DarkStar Spouts Off

Next Time, It's A Mac

Windows Vista downloaded an update and, as has been the norm, the update failed.

Yes, it failed AGAIN.

Next time, I'm buying a Mac or Mac Book or Mac Book Pro. Enough of this garbage.

VISTA Updates

I have yet to have an initial successful Microsoft update of Vista since I got this laptop 1 year ago.

This sucks.

Digital TV Switch

Just wait until people make the switch to receiving digital television over the air and realize during bad weather, they will get the "frame freeze".

I have DirecTv because I refuse to get Comcast and FIOS television isn't available in my area, although FIOS internet is available. From my prior experience, I knew that when the hard rainstorm hits, the DirecTv signal is lost. So, I have a digital television antenna that I use for backup. However, just like satallite, when the weather gets bad, you get the "frame freeze" with the digital signal. Yesterday during a bad rainstorm, the signal that stayed around was the analog signal.

Just wait until more people realize what happens with digital signals and the only backup is to get cable.

LG LCD Television Conclusion

In March, I wrote a post saying don't buy an LG LCD television, and I still state the same thing.

Here is a more detailed listing of what happened.

In January I brought the LG LCD television from Circuit City. I registered the television for the warranty, even though I thought that was a waste of time. After all, LG is a "big brand name" and I "knew there would be no problems" with the television.

In February, the television video went black but the audio was still around. We called LG for support and they determined they had to send someone out to look at the television.

A company that handles LG warranty work came out. The serviceman looked at it, called into LG and ordered a video board.

He came out again, installed the video board but LG sent the wrong board.

He came out again, 2 weeks later, installed the video board but it didn't work. He said he was ordering the main controller board.

He came out again and put in the board but that didn't work either.

We called to complain and they said they were going to send someone out again. At this point, that wasn't good enough and we told them so. We wanted our money back. They said that wasn't possible. The warranty states they will replace the television with a refurbished model but they still needed paperwork from the company that did the servicing.

When they called to say they had the paperwork, I answered and said it was now June, and we still do not have a working television. In that time, I told them, that we got a house ready for sale, brought a "new to us" house, sold the other, and refurbished the "new to us house." This started in February and it's now June. A refurbished television was not good enough. I was told that if, AFTER REVIEW(!), we had good grounds, we would get a new television instead of a refurbished model.

Below is what I remember saying:

"I don't want a new LG television, because quite frankly, your televisions stink. When a new model stops working after 1 month, you have quality control issues. Not only that, but I went online and saw your knowledge base which has this issue as the number one issue on the knowledge base under this problem. Next, I went to technical forums and I found out I'm not the only one with this same problem. OBVIOUSLY, your company manufactured a poor product.

"Here's the situation. Maryland has a lemon law that covers cars and products above a certain price. I believe the television is covered under the lemon law that states I have to give you 3 tries to fix the problem before I can request my money back. Your warranty person has been out 4 times, with 3 service fixes that failed.

"If I don't get my money back, I'm going to send a letter, with screen shots of the LG knowledge base and URL and screen shots of the technical forums that show LG has a problem with the televisions, to the Consumer Protection Division of the States Attorney's Office of Maryland. I'm also going to give the gory details of the failed services.

"I happen to be a little tech savvy. I have a blog account that has one more blog that I can create. I will create a blog that gives the details of the LG television, open it up to comments, hunt around for other LG complaints and post it there. The blog will be indexed by Google.

"I also happen to have Pre-Paid Legal, and if necessary I will contact them to see if it can go to another level, including the option of class action lawsuit."

The outcome is, we ship the television back to them, at their expense, and I get the money back, with the taxes paid.

Don't buy an LG television!

If It Costs $5 to Make But Only Sells for $1, Why Make?

My question for the day is, if it takes $5.00 to make a gadget that, last month, was selling for $6.00, but this month is selling for $1.00 because of market forces, would YOU continue to make the gadget? I wouldn't. The same goes for oil exploration:

The number of oil and gas rigs deployed to tap new energy supplies across the country has plunged to less than 1,200 from 2,400 last summer, and energy executives say the drop is accelerating further.

Lower prices are bringing to an end an ambitious effort to squeeze more oil from aging fields and to tap new sources of natural gas. For the last four years, companies here drilled below airports, golf courses, churches and playgrounds in a frantic search for energy. They scoured the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the Gulf of Mexico and Appalachia.

But the economic downturn has cut into demand. Global oil prices and American natural gas prices have plummeted two-thirds since last summer. Not even an unseasonably cold winter drove down unusually high inventories of natural gas.

The drop has been good news for American consumers, with gasoline now selling for $1.92 a gallon, on average, down from a high of $4.11 in July. But the result for companies is that it is becoming unprofitable to drill.

The reversal of fortune could have important implications for the future health of the nation’s energy companies, for consumer wallets and for national aspirations to rely less on foreign energy sources.

The drilling cutback has been particularly stark for natural gas. Gas exploration had soared in recent years after technology advances enabled the exploitation of gas trapped in huge shale beds found around Fort Worth, western Pennsylvania, upstate New York and elsewhere.

But that boom has created such abundant supplies that companies are not only drilling less but also deciding not to pump from wells already drilled.

That's why this isn't surprising to me. And if they kept exploring and drilling, costs would go down making it far more less profitable.

Don't Buy An LG LCD Television

I brought a 32", LG LCD television from Circuit City.

After 1 1/2 months, I have good sound but no picture. This is a common problem from what I am reading.

It's number one in their television knowledge base FAQ.

Windows Vista Woes

Complained to M$.
They sent a robo email letter stating how to fix the problem I had.
Did and and it was fixed.
Now it downloaded the latest updates, but they won't install. I'm stuck in perpetual "Preparing to install..." hell.

May Gate$ home reboot every 15 minutes.

I'm Down With Black

OK, I will support Black businesses or Black efforts when they provide good service and seem sensible. I'm sorry to say that I don't think Black Bird (powered by Mozilla) meets the last criteria.

Blackbird was developed on the simple proposition that we, as the African American community, can make the Internet experience better for ourselves and, in doing so, make it better for everyone. Primarily we believe that the Blackbird application can make it easier to find African American related content on the Internet and to interact with other members of the African American community online by sharing stories, news, comments and videos via Blackbird.

Why not create a plug-in with a skin and let people know what it is, instead of creating a plug-in with a skin and then re-brand as a new browser?

Government Accountability

Someone is saying the government has to be held accountable.

That same person used a free commercial email service for government business and included their spouse in the cc-list to say the email is personal and, therefore, not releasable to requests about government business. This information was known BEFORE the person's email account was "hacked" and email posted on a website.

People are rightly upset about the hacking, but the same people are not saying diddly squat about circumventing government accountability which is this person's mantra in speeches.

My Desktop & Windows SP3

[ UPDATE ] I found a fix! I've also noticed Google hits on this post so I'm making it a feature article for a few days

Windows XP, SP3 update got downloaded.
I clicked install.
I friggin' music file, Beethoven.wma couldn't be copied over.
The entire install failed because of it.

A. Friggin. MUSIC. FILE!!!!!!!!!

Desktop is now hosed.

[ UPDATE ] 9/5/2008

In this case, the beethoven.wma file resides in the "\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Shared Music" folder. However, the "All Uses" directory had NO permissions set. To fix it, right click on "All Users" and click the "Security" option.

Click the "Security" Tab.

(When I did this, the list under the "Group or user names" was empty.)

Click "Add..."

Click "Advanced..."

Click "Find Now"

In the list at the bottom, do a multiple selection click (control click) to select:

• Administrator
• Administrators
• "Your user name"

Click ok all of the way out and try again.

Lawd, I'm Already Drinking The Kool-Aide

I'm already drinking the Google Kool-Aide, I don't think I'll take another swig of this one:

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

I think I'll pass.

The Start Of The ISDN Model

This is the start of the ISDN pricing model for residential users of broadband. If you aren't familiar with the model, it is simple. You pay for the amount of data transferred. When you exceed a limit, you are charged more and it is at a higher rate than the average rate if you stay below the limit. (Did that come out right? I'm tired. I've worked A. LOT. OF. HOURS. and I'm exhausted! Mrs. D.S. is going to be happy with the check though).

Comcast Corp., the nation's second-largest Internet service provider, Thursday said it would set an official limit on the amount of data subscribers can download and upload each month.

On Oct. 1, the cable company will update its user agreement to say that users will be allowed 250 gigabytes of traffic per month, the company announced on its Web site.

Comcast has already reserved the right to cut off subscribers who use too much bandwidth each month, without specifying exactly what constitutes excessive use.

"We've listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive," the company said in a statement on its Web site.

Sure, just leave "excessive" hanging out there at some arbitrary figure, and then when people, rightly, ask what that limit is, you say you have gotten so many requests to define it, so you define it and say the customers requested it! This is why I am looking at homes in areas which have FIOS. COMCAST is a blood sucking leech and I really don't want to give them my business EVER again.

YouTube exists because of the lack of download and upload caps on residential bandwidth. People pay more for the speed of uploads and downloads, not on the amount of data transferred. If the ISDN model was put into play when residential broadband first came out, YouTube may not exist. How many jobs were directly and indirectly created because of YouTube, including jobs at COMCAST?

Is The U.S. Ready?

Is the U.S. ready to fight a cyber-war with Russia considering what the Russian Mafia has done to Best Western?

The Best Western Hotel Group had more than bathroom towels ripped off over the past year. According to reports over 8 million guest records were nabbed by hackers and, according to authorities, many of the hotel patrons personal information, including home addresses, phone numbers, place of employment and credit card details, are now for sale by the Russian Mafia.

I'm just askin'...

Dead 3 Year Old Laptop

The Toshiba laptop I've had for THREE years died. Folks, that's THREE FRIGGIN' YEARS!

Somewhere I read where the new laptops for Toshiba are a good choice. No. I'll NEVER by a Toshiba computer again.

Dell? With there poor customer service and suspect quality, even if PC Magazine has one rated highly, I don't think I can go in that direction.

HP? Sony? Something else?

I do development on my laptop. Anyone have any suggestions?

Kinda Tech Stuff

Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use

NEW YORK (AP) -- You're used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?

Time Warner Cable Inc. customers -- and, later, others -- may have to, if the company's test of metered Internet access is successful.

Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.

Matt Drudge

Now, as Obama and Sen. John McCain look toward the fall, Drudge has emerged unexpectedly as more of a threat to the Republican than to the Democrat. This, combined with the rise of left-leaning sites such as TalkingPointsMemo.com and HuffingtonPost.com — both of which have proved effective in promoting and amplifying a Democratic message — reflects a major shift from the last two presidential elections, a matter of open alarm to Republican strategists and surprised satisfaction to Democrats.

“The MSM is already sending love letters to Obama,” said a GOP operative who worked for the Bush-Cheney reelection. “That’s something that has traditionally been countered on the Republican side with talk radio, blogs to a lesser degree but especially Drudge. If those tools are not part of the Republican vehicle for message delivery, that’s crippling.”

The Drudge Report is no ordinary compendium of news stories. It is a heavily trafficked gateway to all corners of the Internet, a portal composed of links largely to breaking news from traditional media like The New York Times (as well as newer entrants like Politico). Most of the content is without any obvious ideological attachment. But operatives of both parties have long believed that his choice of links — along with occasional posts of Drudge's own reporting — have reflected a rightward tilt, and they assumed a preference for Republican candidates.

Windoze 7

In an effort to avoid a repeat of the compatibility problems that plagued the launch of its Windows Vista operating system last year, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has ordered computer and other hardware makers to begin testing their devices on the forthcoming Windows 7 OS as soon as the first beta version becomes available.

Hardware makers that don't comply with the edict won't qualify for Microsoft's Windows Logo certified compatibility program for Windows 7 or Windows Vista. "Beginning with the first beta of Windows 7 all Windows Vista submissions must include a complete CPK with tests logs from Windows 7," Microsoft said in a 61-page bulletin to its hardware partners last week.

H1-B Visa

The Bush administration's recent decision

The opponents argue that the administration exceeded its legal authority by stretching the rules for foreign students by extending the length of the visas from one year to 29 months.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., by the Immigration Reform Law Institute and joined by The Programmers Guild and other groups, charges that the administration's decision in April to extend the work period for students under the Optional Practical Training provision is little more than an effort to get around the H-1B cap limit.

GMail And FireFox

From some visual changes I see, I gather Google updated GMail. Unfortunately, GMail on FireFox on an XP platform, seems to mean FireFox takes 98% of the CPU.

Toys: Home NAS and GigE

Right now I have slightly "advanced" home wireless setup. The Verizon FiOS connection comes into a wireless router, which has an Ethernet connection to another another wireless router that is now just a wireless switch. I have an Ethernet connection from the wireless switch to my development machine and a Linux server that I use for Unix-like development and as the home file server/backup.

Why do I have 2 wireless routers? Well, the FiOS wireless router provides crappy wireless connectivity. My wife's machine always gets a poor connection to the FiOS router, so I set up the previous wireless router as a wireless switch, and all is well.

I want to get network area storage (NAS) to replace the Linux machine for file server/backup functionality, so I can reclaim disk space and upgrade Linux to what I need. Plus I'm fearing the pending death of the drives.

I'm looking at home NAS solutions. My requirements are that they are Window$ compatible, of course, but also Linux compatible. The products have GigE connections, so of course that means that I "have" to upgrade the network behind the FiOS router to GigE, right? Right? RIGHT? ;-) With this setup I can attach a printer to the NAS and have a network printer for the house. Believe it or not, this would get some use.

Maybe that's what the congressional bribe will be used for. ;-)

The HD DVD War Is Over. WalMart Declares The Winner

The HD format war is over.

Everyone can go out and buy the Blu Ray DVD player of their choice or the game console that supports Blu Ray. We have a winner in the format war, and the knock out hay maker came from WalMart:

February 16, 2008
Taps for HD DVD as Wal-Mart Backs Blu-ray
By MATT RICHTEL and ERIC A. TAUB

SAN FRANCISCO — HD DVD, the beloved format of Toshiba and three Hollywood studios, died Friday after a brief illness. The cause of death was determined to be the decision by Wal-Mart to stock only
high-definition DVDs and players using the Blu-ray format.

There are no funeral plans, but retailers and industry analysts are already writing the obituary for HD DVD.

The announcement by Wal-Mart Stores, the nation's largest retailer of DVDs, that it would stop selling the discs and machines in June when supplies are depleted comes after decisions this week by Best Buy, the largest electronics retailer, to promote Blu-ray as its preferred format and Netflix, the DVD-rental service, to stock only Blu-ray movies, phasing out HD DVD by the end of this year.

Keep it moving folks. No more here to see. It's just another dead technology littering the highway. Move on. No more rubber necking....

Tech Buy Outs

Sun Microsystems is buying MySQL -- I have no idea what this means for MySQL. I use MySQL for learning technologies that require a database, for prototyping purposes, and for development purposes before putting software on the "real machines" and using Oracle. At home, I downloaded the Linux and Windows versions and installed them to do what I need to do. What this means for MySQL is unknown. What this means for Sun, I assume, is more money from the service side of MySQL.

Oracle is buying BEA Systems -- Oracle had its own application server for awhile and that didn't work out so they brought a company which gave them a better application server, Orion. Now they are buying BEA Systems and they get a better application server, business process management software that uses the application server, web services software, web portal software, a good Java Virtual Machine, and other software. I think BEA got the best of the deal because their software is too damned expensive and is battling open source software that is of decent enough quality for production use. Having dealt with BEA sales representatives and having used BEA software, I hope the quality of some of it improves and the cost goes down, but I doubt it. Just say NO to BEA portal software!

Here is a link to a company pronouncing the death of J2EE software. Gigaspaces is actually on the list of software that I feel the need to evaluate.

Paying By The Byte

For 4 summers, I worked for AT&T before the break up. The first summer I was a clerk in a telephone office that serviced a government agency. One day the manager came in and said the telephone world was going to change. AT&T was pushing for a break up of itself to allow it to get into the long distance game. In short, AT&T got what they thought they wanted.

When I first got an Internet connection, I had dial-up. I got a second line so I wouldn't miss calls while I was on-line. Then, Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), wanted to charge me a business rate for the second line because I told them the line was for the Internet. The person I argued with told me they really want the ability to charge by the minute because the telephone network was designed to handle calls that lasted, on average, for about 10 minutes.

Later, before cable Internet was available, I looked into getting an ISDN line. I decided not to do it because they charged by the amount of data transferred and, at the time, my consulting business was new I and wasn't sure if I could recoup the cost. But I remembered the discussion with the telephone person saying they wanted to charge Internet use by the minute.

Now, comes this and I think it is inevitable. Home users being charged by the amount of data transferred is going to happen:

Time Warner Cable Will Do Trial on Setting High-Speed Internet Charges
Based on Usage

NEW YORK (AP) -- Time Warner Cable will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data they download, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

The company, the second-largest cable provider in the United States, will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.

Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.

Here it comes but the cable company is going to be the first to really try it. When it sticks, watch Internet innovation come to a crawl.

This Can't Be Accurate Reporting: RIAA

The Washington Post published this:

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

RIAA's hard-line position seems clear. Its Web site says: "If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings, you're stealing. You're breaking the law and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages."

Not placing the files ripped from the CD into a shared folder for "all" to get access to, but just COPYING?!?!?!?! That can't be right.

RIAA Says You Can't Rip CDs! NOT!

I got this bit of information off of Slash Dot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In an Arizona case against a defendant who has no legal representation, Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA is now arguing — contrary to its lawyers' statements to the United States Supreme Court in 2005 MGM v. Grokster — that the defendant's ripping of personal MP3 copies onto his computer is a copyright infringement. At page 15 of its brief (PDF) it states the following: 'It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies... Virtually all of the sound recordings... are in the ".mp3" format for his and his wife's use... Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies...'"

[ UPDATED ] Please note that the MP3's were placed on the SHARED drive which makes them available to anyone if file sharing is not turned off. In other words, RIAA is doing the same thing RIAA has been doing. It's going after someone who they believe are sharing files. They are NOT saying that ripping a file to MP3 format is illegal. If the files had been ripped to a non-sharable drive, here would have been no issue.

Spring Framework

I've read about the Spring Framework, so conceptually, I understand what it is about. However, as a result of interviewing people for positions, I decided to learn enough of it to ask strong technical questions about it. In learning it, I am realizing exactly what the positive hype about it is, and not just as another web tier framework.

There are some good things behind the hype. In fact, something I helped develop seems like a perfect fit for the Spring Framework. In fact, I'm making a reference application to demonstrate how the existing application may be slowly retrofitted with Spring.

iPhone Cry Babies

When I buy a computer, no matter how much I load it up or get "the most powerful" system components out there, I KNOW that in a few weeks or months time, the price of the system will fall and there will be a more powerful system out there for the same price that I paid for my system. This is just a fact of electronics gear. It happened with my plasma television. It was a better model and I paid around $3200 for it. Today, the replacement model for what I have costs around $2000. That's just the way it is.

So while I can understand people who brought iPhones in the last week being a little mad, those who rushed to get it the first day would be out of luck if it were up to me.

I have to give Steve Jobs some respect for offering $100 credit to those folks, but then again, it's not a REFUND it is a CREDIT.

C/C++ and JavaScript

Back when I was regularly programing in C and/or C++, I regularly had to use #define and #ifdef statements to account for differences in operating systems the code may execute. A simple example is:

#ifdef _SYS5
printf("%s\n", "This is a Unix System 5 system");
#end
#ifdef _DGIX
printf("%s\n", "This is a Digital Unix system");
#endif
#ifdef _SUNOS
printf("%s\n", "This is a SunOS system"); 
#endif

What the above means is when the code is compiled, only the code relevant to the system type is included. Above, if the code was running on a Unix System 5 system,

"This is a Unix System 5 system"

would be printed. If it was a Digital Unix system,

"This is a Digital Unix system"

would be printed. If it was a SunOS system,

"This is a SunOS system"

would be printed. It was hard, to me, to read code that had a lot of #ifdef's in the code, so what I started to do was write one file for each system. If the code was portable across all systems, there would only be one file. If there was code that had to have different code, I would create files for each system. I used a naming convention such as, "calculate_sys5.c" for System 5 code, "calculate_dgix.c" for Digital Unix code, etc. Essentially I would #ifdef the entire file. I also had a "default" file that would be compiled if none of the systems matched. I always purposefully generated runtime errors in that code so I would know I messed up with the #ifdef. People hated it but it made it easier on me.

So what does that have to do with JavaScript? Well, with the number of browsers out there, when you create JavaScript methods, many times you have to determine what browser and what version of the browser the code is running in before you can make certain calls, especially when you have to get to the DOM. Frankly, just like the #ifdef took some fun out of programming, so does worrying about browser versions and operating systems in JavaScript. Only with JavaScript, I think it is much more aggravating. So, unless I have to, I leave the client side alone.