Of course, that sounds like a good plan when your network is at capacity and you are working to upgrade it to handle more as best you can.  Unfortunately for the AT&T users, they’re being duped.  AT&T has continued to rake in the cash the past few years but they’ve spent rather little of it on upgrading their worthless data network.  As a result, coverage, performance and reliability at large is poor.  Terrible in fact, worse than Verizon’s!  Sure AT&T might be faster here and there but that means rather little when here and there aren’t everywhere and meanwhile Verizon users are off doing all that data-y stuff on their phones almost wherever they want.

AT&T’s recent ad fail with Luke Wilson and all the other nonsense to try to poke back at Verizon have shown how far up their rears they’ve had their collective head the past few years.  Verizon’s map ads are perfectly valid, AT&Ts responses are vague and rambly.  ”Hey look, we have coverage for 97% of Americans!” they shout.  Great, pretty sure Verizon can at least match that, but did you know that isn’t what Verizon’s ads were about, AT&T?

Gizmodo put together some handy dandy graphics (see above and below) to illustrate how much of a fustercluck this AT&T situation is, and it’s really rather hilarious.

Chrome looks better and better every day, unfortunately switching over completely is still difficult because I am still tied to Firefox by plugins and other things, like many people I know.

Please… PLEASE fix Firefox before I really do have to go through the trouble of ditching it.  There aren’t many more effective ways to have your fans lose faith in you than this, and the longer it goes on the worse it gets.

Was Vista unreliable for many because their OEM systems came loaded with crappy bloatware, shitty RAM that Vista would stress by actually using all of it all the time or because of something else?  Whatever it was, I never had issues with it and neither did many people I know.  I grew to like it better than XP, OSX and Ubuntu which were the other operating systems I used regularly at the time (and continue to use regularly).  One thing that worked against Vista was the fact that it scaled lousily to lower end hardware and it wasn’t until you reached a certain minimum threshold in hardware capability that Vista truly began to shine.

That being said, Vista was not perfect.  Plenty of its faults are well documented and gone on about in long, drawn out and often hyperbolic discussions around the web.  I’ve been using 7 for a while and although it really isn’t that much different from Vista, it does have some important changes.  One that I like the most is that it does scale better to lower end hardware, my experience with it on a four year old laptop is that it runs at least as well as XP.  This is hardware I’d never use Vista on.  The fact that 7 scales so well to lower end hardware is certainly good because that means I could have every system I own running 7 if I wanted… and I’d be happy about their performance.

MS has already shown it’s being more creative and fun with their advertising for 7 (release party video notwithstanding) and hopefully they can keep on top of that after release because otherwise Apple will no doubt swing in with their obnoxious (rarely relevant or accurate) attack ads.

Events like Black Friday are one thing, at least you could get a really good deal on something, but in situations like this you get the privilege of being the first to own an untested device, you get to pay more for it than someone else in 6 months and you get to look like an ignoramus in the process.

Sure the 3Gs probably finally fixes a number of major issues with the older models but unless Apple has gone through the UI and tweaked the many stupid decisions they’ve made I still won’t get the obsession with the damned thing (and I’m being nice and pretending the lack of a physical keyboard isn’t an issue to me).  If they fixed the UI I’ll find out soon enough from friends, but otherwise it doesn’t concern me enough to look in to it.

Valve claims they listen to their users, and that their feedback matters, such as with the changes to the achievements system they added to Team Fortress 2.  If Valve is listening then they should really consider hearing what their users are saying about L4D2:

That video pretty much sums it up.  L4D has been buggy since release, they’ve fixed some things but it still doesn’t work quite right.  They haven’t added but a small portion of the new content everyone has been told we’d be getting, all they’ve really been doing in the end is what seems to be finishing an unfinished game.

Will I get L4D2?  Possibly but only if Valve wises up and does not charge $50 for it or they have a steep discount for owners of the first L4D game. Otherwise I’ll just wait for it to be for sale on Steam for $20 or something because there’s no reason to pay $50 a year later for the finished product after essentially paying $50 for the privilege of being a beta tester.

The most likely reason behind moves like this is to prevent people from ditching their cable TV service in favor of currently free or cheaper online TV options directly provided legally by a variety of services such as Hulu.  Certainly this isn’t something that is a shocker, as they make a bigger and bigger mess of the cable offerings and more and more of the few channels we watch are actually available online, why bother with cable?  

Unless they start offering much more custom-lineup-friendly channel packages where we can pick the channels we want I don’t see any stop to people abandoning cable for the soft glow of their computer screen (or a computer hooked up to their TV).

That is, of course, unless they can force you back to using their cable by ripping you off with capacity overage charges on your internet service.  They seem to be scheming a four tier system ranging from 5GB for $30 per month to 40GB for $55 per month with a $1 per GB overage charge.  Waitaminute… 5GB?  40GB?  You don’t even have to watch TV or movies streaming over the internet to find that a horrendously limiting amount of data.  A months worth of 128Kbps internet radio running 24/7 would eat up 40GB alone.  Even cutting that back you can see how quickly your gigabytes could start disappearing, as well as your savings.

This is made all the more ridiculous by the fact that the actual amount of data you transfer doesn’t really cost TWC anything, it’s the amount of bandwidth (or the speed with which that data transfers) that really costs money.  If enough people downloaded very large amounts of data the effect would be reduced speeds for people on the service.  This is something Comcast is attempting to keep under control by implementing a much more resonable 250GB/month cap.  I know I won’t hit that, but I’ll probably be over 40GB each and every month.

Instead of focusing on the small percentage that produces an overwhelming amount of the burden on their networks like Comcast has, TWC says that 14% exceed the cap and have had to pay extra in their test runs in Texas.  14% is not an insignificant amount and not all customers in the test area were actually part of this test.  How indicative is this of overall average home usage?  

TWC effectively hopes you will change your internet usage and that they can force you back to using their TV service.  What about people that have their internet and TV plans provided by TWC?  Do they still get the cap even though they aren’t doing the one thing that could possibly explain such a ridiculous policy?

Time will tell, I know I will look for any alternative for broadband if our local TWC implements this system.

The RIAA takes center stage

If you look at the history of the complaints by media and software companies against pirates none of the numbers add up.  Of course they want you to buy their product and I don’t think anyone fails to understand why.  But what have pirates done to the RIAA or to the software or movie industries?  That’s pretty hard to determine but the powers that be seem to have ignored that fact and allowed the RIAA for instance to move against individuals motivated by their shaky and probably heavily fudged data showing how much money they’ve supposedly lost.  They seem to forget the fact that many independent labels have not had these issues and for years they seemed content with suing the bejeesus out of everyone rather than spend time coming up with a way to take advantage of the internet as a content delivery system.

Excuse me while I use the morons at the RIAA to illustrate another point.  Back before the legal sue-fest many people downloaded music as a sort of test drive.  Why buy a whole album without hearing it all the way through when you have the ability to grab a copy online and give it a listen first?  

More importantly, for many people Napster and similar services weren’t about pirating everything for permanent collections, they were about broadening musical horizons.  Radio stations have become so homogenized in many places that there had become fewer and fewer places to experience new music and variety and if that’s the case where does someone find new music that they might legitimately buy?  It’s no secret that many feel most of the big commercialized music is crap, but to experience it they have to look to less conventional sources.  Fortunately internet radio has also moved in to provide listeners with the ability to sample more music that you would simply never hear broadcast over the airwaves.

For many people the RIAA took the content protection issue to its inevitable but least desirable state.  They moved in on the issue quickly and continued to move against consumers and pirates the fastest.  Nobody has been foolish enough to follow in their footsteps, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen in the future.

You’re doing it wrong!

There have been numerous missteps in the content protection business.  For instance there’s Sony’s embarassing waste of $20 million with Suncomm to protect CDs in computers which could be disabled by turning off autoplay (or pressing shift when loading the CD).  EA got bitten a few years ago with sloppy DRM (Securom7)  on their Command & Conquer 3 game which made it “incompatible” with Windows Vista 64.  The game itself wasn’t incompatible, in fact it could run fine if you pirated it.  Oops, your anti-piracy solution actually forces some people to have to pirate it.  DRM updates to optical media have also resulted in older DVD players being unable to play newer discs… oops again.

In many situations that seems to be the trend.  Installing the software or reinstalling the software is such an adventure that downloading a hacked version means you can actually use the software in a stress-free manner.

You don’t have to worry if you need to install it on multiple computers you own, just go ahead and do it!  Software which limits the number of installs/license is an entirely obnoxious concept that forgets that some people may own multiple computers they want to software on.  They could have the software installed on four computers but still only use it on one at a time (after all they’re only one person) and still satisfy that part of the license agreement.

You also don’t have to worry about remembering to deactivate the license before performing a new install of the software on a new computer or on the same computer after upgrades that might require an OS reinstall or after a system failure.  If you insist on being so obnoxious, at least don’t do what Adobe does.  With the CS3 suite Adobe requires deactivation of an install before you can use that license again.  Maddeningly this does not happen automatically when you uninstall it, you have to do it yourself first.  No surprise perhaps since somehow Adobe has crafted the lengthiest install and uninstall processes imagineable with CS3.  I can only imagine CS4 takes 33.3% longer.

Of course you can go beyond that hassle to any number of a variety of scientific or programming packages where you could actually be forced to call the company and wait until you can get someone to verify some information before they can send you a new license file or code.  In the time you’ve waited for someone to pick up you could have found and started if not finished downloading a bootleg copy.

Why punish the innocent?

Why then must the legitimate software buyer be punished?  Why do we, the people who actually have paid for the software, have to put up with intolerable DRM nonsense?  Well, we don’t.  We have the alternative of going online and finding it for free and being labeled a pirate.  

And do you -the providers of DRM’d content- want to know something?  There are times where we don’t buy your product specifically for these reasons.  Sometimes you’ve made it so difficult, so infuriating or even technically impossible to do things the “right” way that we just don’t feel bad about doing it the “wrong” way.   The we I speak of may be anyone, it could be everyone.  

Until you stop punishing us, we will continue to exist, pirating will continue to exist.  As fast as you can come up with a new method to stop pirating someone else will have come up with a way around it.  It is a war which cannot and I think should not be won.  If you can’t make product use as simple and transparent as possible for those that buy your product, then don’t be surprised when people pirate it.

Buy or pirate?

I will say right now that if you find yourself pirating something for these reasons, don’t feel bad, feel empowered.  You’ve been given two alternatives and you’ve chosen the one that not only doesn’t punish you, inconvenience you or  hamper your productivity, it also costs you nothing!

Somehow instead they almost seem to have beaten Apple at their own game.  The laptop is thinner, yet weighs a fair amount more… the build quality does sound promising but only time will tell.  It does manage to squeeze in three times as many USB ports as the MacBook Air but seems to have traded in faster processors to do so.  Another bonus is that it can hold more RAM than the Air, but again something is traded in for that improvement.  In this case it’s your hard earned cash.

With a higher starting price than the Air and a good shot at being worse in most performance categories it’s hard to pinpoint what Dell thought was going to happen with this new model.  If they thought they would win the hearts and minds of the gadget geeks they have likely made some severe miscalculations.  First, inexplicably, many have had their share of the Apple Kool-Aid and somehow think Apple makes devices with magical powers and can do no wrong.  The second issue is they’ve released a laptop that probably underperforms and overcharges during a pretty serious economic downturn.

This may flop, or it may be well regarded but suffer from poorer sales than Dell hopes for.  Regardless of how it does, the best laptop in this category is still the Thinkpad X301 (formerly X300) and nobody has yet to reproduce the special sauce used to mix up that compact yet feature-full package.  The X301 could tolerate lower performance because it boasts many other things that the competition can’t match.

There are enough idiot parents around that perhaps there should be some sort of exam before you’re allowed to procreate. Why does that woman who has no money decide that having octuplets is a good idea? Now she’s just going to be milking the rest of the taxpayers to cover her own stupidity. It’s not good for the kids either, are they really going to get the parenting they need? Bad or inattentive parenting leads to all kinds of problems. Kids who are baby sat by their game consoles or computers or who are allowed to just roam free.

What do they do? Well apparently some wind up shooting up their school so of course the idiots blame the games instead of the stupid parents who did nothing to teach their kids how to be decent humans. Other kids wind up getting themselves killed huffing glue or spray paint or canned air. Well, if you’re dumb enough to do that crap then perhaps being dead is the best overall life decision you can make for the wellbeing of the rest of us. Parents, are you upset? Do your damned job in the first place and this wouldn’t be happening.

So to Staples, Office Max and all the others, stop checking IDs. In fact cut the kid a break, give him 2 canned air bottles. Maybe he’s a good kid and needs it to clean out his computer or something else. No harm in that then, but if they’re going to be trying to get high off it why not just help solve the problem faster and let them kill themselves sooner rather than later?

Many seem to think CFLs are the answer to all our problems but they can be flaky, unreliable, and contain bad juju (mercury) that makes them not as awesome as everyone would like to think.

Technologically speaking other options like LEDs and OLEDs are more promising in the long run, but they just haven’t been there yet for home users to be interested in.  Philip’s new Master LED will soon take over our lives (I’m assuming that’s what the name means) and light our homes using less power and lasting a whole heck of a lot longer than CFLs or incandescent bulbs.  In fact the lifetime is expected to be 45000 for the Master LED vs 10000 for CFLs and 750 for good old old hot wires.