as it was to get it running locally). Gave up on trying to import all the iBlog stuff (I’m going to be manually re-typing all the old posts). And now, I’ve got the first post on a new Blog, running on New servers… I also set Janice up with her own blog, so make sure you pop over there every once in awhile to see what she has to say. Look for a post a little later detailing how I got MT to run on Godaddy, since from looking around while I was trying to get it running, there are quite a few people who ran into some of the same problems I did.
Microsoft Punished
Since the United States Department of Justice and our Current administration wimped out on punishing Microsoft for being an illegal monopoly (and abusing it)
Its nice to see that at least one Justice system in the world is willing to stand up to Microsoft. You remember waaay back in March when the European Union found Microsoft guilty of abusing its monopoly power to stifle competition right? And unlike the US, they actually delivered a sentence that comes closer to being real punishment! At the time, they were told to open up some of the Windows Server protocols so that other companies software would run on Windows Server, and they were told to release Windows without Windows Media Player installed (do you think they could have been forced to release a version of windows that doesn’t suck instead?)
Microsoft, of course, appealed the decision and hasn’t complied with the sentence yet. Yesterday. a EU court informed Microsoft that they must comply with the decision, even if they are appealing it. So, it looks like some lucky (well…as lucky as you can be if your a windows user) European Windows users will be able to get a slightly less sucky version of windows for Christmas!