04.16.10
Posted in I.T, Racism tagged apple at 10:11 am by kyrias
Or is it just a response to racism? I’m not sure.
I was watching an interview of 田朔宁, the guy who the Chinese government hired to set up the Internet in China when Clinton was to visit years ago.
He was talking about how he used to idolize Steve Jobs for his visionary work within the computer industry, especially as pertaining to how he perceived Jobs’ goal with regards his products: not mass market commercialization, but actually creating cutting edge technology to further digitalization.
Then he mentioned how, when he managed to score a meeting with Jobs, he was completely and utterly disillusioned. Supposedly, according to Jobs, he has never been to China and has no interest in ever visiting China. Furthermore, the “Chinese can’t write big software”.
I’ve never been particularly enamored of Apple products — partially because I have a pretty solid mental block with regarding learning new software when it is unnecessary and partially because Macs really don’t run enough of the programs that I would want to use.
That sentence, however, pretty much solidifies my intent to boycott Apple’s products. Pity, since I thought that the Ipad looked pretty interesting. I guess I’ll just have to wait until the Chinks come up with something comparable.
We’ll see about them not being able to write big software, shall we?
I don’t think its improbable, especially since the Chinese are really getting hard at work developing alternative to American tech: operating systems, the 3G network, etc. I couldn’t really understand why they needed their own version before, but now I guess I have some idea.
At first I almost found my indignation funny, thinking that it was just nationalistic pride stepping in. Then I thought about it, and I really feel that it’s a pretty racist thing to say, especially without any qualifiers. I’m not even sure that you can fix that sentence with any qualifier, actually. To generalize across that many people and to say that the Chinese as a whole are incapable of anything is just a bad statement to make.
Sorry Jobs, you might be visionary and your products might be all sleek and pretty and all — but so far as I can tell, you’re a racist asshole and I’m not supporting anything of yours with my money.
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10.22.09
Posted in I.T tagged Internet monetization, YouTube at 4:15 pm by kyrias
‘ware, this is a rambly post:
I realized a while ago that my YouTube Downloader wasn’t working. It would pop up with a “flash video not found” whenever I would try to download something. I’ve been a bit distracted lately, and so I didn’t really bother to look into it. Today, however, I wanted to download Basshunter’s “Dota” song and I wanted to procrastinate from my literature review badly enough that I decided to solve the problem.
Apparently I’m really behind on the news: YouTube disabled 3rd party programs that allowed the videos to be downloaded.
Of course, the programmers promptly tried to find go-arounds. The last I heard via Googling was that Google bought On2 Technologies: the company that holds the rights to the code that drives Flash — which drives the entire caboodle from the videos themselves to the programs that download them.
Couple of things I’m thinking about:
Read a comment here that said:
Ari - February 12th, 2009 at 4:02 pm PST
Download? download? Isn’t the whole point of YouTube that you don’t need to download videos anymore? Why would you want to store videos on your PC when you can just leave them in the cloud and watch them?
Somebody is still living in 1990.
To a certain extent that’s true. Those funny videos that are good for a laugh but which no one is ever likely to want to download? Who would want to download those when you can just watch it, get your dose of laughter, and then click away? Much less pay for it.
Then again, there’s the songs that I downloaded off of YouTube because they were just too damn catchy/funny not to. Dota and Boten Anna, for example. Or Big Blue Dress. Or Hard like Heroic. Or The Craft of War: Blind — which is just too awesome, albeit not a song but machimation.
Yes, I wanted to download them so I could play them offline and put them in my mp3 player. Yes, I would have been willing to pay $0.99 for them.
The Question is: If YouTube goes for the full monetization route, how is YouTube going to change? The thing is, YouTube probably made it possible for Cranius of Big Blue Dress fame to release an album. Basshunter acknowledges that YouTube success is partially what placed him where he is now. So if YouTube starts charging people to upload videos like someone suggested, in order to keep YouTube from being a massive bleeding financial wound — what does that mean in terms of potential loss of creativity?
About the comparison to Hulu though — I don’t think the two serve the same function at all, which makes it interesting that the author would compare Hulu and YouTube to Ebay and Amazon — mostly because I don’t see Ebay serving the same function as Amazon either. Both ways, one is primarily business driven and the other consumer driven.
The other hand is, there’s so much chaff on YouTube that it’s damn difficult at any given time to find something worth keeping. So much that perhaps it makes sense to charge a small fee for uploading anything so that perhaps people will quit uploading useless videos that have little to no interest for anyone other than the uploader’s immediate family — if that. 15 hours of video uploaded every minute? That’s a lot of data and a lot of money just hemorrhaging away.
Total tangent: I really like Dota and Boten Anna, but I don’t think the re-makes are as good as the original and I don’t think the new songs are half as catchy as those two. One of the main things about the new songs is that I don’t think the lyrics flow as well and the English sounds a bit choppy. I don’t blame him for “selling-out” because much as people whine about YouTube wonders who go on to *gasp* actually make money, I think people deserve to be recompensed for their art. I can and do blame him for his newer songs which I think are not all that. :P
What I think YouTube could do is to make the BUY FROM AMAZON/ITUNES NAO! buttons more prominent/bigger/ less like an afterthought.
Another tangent: I really don’t understand why the backlash against people wanting to charge for services. I can understand not wanting to pay exorbitant fees for music or whatnot, but I really cannot understand the amount of vitriol that occurs when someone wants to monetize a service that is widely enjoyed that was free. I love the comment left by someone who called Cranius a damn sellout because his album is up for sale at ITunes and Amazon. It’s not even as though he pulled the video from YouTube. Sheesh.
Perhaps the real problem lies not only within the fact that Google doesn’t seem to have found a good business model for what they’re doing on the Internet but lies within the greed of the common user who is unwilling to pay for anything on the Internet. It’s almost as if they were Communists thrust into a capitalist country, the outcry is so great and devout.
I’ve seen it before on blogs where they have so many visitors that they put up ads to cover the hosting costs and suddenly all their followers suddenly hate their guts. Not only do they refuse to ever click to help out the host, but the amount of bitching and slamming is ludicrous and amazing.
Meh. I guess all that I can do is to sit back and watch the fireworks. Hopefully YouTube won’t crash and burn — but then who knows? It might go the way of DeviantArt and that would be interesting.
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09.11.09
Posted in I.T tagged DRM, hacking at 3:43 am by kyrias
I recently received a Kindle as a gift.
I’m rather pleased with it, insofar as now I have something to read on long trips without having to lug a couple dozen books and worry about charging my laptop. It’s certainly a very nice device — it does simulate paper and ink rather well and the lack of having the back-lit screen is rather soothing.
However, I find that because the “Home” button is in a rather poor position, I often hit that button instead of the page back button. Also, I found it rather hard to adjust to having the screen flash black before changing pages, on top of feeling that the pages didn’t refresh quite as fast as I’d like. But those are rather minor quibbles, really.
What I really liked was that you can bind multiple Kindles to the same Amazon account and share books amongst those Kindles. Five, I think the maximum was. There is a catch, of course — I’ll have to secretly download my erotica separately because otherwise my little brother and father will have all too clear an idea of what kind of fluff I’m reading.
What I really disliked was that unless you pay an extra $200+ for the Kindle DX, the Kindle 2 does not support .pdf files. Also, it doesn’t support any of the other popular formats such as .lit, .pdb, etc.
This is rather frustrating in that I have a thousand or so titles on Fictionwise.com and there’s no easy way to get those ebooks onto my Kindle, which is theoretically what I would like to be reading off of. I’m not even going to go into how I feel that if you’ve purchased a print book via Amazon before, you should perhaps be given the option to buy the Kindle version at a discounted price. No matter.
So. Suppose one were to wish to break copyright law to transfer previously purchased, DRMed books onto the Kindle…
I suppose one would search for a Python code named eReader2html.py on BitTorrent. Then one would use that to de-DRM .pdb files and convert them to .html files. If one were to wish to convert .lit files, then there’s the LitConverter.exe, also available through BitTorrent. That program supposedly has the ability to de-DRM .lit files and convert them to .html.
I hear that sometimes the formatting and punctuation can get really messed up with one takes the .html file generated by said rippers and uses Mobipocket Creator to create a file that can be read by Kindle. Some horror story about how it seemed like someone just decided to wildcard punctuation every single time punctuation was used so that the book was essentially near impossible to read. I heard someone mention somewhere that if you CTRL+A, then CTRL+C everything on the .html file and then CTRL+V to a word file, save as a .rtf, then save that as a .html and then use that with Mobipocket Creator this problem might be able to be bypassed. Sounds like quite a bit of work, doesn’t it?
The above is simply intended to illustrate just how difficult these companies are making it for us, the average consumer, to read a book that we have already purchased.
At any rate, that’s the illegal aspect of things. Which, frankly, since I don’t even know how to operate BitTorrent, is slightly beyond my reach anyhow. So I might as well talk about what is within my reach — namely the ethics of doing so.
Personally, I find that DRMs on books is a singularly silly idea.
The thing is: I’ve met my share of Luddites who despise the idea of ebooks already and I’m sure there’s a significant portion of the population who shares their opinion. I myself prefer a paper copy of books when I’m not traveling, because there’s nothing quite like the tactile sensation of a real book, and so far no one has managed to make a ebook that one can easily riffle through.
DRM, in my opinon, are just making it harder for people to get used to the idea of ebooks.
With the “secure” format of ebooks, sometimes it’s an additional hoop to jump through just to be able to read the book in the first place. Secure MS Reader for example, doesn’t allow me to download the files from Fictionwise with my Mozilla browser. Instead, I must needs open up IE under administrative mode, and normal mode would not do either, and download the files that way. Palm eReader requires that I type in my credit card number to unlock my books.
Then there’s the problem of having my e-library scattered across several different reading programs because sometimes a book is just not available in certain formats. The stupidity of that goes without saying. The fact that none of these formats are compatible with other reading programs is another peak of idiocy.
Not least amongst these problems is the fact that if Fictionwise or the company they’re purchasing the book rights from goes offline, there goes a couple thou of my hard-earned money — with nothing to show for it. In fact, it’s already happened once — Fictionwise had a little falling-out with one of their aggregators and a dozen or so of my books were lost. Then there’s the Amazon ebooks that I had purchased in the past — also gone without even so much as a whimper.
I don’t think that’s acceptable.
Also, I feel that if I purchased an ebook, then I should be allowed to modify the file so I can read it on other reading devices without breaking the law. I find it ludicrous that I would have to be stuck reading certain books on certain devices or programs simply because the powers that be said I had to.
No matter that I have no intention or purchasing power to re-purchase the thousand or so titles that I already bought on Fictionwise so that I can read them on the Kindle. No matter that even if some of those titles aren’t available via Amazon.com.
No matter at all.
I think the author of XKCD has it right in this case:
Note: The title of the comic said to steal it. So I did. If there’s any objection, I’ll be more than happy to take down the picture.
Caesura points out that DRM is stupid in any case. Even if the companies managed to find a way to make their DRMed media backwards and forwards compatible with technology, compatible with all the different reading programs and devices out there, and to guarantee that the customer wouldn’t lose their collection simply because the company went offline — it’d still be stupid.
I agree with him.
He pointed out that because he bought a copy of ThouShaltNot’s album and then shared it with a couple of friends who had never even heard of them before — one friend went out and bought their next album. The fact that said friend then hated the album he bought is simply a nice touch of irony icing. Caesura’s sharing the files resulted in a sale they never would have gotten otherwise.
The key point is that they’re under-estimating the human need and desire to own things. Not to mention the more than easy concept that if you introduce something to someone else, then if they like the author/singer/ whathaveyou, then you have potentially expanded their market base.
But then we know all this. I’m just waiting for them to wake up and realize this.
Or barring a sudden ephiphany on their part — Fictionwise should just consider having .prc formats for download so I can upload my books onto the Kindle. That way I don’t have to flirt with the idea of breaking the law.
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07.31.09
Posted in I.T tagged web browsers at 12:51 am by kyrias
I used to like Mozilla a great deal.
Right now though, I’m rather frustrated by it. As of right now, I have decided to swap to using Chrome and ceasing my Mozilla addiction.
The thing is, Mozilla has been crashing a lot lately.
For those that know me and how I use Mozilla — I tend to have a lot of tabs open. Say about 50+ open at any given time.
The thing is, I never used to have Mozilla crash constantly the way it does now. Sometimes it would freeze up and crash after the 100th tab or so, but never like what it is doing now. I think I had Mozilla crash about three times in half an hour today, and that’s just not normal.
Perhaps it’s because I now have more than one Mozilla window open, instead of the 50 or so tabs in one window that I used to do.
Perhaps it’s because Mozilla is now unstable, I have no idea. It certainly seems like it started doing this after the recent patches.
What was really funny today was that Mozilla wanted me to send a bug report and then that crashed and didn’t work. Multiple times.
Chrome is working out ok for me right now. I don’t like that it doesn’t save your tabs for you when it does crash — but considering that I’m not expecting it to, I’m not terribly worried about it. Also, I love how it opens a new link that you click on right next to the original page, so things are more or less better organized than they are in Firefox.
If Chrome ever comes out with a tab saving addon or somesuch, I think I might just abandon Firefox.
So Firefox — fix it, yo.
Now, that’s just special.
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07.12.09
Posted in I.T tagged new-toy-excitement at 12:04 pm by kyrias
I just signed up for Google voice.
I don’t know how much use this is going to get because I only have the one cellphone and I don’t know how possible it will be to make my family switch to Google Voice instead of Skype after hooking them up with Skype — but this is still awesome.
Excerpt from Google Voice voicemail I got — that was transcribed(!) :
Welcome to Google Voice! Google Voice gives you a single phone number that rings all your phones, saves your voicemail online, and transcribes your voicemail to text. Other cool features include the ability to listen in on messages while they are being left and the ability to make low cost international calls. To start enjoying Google Voice, just give out your Google Voice number. You can record custom greetings for your favorite callers or block annoying callers by marking them as SPAM. Just click on the settings link at the top of your inbox. We hope you enjoy Google Voice.
Transcribed voicemails! Even if the technology isn’t mature yet and they might garble up my voicemails, it’s still way cool that they’re offering this service. You even have this cool little button that asks you if the transcription was helpful above the transcription. Unfortunately, this service apparently only works for English, so Chinese is slightly out of the question for now. Even so. I’m psyched.
This is the only fully automated voicemail transcription on the market. This means, however, that it’s not perfect yet. It will improve over time as our transcription engine gets smarter. The quality of the transcripts will vary depending on the caller, the background noise, and whether the caller is using a microphone.
…
There are times when the transcription engine isn’t confident enough to transcribe the voicemail you received. This can happen for example, if the engine detects that the voicemail is not in English or if there is background noise. In these cases Google Voice will display ‘Transcript not available.’
…although I have to admit I’m currently not sure if they still do the voicemail transcriptions if the voicemail is left on my cellphone instead of a call to Google Voice. I think so, though.
I also suggested that they make it so Google Voice can receive faxes. I hope they do implement that, although I’m not sure when I’d have the occasion to get faxes. 
I’m just a new-toy-whore and hey, maybe I’ll be in a position to need that at some point.
What really makes me giggle is that apparently you can blacklist certain people by listing them as Spam.
If you want to sign up for an invitation to Google Voice, do so here. I’m totally waiting to see if I can give this thing a test run, but I need some guinea pigs.
Tell me if you want my GV number!
Updated to add: Apparently people are willing to buy GV accounts because invites are no longer going out. I wonder how much I could sell my account for?
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02.06.09
Posted in I.T tagged bad customer service, morons, wow at 10:14 pm by kyrias
Or both.
So yesterday I was doing a quest in World of Warcraft. The quest objective consisted of obtaining a corpse from a monster in a dungeon and then burning it at an altar.
Sometime halfway through the dungeon I died and was then resurrected. To my surprise, I found that the corpse was gone and there was no way to get another one because we were past that part of the dungeon.
I ticketed a GM about it and he gave me the following answer:
The issue reported above is not considered to be “broken” and should be functioning normally as leaving the instance for any reason will remove this from your inventory.
I said, “WTF?”.
So in order to complete this quest I must needs get through the entire dungeon without dying once? And if so, then some of my group members had died and their corpse didn’t disappear. So I ticketed the GMs again.
I got the following answer:
We apologize for any inconvenience, but for all intents and purposes, that still counts as you leaving the instance.
and in response to my query about my group members not losing their corpse:
Should you require further assistance, please submit another help request the next time you are online. We hope you continue to enjoy your experience in World of Warcraft!
It was signed by Erisilwen.
Erisilwen, you are a fucking retard who has no idea of how to answer questions properly. Telling me to submit yet another help request doesn’t help when I already asked you why my fellow group members who died multiple times in this same instance managed to hold onto their Ahn’Kahar watcher’s corpse when I died once and lost mine.
I stayed online for about three hours waiting for an answer and had to settle for this sort of crap because I logged off. Honestly, this is shitastic customer service.
Learn to answer the question, for fuck’s sake.
And for the record, I think it’s shitty to lose the ability to do this daily just because I died once and it’s even shittier to be the only person who lost the corpse when the group wiped at least once.
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11.15.08
Posted in I.T tagged new toy, useful website at 1:30 am by kyrias
I just recently discovered Foodler.
You can use it to find resturants that will deliever near your house or whereever you want take out sent to. It also has a handy rating system so you can see how other people have rated the place.
You can also place orders with it and earn Foodler points. You can then exchange said points for money to use towards more orders.
So far, I’m liking it. I have no identity theft fear, more fool I, so I saved all my information to it and now ordering food is just a few clicks away.
They have menus online, your last picks, and even how much you have to order minimum before you can get a delievery.
If you blog about the resturants and people go to Foodler through the link you provide, you’ll also get Foodler points.
I’ll be test driving it out and see how it goes.
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11.02.08
Posted in I.T tagged Firefox bookmarks, techy things at 12:49 am by kyrias
By the way — I lost my Firefox bookmarks when I installed the latest version. I have no idea why or if it’s a bug. So, be forewarned if you haven’t upgraded yet that you might lose your bookmarks.
Method 1:
Open Firefox -> Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks ->Import and backup -> Backup
Method 2:
Go to
C:\ Documents and Settings \ “your user name” \ Application Data\ Mozilla \ Firefox \ Profiles \ random characters.default\ Bookmark.html
Copy and paste
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07.31.08
Posted in I.T, Uncategorized tagged trends? at 1:57 am by kyrias
I realized I just spent an hour or so on Yahoo Answers, answering other people’s questions.
It’s really addictive, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Racking up those points, having other suggested questions that are similar to the one you answered — the whole “level” shtick — it seems pretty well designed to appeal to the whole capitalist meritocracy concept.
Snide remarks aside, I do think it’s a fairly brilliant concept. I’ve often found answers to my questions on Yahoo Answers and I think that since there’s a large window of opportunity for people to answer the question and there’s so many people providing answers, there’s a good chance of finding the answer you’re looking for.
Since, when I Google answers to a question, I usually try to find at least three or four source that corraborate each other — it’s been pretty useful to me in that regard. I can compare and contrast answers without opening a zillion Firefox tabs.
On the other hand, what really frightens me is the sheer number of people who aren’t using it as a resource, but seems to just be using it to fish for compliments. Also, people need to learn how to use Google themselves instead of asking patently obvious questions.
It’s the Internets, people, seriously. Use it, love it, don’t obsess over it.
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07.10.08
Posted in I.T tagged computer, Fix-it! at 8:52 am by kyrias
My computer is running abominably slowly — especially with regards to World of Warcraft. It goes without saying that playing an online game isn’t that much fun when your computer is going at about three fps regularly.
I figured that if I defragmented the hard drive and ran a search for spyware then things should run much faster.
Except — my spyware scanner turned up nothing.
Zero. Zip. Nada. Mei you.
I can’t help but think that it’s got to be wrong and that my computer is somehow infected with a horrible virus that actually is masking all the spyware.
I mean, not to be paranoid, but what are the chances of having no spyware on your computer? At all?
I’m planning on downloading a couple more anti-virus/anti-spyware programs and running those, also possibly figuring out how to fix my registry.
Boo. I kind of really just want a new laptop and start fresh. This kind of feels like trying to resurrect a slimy, maggot-infested corpse.
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