Atari 7800 (Step 2 in my trip down retro-gaming lane)
So I finally ordered the parts to make my 7800 work again. I have to admit that I just ordered an adapter and used an old RCA cable instead of trying to dig up, or build a manual RF switch although the schematics are freely available. I will say that the site www.atariage.com was very helpful in my endeavors. Wikipedia also had some very interesting articles about the 7800 highlighting topics that I never knew. One was that independent developers have released games as late as 2009 for the system. The other was that the system, while trying to compete with the NES, saw the age of Nintendo's exclusive contracts, and rushed games to market to try and compete. Although the 7800 could address a little more than 4 Megabits of memory, while Atari made the system no game over 144 Kbits was ever released. It got me back on my soap box about how we move through hardware too quickly for stupid reasons, and how we move to new pieces of hardware well before tapping the real potential of the old hardware. This makes sense for some companies economically, but is still lame in the long run. It creates tons of waste, and for what, to chew through some more garbage code with slightly faster hardware(rant, rant, rant). Anyway, I've realized that most of the Atari games I have actually are 2600 games, and the only true 7800 game I have is Pole Position II. I played through many old games in their lame 2 player head to head modes and remembered how much could be done with very little memory for about 45 minutes, and then fired up my PS3 to play Lego Batman. Still when I look at Atari I can only wonder what might have been if they had made better decisions as a company, and if Nintendo didn't come up with the lame concept of exclusive releases. Anyway, long live my 7800.
DRM is like a vampire: It’s hard to kill and it sucks.
Dear Home Entertainment Industry,
Any company that tells you their DRM will keep pirates from copying your material is either stupid, or lying to you because they think you are stupid. Buying or developing new DRM and copy protection stuff all the time is probably costing you a lot of money. This drives the price up for consumers, widening the gap between expensive legitimate media and cheap pirated media even further. Worse, it creates compatibility problems meaning they can't even view your content after they buy it!
Your mistakes are making pirating media even more attractive, completely defeating the purpose of the copy protection. You may dismiss that comic as silly, but remember: The guy that drew it has a degree in physics, and was a contractor for NASA at the Langley Research Center. He seems like a pretty smart guy, and it would probably be a good idea to listen to him. He drew a comic about music DRM being dead, but you skipped the funeral, and are now trying to pull off a Weekend at Bernie's. His comic gets millions of visitors, and his simple art has made him enough money to make the comic his day job. Clearly, he understands a good bit about marketing, and quite a bit about technology. Google seems to think he's a pretty important guy. It's looking more and more like he has the right idea.
Lets get down to the core of the issue: You don't want people to steal your hard work, or the hard work of the artists you work with. The fact is, you can't keep pirates from pirating your material unless you stop making material. If you cut the crap and just sell the media unprotected at lower cost, most of the people who buy pirated copies will just buy your material instead. They'll love it, use it, and maybe share it with other people who will then buy even more of your stuff! Media pirates win over DRM every time. They can defeat your expensive copy protection on one device, rip the media to an unprotected format, make a gazillion copies, and then sell them for a far lower price than you can manage. The cost of your DRM may be more than their costs from start to finish. They will continue to win as long as you keep spending money on your crappy technical bandages. Instead, think like a pirate. Emulate them. Hell, use them as a distribution platform! Research how to easily distribute your content to more people for less cost, and then do it. Media piracy will all but dry up because nobody will need to pirate anything, and you will make even more money!
It's amazing to me that this DRM stuff is still around. For me, believing DRM will prevent piracy is a bit like believing the world is flat. We've seen that it's not true. We've circumnavigated the global market, and we've seen the flaws in this concept. Media pirates still pirate the media, and consumers are finding it more and more difficult just to PLAY the legitimate media. Yes, I know I could just buy a receiver that decodes HDMI's audio stream before passing it to the TV, or buy an HDCP stripper, but I shouldn't be FORCED to spend more money just so it's slightly harder to copy your products. I don't need to copy your stuff, and if I did, you couldn't stop me anyhow. Devices with HDCP compatibility and other DRM products must cost more to make, and this cost is passed on to the consumer. These devices don't mean I get any better audio or video quality, they just mean I have to deal with more headache and confusion. I've finally got my HDCP compliant setup working, so I can ignore your DRM crap, just like the pirates do. I'm getting really close to where I'd rather do without your products than buy them from you.
Do us all a favor and get rid of all this DRM crap so we can all get back to watching movies, listening to music, reading e-books, and playing video games.
Sincerely,
Mark Smith
P.S: Below is just one of many reasons why I hate DRM.
I own a PS3, an XBox 360, a Nintendo Wii, and have a Comcast HD DVR, and I wanted all of them to show up on my nice big Samsung 50" Plasma TV. I had a receiver with two HDMI inputs and a half-dozen Component inputs, along with two Toslink optical ins and one Coaxial digital audio in, plus a half dozen stereo audio (Red and White RCA) inputs. Initially, I wanted all of the inputs to go to my receiver, and then have one HDMI cable going to my TV, just to carry the video. I then realized my receiver was only and HDMI pass-through, which meant that the audio signal was not decoded from HDMI by the receiver, and required Toslink Optical or Digital Coax input to get sound to the speakers. This was especially true of surround sound. Bummer.
I hatched a new plan. The TV had a Toslink optical output on the back. Whatever source was selected on the TV would dump it's audio to this output. Since all the devices had combination audio/video cables, I could just connect all my devices to the TV and then connect the Toslink from the output of the TV to the input receiver, and thus do all switching between game consoles and DVR with the TV remote. This would also mean I would only need my three existing HDMI cables, my one Wii Component cable, and one Toslink cable to connect all my systems to the TV. Six devices, five cables! Perfect!
I set all this up, plugged in all the cables, fired up the receiver, and started up an HD movie channel. I noticed that my Receiver was only showing two speakers active, indicating standard stereo. I thought I had perhaps picked a channel without surround sound, so I tried switching to my PS3, making sure that the audio out was set to 5.1 surround. I still only got stereo. I tried connecting the optical cable directly to my PS3 instead of through the TV. BAM! 5.1 channel surround. Back to the TV. Two speakers. I was getting fairly confused at this point. Surely the TV wouldn't degrade the output to the optical out, right? There's no way they would actually try to make it HARDER to hook up a home theater system to a TV, right? RIGHT?
WRONG. Enter HDCP, or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. The devil-child of the otherwise friendly Intel Corporation, HDCP is designed to prevent the copying of digital content (video and audio) over a variety of digital signal ports (source: Wikipedia). Since a digital copy would theoretically be a perfect copy of the original material, it was deemed necessary to prevent Joe/Jane Consumer from simply copying this media and throwing it on the internet. In order to view most HD material at full quality, you need HDCP enabled devices. You need an HDCP compliant player, an HDCP compliant TV, and if you want to decode HDMI signals, HDCP compliant audio equipment. From the minimal research I did, it seems that the device has to disable outputs that would allow you to thwart the copy protection in order to be HDCP compliant. This means that when HDMI is the input source on my TV, it is required to downgrade it to regular stereo audio out on the Toslink optical port. The practical upshot of this? I can't use the Toslink optical output port on my TV to send surround sound audio back to my receiver if the original source comes from HDCP protected HDMI. What?! Lame.
So what could I do instead? My Video game consoles support surround sound. My DVR/Cable TV box support surround sound. They all seem to have Toslink out, and in the case of the cable box, Digital Coax out. Below is the monstrosity that I came up with. It works, but not nearly as nicely as the original idea.
First off, notice that I need five cables just to go to the receiver! I needed five cables total in my original plan! Also note that the Wii now plays through the TV Speakers, rather than the sound system. This is because the Wii has a combined Component/Stereo Audio cable. In order to get the sound from the TV back to the receiver, I would need to run another stereo audio (red and white RCA ended) cable from my TV to my receiver. This setup requires three extra cables, and a far more convoluted setup. If I want to play Wii or XBox 360, I change the input on my TV. If I want to play PS3 or watch TV, I have to switch the input on my receiver, and if I was playing Wii or XBox 360 before, I have to change the input on my TV too. Since the HDMI on the Receiver is pass-through, I have to mute the TV speakers for the PS3 and the DVR, but I have to turn them back up to play Wii. SUPER LAME!
All this is worth it to the media companies though. It prevents people from pirating their content after all! How does this prevent pirates from copying the material? Well, frankly, it doesn't.There are devices that are sold to circumvent HDCP since some older hardware didn't have it. I'm sure those consumers were THRILLED about having to buy extra hardware that added no value to their viewing experience. Even better, HDCP may have been cryptographically broken since 2001, before it was even in commercial products! This didn't stop it from being required by the EU to get their official "HD Ready" label. The media pirates are ginning out "Protected" material at full tilt, and probably have been since HDCP first went commercial. Some HDCP compliant devices even have a point where the unencrypted digital stream is available, like in this article at Hackaday.com. Basically, HDCP is worthless when it comes to stopping high-volume pirates.
What are the side effects? HDCP makes setting up home theater systems even harder than before. Even if you get the cables connected "Correctly" (i.e., the setup would work if HDCP didn't exist), software and hardware restrictions may prevent your setup from working as expected (like it did in my case). Worse still, sometimes even with all your 100% HDCP compliant devices correctly connected to one another, you still have problems! Because HDCP is complex, it has some issues. Some devices handshake incorrectly, resulting in the blinking screen issue. There is no excuse for this. HDCP is a lame duck, and should be a dead duck.
What Is The iSight Good For? Frustrating Trips Down Messaging and Webcam Lane
Ok so before I get going here I have not updated to 10.6 yet, after all of the problems I experienced with critical applications after the 10.4 to 10.5 switch (not on my own machine but on others, I had enough sense to make a separate partition to test 10.5 with first. Many of the Apple users demand an upgrade to the newest OS no matter what it will do to their stuff btw, the logic on that eludes me.) I decided to wait a bit. Sure 10.6 is actually a reasonable price for once, but that's probably because it's just what 10.5 should have been in the first place if Crapple didn't panic and release 10.5 before it was really ready because of Vista, or whatever. Anyway, OSX used to be alot more into proudly claiming their open source roots than they are now. One of the things that many webcam manufacturers have gotten behind is the UVC standard for cams which Apple claims to support which they do but only sort of. This allows the most systems to support the most cameras. Let me stop and say congrats to Logitech for supporting this as much as possible. The manufacturers have provided a simple standard that allows their USB webcams to work on almost all machines. It works on my Ubuntu machine, it works on my Windows machine, and it works, oh wait it doesn't work on my Apple even though Apple supposedly supports the UVC standard. That's why there is no driver for it. It is just supposed to work, but oh yeah it doesn't, but I have an iSight built in so it won't be an issue right? Well now we get into the frustrating part and provide some more technical specifics. My family wants to communicate with me via webcam. Since most of them just surf the web I am not going to recommend a Crapple to most of them unless they just love Crapple, have used it before, are just dangerous around a computer, etc. because it is just too expensive for what they want to do. Sure Apple's do some things better than other computers but most users don't need to do those things and that is another post in itself. Anyway, I tested my Quickcam Communicate MP in Ubuntu with Pidgin, no dice, with Kopete, worked fine with MSN protocol. Of course I tried many protocols including Yahoo, MSN, AIM, and Jabber. I did not try Google talk. I guess I should but since I'm paying for an iSight just to have open source save my ass in the end I got kind of annoyed. This is pretty typical though. Sure if I was an incompetent CIO I would have just spent 60 grand on some system to manage all of this, then demand that everyone else use that, or some shit but I'm smart enough not to do things like that. The problem was simple. This is an area where the companies are battling it out over protocols, and ultimately control of what we will use with the systems we own. Anyway, I downloaded MSN Messenger for OSX since iChat doesn't support this as one of its built in protocols, guess what, MSN on Mac doesn't support the built in iSight camera and since the Communicate MP doesn't work I tried an old Firewire camera I had. MSN Messenger basically said sorry, but we expect to have full camera support in our next version. Ok on to Windows, no problems here after I installed the Quickcam drivers, but I still couldn't really communicate using a cam with the Crapple. Skype seems to work with everything, but it really doesn't provide optimal performance. The point I'm getting to here is that there are some 3rd party companies that release broader webcam support for the Apple, perhaps 10.6 has better UVC support, etc. but the real problem was iChat, the built in iSight, and companies deciding what they will try to make you use. What the hell is the built-in iSight good for other than communicating with other Apple users that have built-in iSights and iChat (the old firewire iSights are pretty awesome btw, but that's not what I'm taking about here). Then it dawned on me. That's all that it is for. From Apple's point of view why is anyone trying to use anything other than iChat anyway? Microsoft wonders why they try to use anything but Windows (pick a version) messenger, but at least MS has taken steps to provide a Messenger for Mac with better camera support, sure it isn't out yet because this wasn't a foreseeable problem j/k but at least they're starting to wake up. Lower end UVC cameras are not supported well at least up through 10.5 on the Apple because they don't seem to be too worried about them, and then not in many applications and now we can start to pass the blame around to the companies that provide messengers with fewer features on one OS than another. The list of supported cameras that work on the Apple are usually very expensive when compared to the Communicate MP and similar models. The point I'm getting to here is if we're going to include the iSight as such a proprietary device and lock it down to a few programs let's not lie to people and sell them Macs with the claim that they have a built in iSight. Yeah technically they do, but it's not worth much if you work in a real environment with many different computers. Perhaps they can give you a credit towards purchasing a real webcam to use with your Mac. I don't know. All I know is that by the time I was done I could do everything I wanted to from Linux to Linux and Linux to Windows with affordable hardware using UVC on Linux with good performance, but not using Apple's UVC implementation. Again Skype worked on all after some fiddling. I tried Yahoo messenger, MSN Messenger, iChat and some open source variants on the Apple. I could almost always get text chat, but not camera support even with the firewire cam on the Apple. Again, I did find a way around it in the end, I'm just using the cam with my Laptop (Ubuntu/Windows) or I can get some of the users to go to iChat, but I guess that I'm annoyed that this issue is so complex for something that should be so simple. Instead I feel like users are being hearded into using one protocol or another with one hardware set or another so that companies can try to corner us into their products. Sure iChat is pretty impressive when Macs are all talking to each other, but when is Apple going to learn that fully implementing open source standards that they use is good for them, and that they don't have a large enough percentage of the market to be jerks? Fighting that only makes people not want to buy Apple's again, and when they buy their $120, instead of $30, webcam that's OSX approved so they can use it with more than iChat they feel ripped off and lied to because they have been. Sure techs can find some ways around these problems, but the average user doesn't buy an Apple to deal with these problems. The overall point is that problems like this leads some idiots that run IT departments to demand all Windows, or all OSX environments, but the truth is that if I had all Ubuntu machines with Ubuntu approved webcams I would have had no problems either. Sticking to one kind of machine plays right into the companies hands and rewards them for making simple problems complex. If I have a camera built into my computer I should be able to use it with any major chat program to connect to anyone else using a similar client with full video and audio support. The camera manufacturers have done their best to make this possible so if Apple and MS are fighting them than what else are they fighting, and should we really be spending money with them? Anyway, that last point is a whole other post. Still MS and Ubuntu came out way ahead of Apple on this one.
Sega Genesis 3 (step 1 on my trip down retro-gaming lane)
So as many of you know, and many more are soon to find out, Sega released a Sega Genesis 3 in North America around the time they released the 32x and the Sega Saturn. This was a smaller version of the Sega Genesis that did not accept the 32x, officially anyway, and did not have an expansion slot for accepting the Sega CD. Still, after our Genesis finally burnt out, a few months after we burnt out the Flicky cart from playing it too much, we were hard pressed to find a brand new Sega Genesis that could accommodate the add-ons. So with the loss of the main unit we also lost the use of the Sega CD and 32X. Sure I could have looked harder, etc. but I moved on to newer game systems, well actually I think I just played a ton of Super Nintendo which was way better than the Genesis and since the 32x kind of had crappy games I think I got lost in Final Fantasy 3. Still the Genesis will always live in my heart as my first "16-bit" home system. Notice the double quotes. Anyway, somewhere along the way we ended up with the Sega Genesis 3 and I fired it up tonight. I played some of my old favorites including Altered Beast, X-Men and Shadow Dancer, but my lust for power did not stop there. I dug out, and am cleaning up my Atari 7800. The schematics for the 7800 are public domain now, which is good because my RF switch is shot, so I can either build one from the schematics, repair mine, or cop out and buy another one for about $10. Still, it might be more fun to build one, especially if I get one of those $2 circuit boards from Radio Shack and put it together without a casing so the electronics just dangle there on the side of the TV... The when technophobes came into my house I could be all like, "that's what a circuit board looks like, that's where the magic takes places. Inside of the little black things on the boards wizards and other mythical creatures cast the spells that cause you to see images on the screen." Still, in this town some of them may be seeing images from some stuff left in their systems from the 60's and I don't mean their retro-gaming systems when I say systems here. Oh man, I'm so excited. Still I have vowed not to dive into another old system until I finally beat level 6 on X-Men without using cheats. Wish me luck. Yes I could get emulators, but emulators are not nearly as cool as having the old hardware. It is amazing that the developers were able to make them so please don't misunderstand me here. I am very happy that emulators exist, but God I love old game systems. Oh yeah, and there is a store in my town that sells old arcade machines. They have skee-ball machines for $45 bucks, the problem is you have to rent a huge truck to get it home, still I'm tempted.
I’m in love with an Android.
I watched enviously as my Mom handled the new Moto Droid. It was fast, powerful, and awesome in ways I never thought possible. Taking a break from switching from the phone Mom was returning, the Verizon sales dude picked up the phone and demonstrated something that I thought was firmly stuck in the realm of iPhones: He tapped a button on the screen and spoke to the phone. Suddenly, even in the noisy store, Google sprang to life and found "Furniture Stores", with little link entitled "Local Results for furniture stores" with a blue dot next to the name of the town we were in. I couldn't help but let out a "Holy Sh--" in the middle of the crowded store. I got a few looks, but the din of the store kept them local. The Verizon dude chuckled and quietly admitted "Yeah, that's what I said too."
I had just bought an HTC Touch Pro six months prior for my new business, and wasn't even remotely eligible for an upgrade. Mom was a die-hard blackberry user, her last phone being an 8830 world edition, but she hated the tiny buttons. She also hated dialing using the same tiny keyboard, which has the numbers placed awkwardly one column in from the edge of the phone. I have convinced her to give the phone I had a shot, an HTC Touch Pro running Windows Mobile 6.1. I loved the keyboard, and it was an excellent email and text messaging device, and had a nice touch screen. After a few minutes playing with the phone, she decided to get it with her upgrade. We had to ask at the store for one: they weren't even on display. That should have been a sign. Two weeks later, we were returning her Touch Pro, and I was drooling over Droid.
I had turned a blind eye to the problems on the Touch Pro. It is not a bad piece of hardware. The keyboard is truly fantastic, with nice large keys, solid construction. The phone has excellent sound quality. The problem was Windows Mobile. Using the phone felt like dragging a grouchy kid to buy new clothes. The phone was always lagging behind, getting distracted, and refusing to try on the sweatshirt. I had largely ignored these problems. I rarely used the phone for phone calls. Most of my time was spent in the email application, and occasionally the web browser. My mom, on the other hand, used her phone constantly. Email was checked and sent all the time. She switched rapidly between sending e-mail and calling. Windows Mobile couldn't keep up. To top it off, I started noticing the same problem with my phone. Every complaint from her rang true, and I started to hate my own phone. She could return hers, I was stuck with mine. We drove back to the same Verizon store we had been at the week before, got our sales guy, and gave him the bad news. Mom could not contain herself any longer: "I hate this phone. I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. I need to exchange it."
We wandered the store, and the Moto Droid caught my eye once again. I had heard bad things about it: The keyboard felt cheap, It wasn't that great, and it certainly was no iPhone. The last one was a bonus, in my opinion, and I figured it was worth a shot. We wandered over to try it out. Mom fell in love almost instantly. The phone had a keyboard she could use, on screen dialing, and she could read her contacts without her glasses. It worked with outlook web access so she could have her exchange email. It was perfect. I had to have one. Then, I laid eyes on Eris.
The Eris is HTC's Android phone. It ran a different version of Android, but is getting an update to 2.1 in early 2010. I picked up the phone, and thought about my options. I did want a new line for my business. I sure as hell wanted an android phone. I was still uncertain. The phone had no hardware keyboard, and only had three physical buttons, one of which was under a trackball. I am a big fan of tactile response. I started messing with the keyboard. Every key press brought a little buzz from the phone, shaking it just enough to tell me I'd hit a key. Perfect. Of course, it was still $100 I didn't want to spend. I was about to walk back when the Verizon dude saw me. "Hey, if she's getting the Droid, if you need an upgrade or a new line, the Eris is free."
So now I have a new personal number, separate from the number on my business cards, and I have my own piece of Android love. This phone is FANTASTIC. The one feature I would say that is missing is support for the turn-by-turn directions on Android 1.6 or higher. The Eris runs 1.5. The Moto Droid runs 2.0, so it already has this feature, and I am still a bit jealous of my mom's phone. Verizon PR reps have been telling some high-end customers that there will be an update to 2.x sometime early next year, so that feature is pending. It also doesn't support tethering through Verizon yet, but I found an application that gets the job done. I'm not going to bore you with the specs of the Eris or the Droid, suffice to say they are both powerful, fast, and awesome to use. Make sure you download the Barcode Scanner application by ZXing Team, and give this a scan:
QR Code URL
(iPhone users can also get NeoReader from the
app store for free to scan this kind of barcode.)
Goodbye MS Office! Hello Open Source!
When I got a netbook, I wanted to copy my e-mail settings from my 64-bit Windows 7 desktop running Office 2007 to my 32-bit Windows 7 netbook, also running Office 2007. Boy was I surprised when the Windows Easy Transfer Wizard told me that I couldn't transfer my settings from 64-bit to 32-bit. I have half a dozen e-mail accounts, and I was going to have to enter the information for each one in by hand on the new computer, and then re-download months, or in some cases years of messages.
This got me hunting for another way to get my e-mail. What I found was amazing. Even the newest piece of my puzzle - DavMail - had been around for two years, and I hadn't noticed it. Now that I have put everything together, I am ecstatic. I will never have to go through all that garbage just to move my e-mail again. Furthermore, I will never have to type in a license key for my home office and email suite again. I don't need to stick with a single operating system to get my work done. I can use a single collection of programs across three different operating systems, and I can move my data easily between those systems, regardless of whether it's running Windows, Linux, or OS X This doesn't require a magic wizard utility or expensive third party software, I just copy and paste the folders containing the data. All of this is thanks to DavMail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Sunbird, and OpenOffice.
DavMail is a gateway between your computer and your company's Exchange client. It runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X. It translates requests from Thunderbird and Sunbird for data into something that your Exchange sever and Domain Controller can understand, and then translates the responses from those servers into something Thunderbird and Sunbird can understand. Even if you don't like Thunderbird and Sunbird, Exchange e-mail access is still possible. DavMail works with any client that can get POP3 or IMAP e-mail. Calendar access through DavMail will work with any client that can use calDav. Corporate address books will work through DavMail with any client that can get contacts from LDAP. You can even use it as a server for e-mail. This means that you can use your home computer running DavMail to from an Exchange server, even if you can't install DavMail on that device! Most important of all, DavMail is Free (as in free beer) and open source.
Mozilla Sunbird is a standalone calendar client that runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X. Thunderbird has plugins to perform all of Sunbird's work, but I really like the fact that I can look at my calendar and my e-mail at the same time. The interface is simple, and all of the settings are stored in a profile folder specific to Sunbird. It has the same ultra-low system requirements and easy migration as Thunderbird (noted below), and is clear, simple, and easy to use. At this time, Tasks are not synchronized (at least, not that I've seen), but I expect this will change with later versions of the client.
Mozilla Thunderbird is an e-mail client from the Mozilla Foundation that runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X. If The Mozilla Foundation sounds familiar, it's probably because you're running Firefox, another of their excellent free products. It supports plugins, just like Firefox, including the Lightning Calender plugin. It also supports LDAP contacts, so via DavMail you can search for contacts through an Exchange Server or Directory server. It also supports POP3 and IMAP accounts, meaning that you can use it to get e-mail from most ISPs, gmail, etc. It is stable, well developed, well supported, and easy to use. One of the features I like the most is how it stores e-mail data. The program simply creates a profile directory in your home folder, and stores everything there. This means that when you get a new computer, want to change operating systems, or want to back up your e-mail settings (and all locally stored mail), all you need to do is copy and paste this directory somewhere else! This is an enormous perk. Not only does it mean that you can move your e-mail settings from computer to computer with nothing more than a flash drive and a few clicks, but it also means that new computer can be running any operating system that Thunderbird runs on! Just get a Mac? Install Thunderbird, and copy your profile. New Linux netbook? Thunderbird! New Windows 7 Desktop? Thunderbird! Even if your computer is from halfway through the Clinton administration, sporting a 233MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM running Windows NT4, Thunderbird will dutifully collect your e-mail. (Author's note: Windows NT4 was released in 1996. That's some serious - and perhaps slightly insane - legacy support! )
OpenOffice is a free and open-source Productivity Suite designed by Sun Microsystems to compete directly with Microsoft Office for most computer users. While not strictly required for my e-mail setup, I felt it important to include this as a viable option for users to completely eliminate Microsoft Office. People who use Word, Excel and PowerPoint can easily switch to OpenOffice without worrying about problems with documents opening or paying expensive license fees when a new version comes out. It has applications to match Access, Visio, and Microsoft Equation Editor as well. Because of its open source nature, OpenOffice has been ported to Windows, OS X, Linux, OS/2, and of course, Sun's own Solaris. It can save documents in a variety of file types, including Microsoft's formats and OpenOffice specific formats. OpenOffice Writer even has an "Export directly as PDF" button next to the print button.
Phew! That's a lot of software and functionality! Don't forget, your grand total for the software above is ZERO currency. You will not spend a dollar, dinar, peso or euro on those packages. Furthermore, if you are a programmer, you can write your own plugins, addons and extensions using nothing but more free software! Wow!
Pictures Display in Firefox but not IE 6, 7, or 8
So I had some trouble with some web development lately. I designed a webpage using Bluefish Editor on GNU/Linux using some code that a friend provided and modifying it. and checked my pages with Firefox and Ganelon. So far no problems. Then I tried multiple versions of IE. My page would display but not the images, except for on 1 page, and only in IE. My doctype was good
meaning
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
-- This is a coding solution, many of your problems, especially if they exist across multiple web pages, probably have more to do with your settings than code.
-- There are many reasons why IE does not display things properly, and my solution may not work for you, but in the end it was simply that IE stinks, and I figured out exactly why in my case after reading through a ton of other documentation and comparing my code. You see the other browsers read my code and ignored white space issues, IE did not. In this bit of CSS where I defined #top I accidentally left no white space between my image name and no-repeat. Once I put the space back in all versions of IE worked correctly. Again, this may not solve your issue, but if you've done code verification, read all of the other forums, and still are having trouble give your code another closer look. Especially if you don't see a red x image place holder like I did not.
#top {
background: #8B956D url(HMS_small_CSS.jpg)no-repeat top center;
padding-top: 375px;
}
#top {
background: #8B956D url(HMS_small_CSS.jpg) no-repeat top center;
padding-top: 375px;
}
I hope this helps someone out. At any rate I don't want to condone initially sloppy coding, but really the largest software company in the world can't create a browser that deals with this?! At any rate some day we'll all use GNU/Linux or similar operating systems and, well I'm about to rant.
Why You Shouldn’t Be An Admin On Your Work Computer
To Users That Know Enough To Be Dangerous,
Let's start out with a really simple point. It's one of those points that you know everybody knows, but chooses to ignore. You don't own your work computer unless you own the company. It is not yours. It was given to you to use to get your work done. It is not a violation of your rights to put restrictions on the computer since it is not yours. Since we have basically no employment law anyway, you should assume that you're always under surveillance when you're at work. I don't agree with this, I'm just being realistic. Plus you hardly even react to the fact that you are under constant surveillance at home and at work anyway whether you are an administrator on the computer or not. Don't tell me that not making you an admin means that you can't get your work done. In 99% of cases I can find a way to make your programs run, and let you get your work done, without making you an admin and you know it. It's a lame excuse so stop. To those less tech savvy let's just say that an administrator can make any change to the computer. In a group environment an administrator can make changes that give them access to everyone else's information on that machine or any machine that they are an admin on, for example. This means that your boss, let's say a professor at college, has access to your entire profile. That professor can be under survelliance all the live long day, but may get upset if someone does remote work on their system without telling them?! So it's totally ok with them that eveyone that uses their system as admins, or anyone that can log in against a domain and get admin access, can access anything they want in their account, but up yours if you try to fix the thing remotely and forget to tell them. It's time to wake up. The person fixing your computer is not the problem. The brass collecting data on you is. Making yourself an admin will not keep your company out of your files, and in most cases this is reasonable since you work for them. If you want to look at porn on your computer, use your own, except in very rare cases you should not be doing this at work and even if you use your own computer, if you are doing this at work, your Media Access Controller (MAC address which identifies your specific network card), IP Address, and the names of the sites you are visiting are probably being recorded anyway. The only thing you are doing by demanding administrator access is allowing the sites you are visiting to corrupt your computer and require more maintenance. You are not protecting your privacy so stop claiming academic freedom, etc. Academic freedom says that you can look at things that are relevant to your work, even if that material is offensive, but not if it's illegal. If your computer becomes infected with Spyware because you visited "SuperHorseFucker.com" your IT guys will know that you went there when they clean up the computer. Sure corrupt bosses may tell you to look the other way when you clean up a prominent professor's computer and all of the infections they have come from hardcore porn sites, but I think we all know that unless we work in the porn industry we shouldn't be doing this stuff at work anyway. If you need a specific program someone can install it quickly, and remotely for you or simply include it during setup. By not being an admin at work your computer simply will not become a hazard to you, and the entire network. If your IT department disagrees with me, you need new management, and they need some backbone.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." -- Spock
Swords to Plowshares in the Multimedia Piracy war.
If multimedia companies focus on subtle, tasteful advertising via their movies and their stars rather than trying to sell the media itself, free distribution of their content will no longer be a harmful. Instead, the free distribution can seriously improve the market for stars and media. Suddenly stars will have enormous amounts of free advertising and gain popularity. This in turn makes the the stars able to sell products more effectively since their face is seen more often. They will take the enemy of media "pirates" and turn them into a powerful ally as "content distributors". More importantly, expensive DRM strategies can be abandoned, and companies can once again focus entirely on making better media rather than harder to steal media.
"They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore."
— Isaiah 2:4 & Micah 4:3
We live in an era where electronic media is easily obtained. Downloading music has been brought to the masses by the likes of Napster, iTunes, and Limewire, and many others. Bitorrent has allowed distributors of free content to share files easily without placing heavy load on their servers. Large organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA have a love-hate relationship with these concepts. On the one hand, distributing media for little more than the cost of web hosting is phenomenal. Companies distribute their media far and wide across the internet, while still selling masses of DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and various other hard media. However, while discs and downloads are sold to most, some parties are stealing form these companies. Third parties can still purchase DRM protected media, rip it into a format that is easily distributed, and then resell it with little regard for the original copyright. The recording industries seem to have an ongoing digital arms race with pirates, and the consumer suffers as their options for viewing their movies and listening to their music are restricted.
The Sony rootkit fiasco, people getting sued for cracking DVD's Content Scrambling System, and a multitude of DRM schemes have made watching videos or listening to music many times more difficult when anybody wants to use more than one media player. DVD and Blu-ray seem to be making some moves in the right direction: Blu-ray discs often come with a DVD copy and an electronic copy for portable media players. This is a simple solution to a problem that the industries themselves have created. If Blu-ray discs were not protected by restrictive DRM, it would be easy to make a copy for personal use in older DVD players (such as those found in automobiles) and personal media players like iPods and Zunes. Instead, we have to create more plastic discs just to give consumers the media they would want to use. How can content subscribers get their product to the masses, make money, and not have to worry about pirates? Companies have tried making it harder to steal media, and have tried suing the people sharing media. These strategies have harmed consumers, and harmed the image of the companies selling the media. After all, who likes watching a big powerful company crush a kid with crippling debt over music files?
It is unlikely that there is a single solution to the problem of media distribution for profit, but there are some simple ideas that can be applied to digital media of all types. Advertising is the simplest and most effective answer. In the music world, the content is advertising. While selling music is profitable, giving it away sells the artist as a star. Musicians that are popular are often paid to appear in advertisements, and certainly a portion of this goes to their label. Why not make this the key source of income for music companies? Artists and labels will be able to get their media to far more people since their media is free. They can then appear in advertisements for products, preferably ones they actually use. The same goes for stars on both the big and small screen: When we see Whoopi Goldberg or Chevy Chase in a TV commercial, we are interested in what they are selling because they were in something we liked, not because we spent money to buy their DVD. In addition, any product used in a movie or TV is instantly advertised to anyone who watches. How many people saw The Matrix and immediately wanted that sliding phone Neo answered? Knight Rider replica cars from the 1980s version of the show are still sold today over two decades after it went off the air. TV shows themselves are there to compel people to pay for services such as Cable or Satellite TV, but also to advertise products during commercial breaks. Movies and music should not sell themselves, but rather should sell the stars within.
This strategy depends greatly upon the type of advertising used. Ads that interfere with the viewing experience are annoying, and could turn consumers away from a product they would otherwise happily buy. YouTube has advertisements that pop up in the bottom quarter of a video, overlapping the media and obstructing the watcher's view to spew garbage. I have literally never read these ads. I immediately begin hunting for the close button and exit the ad. If this button was removed, I simply would navigate away from the video, killing both the opportunity to sell what was in the ad and the stars and products in the video. TV shows sometimes have ads for other shows that pop up in the corner of the screen, obstructing action in the show I'm actually watching. If I'm watching one show already, why would that network then interfere with my enjoyment to advertise another show? If anything, I am now less likely to remain on their channel since I know the viewing experience will be ruined by constant advertising. Meet The Spartans and other spoof movies seem to have moved to crass, blatant plugs completely unrelated to the movie. Why is Leonidas eating a Subway sandwich? That's not funny, relevant, or compelling. It is just as distracting as the ads that cover video action on YouTube or TV, and indeed after the second or third unfunny, unrelated plug, I turned the movie off.
CD/DVD/Blu-ray sales will not suddenly dry up, nor will stars only be seen in the home in a free-media economy. People will still pay for good quality copies of a movie or song they like, or to see a star on the big screen or live at a concert with an excellent sound system. The people that would pay for this media already do pay for it. Many of the people pirating media are doing so because they are either unable or unwilling to pay for the product. Others are pirating the media to resell it to customers at lower prices because they are not paying royalties. The people selling cheap DVDs made from freely available content will still make themselves money while doing free advertising for the original content creators. Certainly the availability of cheap electronic copies, or the ease of stealing media has contributed to media piracy, but a strategy of quality advertising could recoup all the money spent and lost in this giant battle against pirates.
Apple: Making 2009 just like 1984.
Apple is skillfully misdirecting it's customers. Some Apple customers even seem to enjoy lying to themselves about their Macs. I hear users praise macs as never having problems, even as I am in the process of fixing a problem on their machine. They see themselves as rebels, and revolutionaries. They proclaim the excellence of Apple products, and talk about how everyone would be so much better off with a Mac. Not all Mac users think this way, but there are enough for it to be eerie.
Apple has always touted itself as a company of fresh ideas and revolutionary products. Their Superbowl ad in 1984 showed lines of boring gray men marching along gray and white tunnels. They are on their way to view gray conformist propaganda. Suddenly, a rebellious woman in bright colors evades the way of conformity and lack of choice, dodging the black-clothed security forces trying to stop her. She smashes the conformist propaganda in an effort to wake up the gray masses. Since then, Apple has persistently moved to make its users conform to the Apple way of doing things. Once the masses believed Apple was the woman with they hammer, they could focus on forcing everyone to be the same. Apple will only let OS X run on their hardware legally. They monitor and police applications in the App store, and constantly try to prevent users from using their iPhones and iPod touches with anything not Apple Approved. They attempt to silence critics and satirists with law suits. They constantly talk about how much better their software is, and how it has always been better. They partner up with Microsoft, praising their software. When the partnership breaks down, they talk about how awful PCs and Microsoft are.
We are allied with Microsoft! We have always been!
We are at war with Microsoft! We have always been!
Doublethink is just as useful for Apple as it is for Big Brother.
Apple's attempt to make users conform has a very real physical representation too. Watch that 1984 ad again, and tell me which group Apple seems to match today. The brightly colored rebellious woman? Not anymore. How about the conformist masses in black and gray and white, with silvery skin? Put a MacBook Pro in front of one of those guys, and it would blend right in. Apple isn't the bright woman smashing conformity. Apple is the propaganda spewing leader on the screen, encouraging unity through conformity.
Apple has become exactly what they said they were claiming to slay in 1984, and they are just as Orwellian in their practices as Big Brother's government.
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