While reading an article on the Huffington Post today, I noticed a sidebar article with a frightening headline and a picture of a Honda Fit like my wife drives.
Honda Recalls 440,000 Cars Over Potentially Fatal Airbag Problem
So naturally I freak out a little bit and click on the link. It’s a teaser for another article that’s actually linked on Reuters, but it mentions the recall only applies to Accords and Civics. Reuters further clarifies by pointing out it’s only 2001-2002 Accords and Civics, and a few Acura TLs. So that brings me to the question…. why use the picture of a Honda Fit? Are your editors just THAT DUMB that they can’t tell the difference between a 2001-02 Civic or Accord and a 2007-08 Fit? Does anyone there believe that an informative news article should perhaps have a picture that matches the content of the story? What the hell?!
After a VERY close call a few days ago with a Hummer H2 that pulled out in front of me, I realized I would have been under it and probably quite seriously injured in the process. That led me to wonder, why have cars swelled to such gargantuan size these days?
At a redlight this morning, I saw a mid-late 90′s F-150 sitting next to a 2009 F-150. The difference was ridiculous. For years, though, the F-150 is said to have been the best selling truck in America, so it should represent a good case study of what Americans want. After doing some digging on http://autos.msn.com, the biggest F-150 made in 1996 was the XL SuperCab Long Bed weighing in at 4587lbs. For 2009, the largest is the XL 8ft. bed 4×4 weighing in at a MASSIVE 5820lbs. The smallest 2009 F-150 is the RWD XL 6.5ft bed, which at 4743lbs is STILL heavier than 1996′s largest. But why?
Can someone please explain to me why, even as gas prices continue to threaten an upward trend, vehicles are becoming larger and larger? And why the hell is such a giant vehicle still the top selling in America? I consider myself something of a nerd, and enjoy learning about anything I can. I think I have a rudimentary grasp of things like nuclear fission and astrophysics… but my mind can’t grasp why people WANT to drive vehicles like this.
While poking around at a Shoretel phone this morning looking for a way other than the web interface to reboot it, a co-worker and I saw this spit out in the debugging information from a call.
Setting VoiceStats interval to 10 seconds
processCmdQ: EPTCMD_ATTACH_DEVICE
streamDevAttach: devId 0 streamId 0
HDSP: PVE Codec for VHD 80 encoder rate change to G.711 u-law 64 kbps no VAD
HDSP: endpt 80 mode change event op1:2 op2:0
addAttDev: store devId 0 to streamId 0 list
processCmdQ: EPTCMD_MODIFY_STREAM
streamModify: Derek (Max)Jeter = 50<– Go Yankees!!!
I remember the earlier days of the internet, when Real Player got a nasty reputation by trying to take over every aspect of your system. People hated it, it was widely panned, and to this day some people (me) still avoid anything even remotely related to Real Media.
Well Adobe seems to be joining them in the “take over your computer” category. The past few versions of Adobe Acrobat reader have been bloated and slow, and the only thing they seem to do efficiently is pop up boxes asking you if you want to update. If you click the “Do not ask me again” box, it does the only logical thing an unruly update client can possibly do… and asks every single time you start the software. YAY!
And now, I find another annoyance. I’m working on a co-worker’s computer that she thinks is infected with AntiVirus 2009. I don’t want to hook it to my network, so I put Malware Bytes and the latest update for it on a thumb drive, pop it in the USB port on her laptop, and….. Adobe Photo Downloader. No asking, just the downloader. I close it, hit My Computer, and…. my drive isn’t there. So I unplug it, plug it in again, and once more… Adobe Photo Downloader shows up, and my thumb drive isn’t assigned a drive letter. Eventually I found the system tray icon for Adobe Photo Downloader, killed it, and unplugged/plugged the thumb drive again. Low and behold… there’s my drive letter.
I’m probably just too easily annoyed at things like this, but one of my pet peeves is software hijacking a computer and preventing “normal” operation. And given Acrobat’s increasing bloat, I can only recommend using something else…. ANYTHING else. I would suggest Foxit, but they have a lame payment/advertising systemthat I don’t agree with and won’t link to. If you can get past that, or can live with what their free version has to offer, give it a shot.
Let me just start off by saying… no, I don’t have an MBA. I don’t even have a Bachelors degree. I’m not CEO or CFO material, either. But, unlike any of the CEOs of the Big 3… I’m actually a car guy. So, what would I do with Detroit? Read the rest of this entry »
The much anticipated (at least in my household) release of GTR Evolution has led me to write this up for any game publishers out there who are curious. This has become a prime example of a horribly botched release.
First, the game was supposed to have been released back in June. Then it was July. Then the pre-releases started showing up for the reviewers. Shortly after, the torrents started showing up for the pirates. At this point, we the consumers have received ZERO information from Simbin on the release, and are left standing around clueless.
Amazon listed August 15th for a release date, as did EBWorld. August 15th came, date got changed to August 26th. August 26th came… Amazon says it’s released but won’t ship for 1-3 weeks… and EB says Sept 7th.
But alas, there it is on Steam! That’s how I want to buy it… Steam… instant delivery in the morning without having to leave my house or wait on UPS! Ahh the wonders of internet delivery. So I pre-purchase and it adds it to my list of games as “Not yet released.” The product page has this nifty countdown to show me when the game will be released. The countdown ends at the stroke of midnight signalling the start of Sept 1st and the game……………. “Not yet released.”
So now it’s almost 7:21am here on the east coast… I’ve been up for over an hour now anxious to play my game… and I’ve got nothing. I’m out $18, and neither Simbin nor Steam have posted anything about when I might actually get to play it.
So there you go, publishers… there’s one of the many reasons people choose to pirate your games instead of paying for them. Remember, we are not merely cash cows for you to milk at will. We like to be kept in the loop… informed of when things are going to happen. I was looking forward to spending a nice day off from work today racing around the Nurburgring, but it looks like the only way that’s going to happen at this point is for me to grab a pirated release.
Every time we get the cool temperatures and high humidity that lead to pea soup fog, I find myself utterly amazed on my commute to work just how many people are too goddamn stupid to turn on their headlights in it. It seems to me to be a fairly simple concept. Not only is it the law, it helps other people see you. That’s right… you don’t turn on your headlights to help you see… but to help you BE SEEN.
It’s not that hard, regardless of the car. Some it’s a twist of a stalk on the steering column, some the knobs are on the dash, and some have a pull out handle. Regardless of the style, it takes all of 1 second to do, and it helps make sure that people can see you from more than 30 ft away.
I’ve said it for ages… for as long as I’ve worked in IT. Overly restrective anti-piracy and licensing mechanisms do NOTHING to curb piracy and only serve to harm consumers. It’s that simple. And today, VMWare proved it.
In a fuck-up to rival the all time great fuck-ups in the world, VMWare ESX 3.5 update 2 just stopped working today. There was some bug related to the date, and it quit. I’m using it here at work in a lab environment, since they started offering free licenses a few weeks ago, so I got to see it first hand. The VMs that were already up and running continued running. VMs that were down, however, couldn’t be booted. The licensing screen under configuration didn’t seem to balk at it, and showed no errors… but the Hypervisor itself just wouldn’t boot a VM.
Now, as I’ve said, I’m using a free version. “You get what you pay for” they always say. However, this affected customers that had paid money… BIG money… to VMWare. If I had a contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with them, and all of a sudden my entire VM infrastructure just quit working… words could not even begin to describe how livid I would be.
And in the most ironic twist of fate, there was speculation that VMWare had released their ESX hypervisor for free to combat Microsoft’s Hyper-V and bring customers to the VMWare side, where they could later spend money adding features or support. Today’s little incident may have done the exact opposite, driving potential and even existing customers away from themselves as people see what havok a licensing glitch can create.
So any of you publishers or authors out there, keep this in mind. You may feel safe with your snuggly anti-piracy watchdog…. but what do you do when he turns around and bites your hand off?
While reading an article on the Huffington Post today, I noticed a sidebar article with a frightening headline and a picture of a Honda Fit like my wife drives.
