Category Archives: Rants

Things that irk me and I feel like I have to share

HP kills TouchPad, looks to exit PC business

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Hp-ceoIt looks like the CEO at HP is smoking the crack and not sharing the recipe with the rest of us.  A month after their TouchPad debuts they kill the product because it’s not selling like they want.  OK, it wasn’t selling well at all from what I read, but come on you launched the thing when Apple was releasing the iPad2, what the hell do you expect!?  You have a new and untested product going up against the most wanted toy on the market.  Let’s not put any thought or … I don’t know, work into making the sales of that product better or maybe realizing that you picked the worst time ever to release it.  Just dump that chump and blow through more cash on something else.

Next they are talking about ditching their PC business, which generates 1/3 or their annual income at HP.  I mean, what crazy idea is that, especially when at the same time you talk about buying a database search software company for $10 billion in cash.  What in the world is CEO Apotheker thinking of??  Just by talking about the stuff after kill the TouchPad HP’s stock dropped 12%!  Can you say OUCH!

Read more here …

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Information Is King

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OK, kiddies, gather round.  Let me pontificate loftily standing upon my bubbly box of soap, in order to loudly proclaim that information is king (or queen if that is your perspective).  Why is information so important?  The reason is simple!  The more information we have (at hand, it doesn’t have to be memorized, it can be in a book or anything readily available), the more we know.  The more we know, the more we can do!  The more we can do, the richer we become.  Not just in dollars and cents but in self-reliance, survival and practical sense.  Take that information that you know, and add it to what your friend knows and now you both know even more.  Take that and share it with what many other people you know and oh my goodness!  We have a revolution on our hands, a real live revelation revolution springing up.  It is natural that folks will still have their areas of expertise, but all of that shared knowledge is only going to help us out.  More people can then do more things, you have more people to help when one thing gets really busy and backlogged, like when everyone has generator problems during an ice storm.  Would you rather have 1 person trying to fix all those 100 or so broken gennies, or 2 or maybe 4 or 5 or even 10.  Do you see where I am going with this?

What I just wrote about above is the sole reason I started this site.  I had lots of information that I wanted to share with folk, anyone who could benefit from it.  I have been working with computers and related “stuff” for over 20 years now, and whether it was trying to pass along some basic info to keep Grandma safe while checking her email, or sharing the intimate technical details of setting up SVM software RAID on Solaris UNIX servers, I felt like I had information that would be worthwhile to others.  So far I’d say it’s been a success, while I don’t share the popularity or traffic that Slashdot gets for example, I get quite a lot of visitors compared to your average website or blog, and I do get some email now and then from people thanking me for the site or telling me that they found help with their problem they were trying to fix, and that makes all of the work and effort that I put into this site worthwhile.

If you have managed to read this far, you are probably now asking yourself what in the world I am going on about.  Well, keeping what I have previously said in mind, I have decided to expand the site a bit.  You see, when I started this site, it was only natural that I focus on IT related topics.  However, I have experience with and work on much more than just IT stuff.  In the past years I have been an electronics technician, why at one point I could repair the copper runs on a circuit board complete with new green (or amber or whatever) over coating so that one could hardly tell it had ever been broken in the first place.  At one point I spent years as a mechanic, working on everything from air and electric tools to outdoor power equipment to diesel trucks and buses and damn near anything in between.  In both of these cases I was lucky enough to work for business owners who were also masters in their field, I mean pure freakin’ geniuses at the technical work that they did.  This allowed me to not only learn a great deal, but also develop some of the habits that I have now that make some people call me a perfectionist.  I just say that if it’s got my name on it, I want to make damn sure I do it right.  I am not saying that I am perfect or anything, I make mistakes just like anyone else, I just try really really hard to avoid them!

I could go on about other stuff I have done, some good learning experiences and some not so much.  The point is that I have decided to start adding more information to this site as I get the oppotunity to do so.  Because after all, information is king (or queen if that is your perspective), and if I can share something that helps someone, who cares if it’s about a computer or about a truck or maybe a CD player or who knows what.  I don’t know everything but I know a little bit about a lot of things, and I love to learn.  Maybe I feel it’s my duty or maybe my mission to give back and share that information.  Worst case is that I waste some time and take up some extra binary real estate on my server and no one notices, or they notice and shake their head and mumble something about that crazy guy and his weird website that sounds like something out of Harry Potter.  On the other hand, what we might call the best case, someone and maybe many someones come along from Google or however they get here and find something useful to them and helpful in solving a problem they were dealing with.

How is that, eh?  How is that for a long winded rant about information! LOL  I hope you enjoy this site and find something useful here, I have put a lot of time, energy and money into it because I believe in sharing information.  If you have something you want to share, to add to the data archive, please by all means let me know about it via the contact page.  I am unable to pay you for any information that you share, but I will make sure that you get full credit for it, in whatever format you like (i.e. your name, pen name, alias, whatever).  That could be a good way for aspiring writers to easily get content published for reference later on when needing to provide examples of your work.

Many thanks to all of my readers and visitors that have stopped by and even taken the time to come back!  (Cue the mysterious pipe organ)  Enjoy!

Good Stuff, What Is It?

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Let me talk to you for a moment about a new box of stuff on the right side of this site.  Yep, just like the title says, it’s Good Stuff!  First though, I want to share some information and history if you don’t already know.  I started this site because I wanted to share information.  I felt like (and still feel like) if we all share the knowledge that we have with one another, our collective knowledge base grows by leaps and bounds.  Seems obvious I know, but some folk I have seen and have even worked with want to horde information as if it were gold.  So, hoping that sharing some of my knowledge and information might help others, I started this site.  If someone is having a problem, and I have already run into the same thing and can post an adequate solution, then they get to solve that problem without re-inventing the wheel (so to speak).

I do this because it’s just something I do, a way that I can try to give back and help others.  I don’t charge people for access to anything, I don’t have banner ads or popups (or unders ;]) or anything like that.  At one point I played with Google Ads, but that was more to learn than really try and make any money.  Which is good because I didn’t make any, a few pennies here and there, but nothing really.  This though, is my point and has a direct impact on the Good Stuff I am getting ready to explain.  That point is that I run this site using my time, paying for the server and bandwidth out of my own pocket, and I like it that way.  I don’t want to be beholden to a vendor.  I do have a donation link, so if a reader wants to show some love they can, but that’s different.  I don’t get any kind of payment, kickbacks, reimbursement, dump truck loads of yen, or anything from companies that sell products, especially the ones I talk about or recommend.

What does this mean?  This means that if I post a review about something, I am not blowing smoke just to say there is a fire.  I am telling you, my reader, my own experience with whatever it might be and what my honest opinion is about it as well.  Mainly I do this when I find something really cool that I think more people need to know about.  Some piece of software that other geeks like me might find useful, or a game or whatever that seems to be well worth the duckets.  I want to share that information with anyone who wants to read about it, that might benefit from it, and I want them to know that the information is coming from an unbiased source.

So, back to the Good Stuff box.  This is where I am putting stuff to showcase things that go above and beyond or are extra good or really special, etc.  Kind of like banner ads except I decide what is put there and no one is paying me to do so.  It’s a showcase of things that I use and that I very highly recommend and therefore proclaim to be “Good Stuff”.  This site had over a million hits last year, and the traffic trend is still rising, so my goal is to share Good Stuff with my readers, and hopefully help encourage those people that care about the customer and care about providing good valuable service to keep up the good work.  If any of you have something you want to recommend, or some information you want to share with the world, hit the contact page and share it with me.  If I end up doing something with your submission, I’ll make sure you get credit for it.  Thanks.

Stop Hijacking My System Tray

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You want to know one of the things that really draws my ire?  I mean really makes me want to uninstall your pathetic excuse for a piece of software, remove any remnants or traces of it having ever been near my machine in the first place, destroy the CD it came on with fire called down from the heavens and send ravenous zombie hordes to your home office?  It’s when some developer douche bag decides that he knows what I want more than I do.

I don’t mind if you ask me, give me a choice, but not every damn program out there needs to put one or more items into my system tray to load there every time the computer starts and slow down my startup time, eating away at memory and CPU power.  Normally this is under the guise of “speeding up the application”.  Well, I say that if you need all of those pre-loaders to make your application function acceptably, maybe you should go back to Fortran 101 and learn to write good code in the first place!

What’s worse, are the damn services that get installed and started that we don’t even know about.  Why does a simple media player need a web server?  Why does my GPS management app want or need to check out my hard drive at night?  Have all developers taken refuge at the throne of Bill Gates and Lenovo or something?

“We have a right to look at the user’s private information because they bought our crap.”  or “We don’t need to worry about writing tight, efficient bug free code, we’ll just tell the customer to by a new computer and get more kick backs from Intel.”

Not to mention the shift away from ownership to leasing.  Now when you “buy” software, you really are only “buying” a license that allows you to use it for a period of time.  Screw that noise, man.  If I am interested in a certain product and see that kind of license, ffft it’s gone and I am looking at something else.

This is just one reason why Open Source software is so damn good and popular.  Microsoft and the other behemoths of the commercial software industry want to come out and tell everyone that free software isn’t really free, it costs you more than the expensive slop that they sell.  The thing is, they don’t get it.  We don’t mean free as in dollars, we mean free as in spirit and ethics.  You get some open source code and you may spend a few bucks to implement it or get some support, or you may not, either way it is completely open.  All of the source code is there so you can make damn sure no one is spying on you or stealing information from you.  You can make a change to the app if you feel like it so that it fits better to your needs, instead of only getting “good enough”.  It’s free like the wind and water cascading down the mountain, and brothers and sisters, that’s a great place to be.

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Beware World of Warcraft Cataclysm Beta Opt In Scam

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In yet another new and trendy spammer and phishing ploy, I have been getting a few copies of a message claiming to be from Blizzard regarding Beta access to the Cataclysm expansion coming out soon.  This one did give me pause at first because I am signed up for the Beta, waiting to see if I get in.  Luckily, I noticed some blatant signs when I inspected the message.  The biggest thing was not only the Cataclysm website they wanted to send you to for account information harvesting being wrong, as in the wrong URL (not even close LOL), but I received several of these and they had different URLs between them.  One other thing was that I received this to several email addresses, none of which were the one actually associated with my WoW account.  Obviously these guys (or gals?) are carpet bombing and hoping they snag a few of the 10 or 12 million or so WoW players.  Just wanted to pass this on, be on the lookout if this fits you in any way!  In the words of Mad Eye Moody “CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!”

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Don’t count on Corel for support

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Thought I would pass this along for anyone wishing to part with some of their hard earned duckets for some software and expected some type of semblance of support from the company that makes it.  I purchased a product for video editing from Corel called Ulead Video Studio (I guess they bought Ulead like they bought Jasc with Paint Shop Pro).  Now, the product is pretty nice when it works, I say when it works because it’s always been fairly buggy but reliable enough that I didn’t complain.  At the very least it always installed fine when I had to rebuild my machine after Windows decided eating itself was a good idea or something of that nature.  That is until today … when the actual install completes, but it will not accept my product key saying that it is incorrect.  At first I thought it was just one of those situations where I have installed it enough times that I have to have a counter reset somewhere before it will activate again or something like that.  I noticed also though, that no patches would install either, saying that it couldn’t find the product installed on my system anywhere.  That was pretty odd I thought, maybe it’s a Windows 7 thing, who knows.  Either way, even though my product is a couple years old, it wasn’t cheap and we aren’t talking in depth support here (at least on the surface), I just need to activate the thing.  So, I go to Corel’s web site and log in, go to the support section, fill out the long ass form with technical details, hardware specs, screen shots, and lots of other stuff.  It was a pretty involved form, but that’s OK, it will help get the problem resolved right?  Wrong.  I couldn’t even submit the form to get an email to the support staff, I was instead immediately presented with a message that any product that is too old, which they define as more than two versions back, cannot be supported.  That’s it, zip, nada, nil, nothing.  I can’t even ask the damn question.  All I want to do is activate my software that I bought and paid for, and instead I get snubbed and told to go away.  I can tell you one thing for sure, aside from the fact that I will figure this out on my own, and that is I won’t be purchasing any more products that have anything to do with Corel again.  They put out new versions at a frenetic pace, and now I know why.  I had wondered in the past why they released new versions of their software with only seemingly minor changes at the rate of one to three per year.  I think I have my answer you could check here.  That being said, beware you don’t get stuck like I did.