Category Archives: digital pity


digital pity

Oof.

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MSNBC.com: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has chronicled the news of the city since logs slid down its steep streets to the harbor and miners caroused in its bars before heading north to Alaska’s gold fields, will print its final edition Tuesday.

Hearst Corp., which owns the 146-year-old P-I, said Monday that it failed to find a buyer for the newspaper, which it put up for a 60-day sale in January after years of losing money. Now the P-I will shift entirely to the Web.

“Tonight will be the final run, so let’s do it right,” publisher Roger Oglesby told the newsroom.

In a word, be it printed or blt’d: wow.

Hearst’s decision to abandon the print product in favor of an Internet-only version is the first for a large American newspaper

…but it won’t be the last, I’m sure.

digital pity

What’s More Insulting For Valentine’s Day: Chocolate or a Wii Fit?

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This weekend I wandered into Circuit City and said “Whoa, they got the Wii Fit in stock!” For “social games” – i.e. Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Wii Fit – the liquidators are only offering 20% off, but in all honest, that’s far better than nothing and it’s even enough to cover WA extortion sales tax… and it’s not even that I wanted it, otherwise it would be moot because it would have been an insta-purchase.

The problem was that Jolene wanted one. Or at least to try one out and see what it was like… having been to yoga classes before, she was skeptical that a) you need a video game console to learn yoga and b) that the board did anything. Frankly, I’ve agreed with her 100% on this because I’ve yet to see one at the ProClub. And as a gamer, I still see the Wii as a whole as being a) a gimmick and b) a limited console with two titles: Wii Sport and Wii Fit. And I say that as a Wii owner.

The tricky part for me is how do you give someone a Wii Fit for Valentine’s Day without implying anything about her physical appearance.

Yes, I bought it. Yes, there will be a follow up in five days.

Assuming I don’t bollocks the whole thing up, that is…

digital pity

Note To Self: Browsers Still Suck a Decade Later

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Note to self: not matter how big a file is on a remote server – i.e. a 7.37GB .TiVo file that I’m attempting to download over my local network – the following applies:

Browser    Version    Max Download Allowed
Internet Explorer v7 4GB
Firefox v3 6.75GB
Safari v3 6.75GB
Chrome v1 4GB
Opera v9.6 6.75GB

I have no idea how any browser team can find this as an acceptable limitation. FTP can handle a monster download – it’s just streaming bits, be it HTTP or otherwise. Obviously TCP/IP has no limitation – neither should the HTTP protocol since I’m finding different limits with different browsers. IE also get tagged because it inherently limits your downloads to two at a time, unless you tweak the registry…

Dial up software limits living in broadband times? Pft.

digital pity

Angst: Web 1.0 Edition

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“Oh… then clear your cache then delete all of your cookies and it will be fine.” How about ‘no, I don’t think I will’ for a reply?

Not for anything, but the whole purpose of cookies is to store little snippets of information on your local box. Now that the wave of paranoia about cookies and “personal information” has passed – and rightfully so seeing as the – there are all sorts of nice things that web sites do for you, based on the information you’re stored in the cookies. For example, passwords that you might use once a quarter – those are stored for you, as part of the cookie. Often used numbers or forum information also might be pre-populated… this very web site will store your Name, Email addy, and URL, if you ask it to and that’s stored, where? In a cookie.

So why is it that IT departments or CSRs are so avant-garde about asking you to sacrifice all of your stored information just because they can’t figure out why their web site isn’t working? Doesn’t it make more sense to say “Oh, go remove this cookie from your PC” or even “any cookie with HiImUrDomain in it”? Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s pretty freakin’ ballsy to ask someone to wipe out their “note pad of information” just because they don’t know their own site.

1996 called: they want their support steps back.

digital pity

Glutton For Punishment

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Thus begins Round Three of the Apple saga…

I bought a MacBook last night. 2GHz (no underlit keyboard but also less heat than the 2.4GHz), 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 802.11n, etc. My take is that it has a really nice looking screen. Excellent chassis design – first MB/MBP/PowerBook that won’t have bowing problems on the lit or warping problems on the bottom. Keyboard is a little weird for me because the bottom half of the notebook is thicker than what I’m used to. New trackpad rocks: you can turn tapping off but still click because the whole bottom half of the trackpad physically clicks. Makes a cha-chunk sound, but so did the last Dell I used… and now that it’s aware of where the clicking is happening, the lower left and right corners are right-clicks, so my one button complaint is gone.

Why did I buy this one? iPhone development on the road and I’m planning on replacing the Mac mini in the living room since I almost never use it for iTunes playback – the TiVo with Amazon, 360 with Marketplace, and NXE with Netflix have all been the primary means of getting digital video to the TV – iTunes pretty much became a back up.

Already repaving the box tho – typing in the wrong short user name on the first pass caused this exercise…

No matter how good the hardware or the software, User Error can kill anything!

digital pity

Huh…

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c|net: Microsoft looks to ‘Mojave’ to revive Vista’s image […] The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a “new” operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that “Mojave” was actually Windows Vista. […] Veghte is convinced, like others at Microsoft, that despite early technical challenges, Vista’s problems are primarily ones of perception. Much of that perception, Microsoft belatedly acknowledges, stems from Apple’s successful and unchallenged anti-Vista campaign.

Perception has killed more software projects than technology has. At least in my experience, which has covered a number of technologically superior products that got torpedoed by inferior but better marketed examples.

What I do find moderately amusing is when my iPhone prompts me for a password whenever I try to download something from the on-device App Store… very, uh, UAC like no? Just as annoying yet just as security oriented…

Still think perception isn’t everything?

digital pity

RULES!

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Xbox.com: Transferring Content Licenses to a New Console – Got a new Xbox 360® console? Great. But maybe you downloaded games or other content from Xbox LIVE® Marketplace onto an older Xbox 360 console, and now you want all that content on your new system. Well, now there’s a way to do it. With the license transfer tool, you can transfer the licenses of all your previously downloaded content from your old console to the new one.

This freakin’ rules!