Archive for the 'Geekish' Category
WNBC doesn’t get technology
So WNBC ran a story tonight about domain name squatters, which was basically a story complaining about how all the “good” domain names have been taken. It’s really not news in my eyes, since it’s a practice that (as the story itself said) has its roots in the cyberbubble of the 90′s. But I guess since more people are getting Internet savvy(?) it’s becoming more obvious to more people, and thus is now considered “newsworthy”.
The problem is they simply misrepresented things. In talking about domain name squatters, they said that the largest owner of domain names is Go Daddy, the domain name registrar. Registrars don’t own the domains they register, they simply handle the registration process on behalf of people who would like to purchase domains. The domain is owned by the person who buys it through the registrar. However, the story made it seem as if Go Daddy itself was a domain name squatter, and the quote they used from Go Daddy didn’t help clarify things:
We consider domain names the real estate of the 21st century.
Makes sense if you understand that Go Daddy is trying to convince you to buy your own domain name, but if you’re already under the impression that Go Daddy owns 30 million domains of its own and is just trying to auction them off to the highest bidder, it sure won’t dissuade you of that opinion either.
Their website doesn’t really make things any clearer. They offer a link to Go Daddy’s complete email in response to their questions (which, again, doesn’t necessarily clear anything up if you’re already misinformed) and a link that simply reads Who Owns The Most Domain Names? (Again, this is a list of registrars, and nothing about the page they linked to implies otherwise.)
Then again, the page in question also currently links to file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/501452663/Local%20Settings/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/OLK1639/product_detail.htm, so, uh, you’ll excuse me for not taking them too seriously.
iPod Touches still ship with old firmware
In case you were wondering, an iPod Touch purchased since the 2.0 firmware was released will not, in fact, come with version 2.0 installed. It won’t be an oversight, either, because it will come installed with version 1.1.5 instead, which was released after 2.0.
And, needless to say, Apple will still be willing to charge you $9.99 for the upgrade, finally putting a nail into the coffin of that silly old “we only charge for the upgrade because we have to for accounting purposes” excuse that they’ve been touting.
My annoyance with Apple in this regard (no, I don’t own a Touch) is only outweighed by my disappointment with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform, which has been thoroughly put to shame by the iPhone OS. As much as I dislike Apple’s resistance to removable batteries and external storage cards, the lack of Bluetooth/speaker/microphone on the Touch, and Steve Jobs’ draconian control over what applications can be marketed and installed to devices that Apple sells, the usability of an iPhone or iPod Touch vs. a technically superior (with regard to hardware) Windows Mobile device is just so much better that my qualms more or less become irrelevant.
There are a lot of things Apple does wrong, and many things that they do worse than their competitors, but their final package is often simply unmatched in the end. In a way, it’s kind of disappointing.
From the “here’s-the-first-thought-that-came-to-mind-when-I-read-this” file
And really, could Sprint have made the battery door any more impossible to remove?
Yeah, they could have put an iPhone battery door on it instead. *rimshot*
iLive, You Live, We All Live
So today (by which I mean yesterday, since I’m posting after midnight), Mac OS 10.5 (“Leopard,” as they call it) made its triumphant debut to much fanfare. Even here at that university in Cambridge, 6:00 saw a fairly lengthy line stretching out of the main computer center in the Science Center, full of people anxiously awaiting their shiny new OS.
Although I was obviously in the vicinity at the time (as you can tell from my observations of the line), I was not there to obtain Leopard—I had another mission in mind. Some barely circulated flier advertised a raffle, where 100 lucky winners would obtain a free copy of iLife ’08. I hadn’t planned on upgrading, but since this is something like $40 with a student discount, it seemed like a nice chunk of change to save. Noticing the total lack of visibility of the fliers, I expected that the occasion—an event starting at 6:00, and a promised drawing at 7:30—wouldn’t even draw 100 people to begin with, and if it did, the odds would almost certainly still be overwhelmingly in my favor.
Showtime arrived, and I made my way past the line of Leopard-seekers (taking a few Apple-branded things they had lying around for the taking) in search of this raffle. It was a bit of a stretch, but no matter—an employee shows me a box of entry forms, and I take one. Then, a curiosity: I notice a girl exchanging her entry form for a copy of iLife. I ask whether I’m just supposed to fill out the form (hopefully to be told that they’re just giving it away to anyone who enters), and I hear the bad news: only entry forms with special stickers are winners, and since mine didn’t have a sticker, I wasn’t going to win. I was told that even though I was supposed to fill out the form, there wasn’t any chance I could still win, and he wouldn’t blame me if I didn’t bother.
Frustrated, I gave him back the blank form and left. Of course, this was a giveaway—you could say it’s hard to be annoyed with something so petty as to be free to begin with. But still, the fact that this was hardly a raffle at all—that you could feel around with your hand for a stickered entry form, or that you could come back again and win later, or even that earlier arrivals had an advantage against those who came closer to the 7:30 “drawing” that wasn’t—made it seem awfully unfair.
After attending to other matters that demanded my attention this evening, I made my way back by the Science Center a little after 7:00, aiming to try my hand at getting free stuff again. Surely, the masses would have largely left, and perhaps they still hadn’t gotten 100 people to show up. If, as I overheard, 1 in 4 entry forms were missing a sticker, there was a fair bit of hope.
I put on my glasses, hoping this might at least disorient the employee I saw before, if he was even still there. There were about three customers there, and a number of employees, but I didn’t see the one who I had spoken with before. I approached a man behind the counter, and had a conversation something like this:
“Is there a raffle going on here?”
“Do you have iLife ’08?”
“No, I don’t.”
(The man hands me a copy.) “You do now.”
Ah, the wonders of free stuff. I still need to figure out what exactly the new iLife has that’ll benefit me, but it’ll probably have at least a couple things I’ll find useful at some point.
Satisfaction is the theme of the night.
There Is Still Nobody Here
But it being the last day of another month that has thus far seen no new posts, I thought I should take this opportunity to at least remind you of such.
To express my apologies (perhaps most of all to anyone whose RSS reader informed them that this would be a post worth reading), I extend to my readers this amusing game.
Note to Self
The next time the Audacity Beta refuses to let you run noise removal even when you’ve set up the noise profile, edit Application Data\Audacity\audacity.cfg and, under [CsPresets] change Noise_Level=0 to Noise_Level=3 or something.
