Sensational Fanboyism

So many stories that make the front page are based on platform zealotry.  Or stories that have just a tenuous link to Apple, Microsoft, Linux, or politics soon descend into a fanboy fight in the comments.

Old News

I find a well crafted list of blog and news subscriptions gets you cutting-edge news in a more timely manner with much less noise.

Too Slow

Digg, the actual site itself, is so slow.  It takes much longer to load than Google Reader or many other news sites.  While catching up on my feeds I’ll normally open up links I want to look at further in background tabs.  Invariably, Digg links are still loading long after most of the other tabs have finished.

Drama Queens

I don’t care about all the Digg drama.  “OMG TOP USER QUIGGLES HAS BEEN BANNED!!!1111!!!!!oneoneone!!”,  “NETSCAPE DIGG CLONE SHUTDOWN”, “I GET PAID TO DIGG!”.  There is way too much news about Digg on Digg in the form of both stories and comments.  Attention diggers, no one in the real world cares.

Fantastic.

Over on Techcrunch they have this Bram Cohen quote:

“Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.”

 When are fast lightweight implementations like uTorrent not suitable?

Link to Techcrunch » Blog Archive » BitTorrent to Acquire µTorrent

Pretty amazing to see what one man can do with some ingenuity. 

Microsoft has released a new product into called Windows Live Writer.  It’s sole purpose it rich editing and composing of blog posts.  As this is my first use of it I can’t tell you how good it really is, but so far it seems completely excellent.

For example, right from the Writer you can insert pictures into the post:

Also of interest you can insert maps right into a blog post:

St. Louis is about 60 miles from me

(Yes, I know I haven’t posted in a long time…Sooooo busy)

Argh.  While syncing my music to my SMT5600 the phone crashes after just a few songs are transferred.  The phone will not respond to any button presses.  The only way to recover from this state of affairs is to remove the battery.

WMP10 just shows that whichever song it was copying when the phone crashed is xx% done without reporting any errors.

My search skills have failed me because I am unable to find anyone else suffering from the same issue!

Here’s Gizmodo’s story:

Rumors: Origami Just a Glorified Media Player with Nasty DRM?

Here’s a story they’ve never run:

Facts:  Ipod Video Just a Glorified Media Player with Nasty DRM, That Can’t Run the Thousands of Windows Software Applications.

Their never ending fascination with Apple becomes more and more tiring as the days go by.  I have a hard time seeing a future for Origami, but I’m sure willing to give it a shot…

I’m currently in the process of changing hosting providers. Hopefully this happens without any downtime. I’ll do a write-up of the process later.

In what is seen by many as an attempt to grab onto some of the success (money) of internet power houses like Google, the broadband industry has been floating ideas about charging such companies extra money since they couldn’t exist without the bandwidth provided to them by the broadband industry.

The problem is this: Would the internet be successful if the telephone and cable companies became the gatekeepers of what you could and could not see?

Additionally, we already pay for the bandwidth, and I can only assume that companies like Google already have massive bills to pay for the bandwidth to their server farms, so at first I couldn’t see how exactly one could justify such a move. After further reading I see that the industry’s idea is not to charge for the basic bandwidth that everyone gets today, but to charge extra for things like QoS guarantees. I see this as a potential slippery slope where in a few years time traditional internet access becomes sub-par because it is pushed aside by those who are paying extra for a high QoS…after all, if a packet attached to an account with guaranteed QoS comes along at the same time as your regular ole’ non-guaranteed packet, your packet is getting pushed aside. This has the potential to happen with more frequency as more and more people opt for the QoS-“enhanced” package on their broadband accounts. The broadband providers will of course have every reason to encourage more people to pay for QoS until we get to the point where everyone is paying extra. This coupled with the broadband providers desire to stifle all competition will lead to nirvana for them, and mediocrity for the rest of us.

PS: I’m already living in a state of broadband provider-induced mediocrity since I cannot get either DSL or cable HSI where I live. My only option is the $110/month I pay for an ISDN line plus the $35/month for an ISP…