What the hell?

Preparing for download? What the hell does that mean? As far as I know, the only preparation required to download a file is to clear off some mpegs to make room for it. I wonder what it’s doing…

I swear, this must be in the Texas Driver License Handbook:

1. Every time you touch the turn signal lever, Jesus cries. So never, EVER use it.
2. What the “Speed Limit” sign really means is “Never Go This Speed”. Go 20 MPH faster, or 20 MPH slower, but never go that speed. This is Texas, we do things differently here. Bonus: If someone in front of you happens to have the audacity to drive at the speed on the sign, be sure to drive no more than 3 feet behind them, beep your horn, and rev your engine. Double Bonus: Do this even if there is a passing lane.
3. The person with the brightest headlights wins. So get the brightest bulbs you can find, and keep your high-beams on at all times, even during the day! Also, have your mechanic aim your low-beams at an angle matching where other drivers’ eyes will be. Bonus: Have each high and low bulb aimed in a different direction. Double Bonus: Also aim your driving/fog lights into the eyes of other motorists.
4. All pickup trucks must have a ground clearance of above 3 feet, or below 3 inches. Trucks with the higher clearance must also have at least two of the following:
   • Even more blinding lights on a bull bar or roof bar
   • 49-inch diameter mud tires
   • 6-inch diameter quadruple exhaust pipes
5. There is no such thing as a four-way stop. Stopping is for pussies. Even a brief decrease in speed is pushing it, you pansy.
6. The safe minimum distance from oncoming traffic while turning onto a road from an intersecting road is 12 feet.
7. Right-of-way is based on vehicle size, not position, direction of turn, or order in queue.
8. When in doubt, lean on your horn, flash your high-beams furiously, and run the motherfucker off of the road.

Well, if I’m buying a new case… why not do some upgrades while I’m at it? I’ve been running a sort-of new-ish Pentium 4 3.2GHz box for a while, but AGP graphics and DDR-400 memory are starting to get a bit out of date, and I could surely use a boost in performance.

Here’s where Gateway enters the picture. Not so long ago, Lance bought a Gateway desktop PC with a quad-core AMD Phenom processor. Since then, he had pretty much replaced every part within the machine, including the aforementioned case. The only original components were the memory and the processor.

So, Lance agreed to sell me the Gateway motherboard, the ATI HD 2400XT video card, and the 3.5GB of memory from the original machine, as he was planning to buy new memory at Fry’s when we went to grab my 690 case. All I had to do now was order a processor for my new rig (hard disks, optical drives, and power supply were being pulled from my previous beast, no need to re-purchase what I already own). I opted for the much-praised AMD Athlon X2 6000+.

My agonizing wait began. I ordered the chip on Saturday, and since Newegg doesn’t process squat on the weekend, that meant it wouldn’t even be packed until Monday, and with UPS “three day” shipping, it wouldn’t arrive at its final destination until Thursday. Lame! Alright, I can be patient, it will just make the assembly all the more gratifying.

Thursday finally comes around, and my wife sends me a message telling me that a box from UPS has been delivered. Oh glorious day! My processor is here! Woohoo! So, I spend the next 4 hours at work, counting the milliseconds until it’s time to go home.

5:45 PM, and I can no longer wait. To hell with 6:00, I have a computer to build! I spend 30 minutes in rush hour traffic (”get out of the way you assholes, you’re proc-blocking me!”) and finally get home, and there it is, in all its transistor-filled glory. My new processor. I inhale a sandwich, rip the parts out of my current computer which will be surviving the upgrade, pack it all up and head over to Lance’s house where the new parts have been patiently waiting since Sunday.

Yes, finally! I connect everything, install the processor, memory, and drives, and seal it up. Time to fire it up! Awesome! Woohoo…. wait… why did it just turn itself off?

-Click-
-Whirrrrrrrrrrclick-
-Silence-

That is the sound of the computer powering on, everything spinning up, and then turning itself off.

What. The hell.

We go through the standard troubleshooting process of reseating all of the components, and when that didn’t fix it, disconnecting components one by one in an attempt to isolate the culprit. After a good hour of troubleshooting in vain, Lance produces a hypothesis. He’s had a Gateway PC in the past, and noted that when he tried to swap its processor, it would no longer boot - Gateway had hard-coded the motherboard’s BIOS to only work with the processor Gateway supplied with it.

Could this be the case with this Gateway motherboard as well? Only one way to find out for sure - we drag my new rig over to his desk and swap our processors. My Athlon X2 booted up fine in his XFX motherboard, and his Phenom X4 booted up perfectly in the Gateway motherboard.

Son of a bitch! Gateway, in all of their profiteering wisdom, has crippled this motherboard to only work with an AMD Phenom X4 9500. Those sneaky bastards! They have ensured that if you want to upgrade, you must purchase a whole new computer from them. Sound familiar? -COUGHappleCOUGH-

After a few moments of fervent WTFing, Lance, in an epic friendship maneuver, offers to trade processors for the time being so that I could have a working rig. (Thank you, Lance, I am truly grateful :) )

This experience, combined with the living hell I had to go through to find Windows XP drivers for my Gateway laptop, has firmly ensured that I will never buy another Gateway product as long as I live. How dare they attempt to dictate what their customers can do with their products once they have purchased them? These computers are their customers’ property, Gateway has no right to cripple the systems to force customers to purchase an entire new computer rather than just upgrade a processor. Bad business practice, there.

So, in summary:

Bite me, Gateway.

This works for most clients, but unfortunately there are still those who wish they had the freedom to completely individualize their VPS/VDS for their own purpose.

Enter Webbynode. Webbynode is a new kind of VPS service provider. It’s not a cookie-cutter mass-market profit-by-volume solution as you see from the likes of Godaddy, but rather a completely customizable system which allows you to configure your “Webby” exactly how you want it.

You can even easily cluster multiple “Webbies” together for redundancy and increased performance.

If you’re a VPS/VDS client, I recommend checking Webbynode out: http://www.webbynode.com/

1. Costs $400
2. Does all these great things… which Palm and Windows Mobile devices have done for like 8 years.

I have mobile service through Sprint PCS (love them, customer service blows AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon out of the water. My unlimited data plan was free, thank you very much!). I originally had the free phone, which was a Razr, which recently died. So, I needed a new phone.

Scouring eBay, I found a pretty sweet deal on a Palm Treo 650 Smartphone. It’s 4 years old, and I paid $80 for it. Now, to prove to you that my 4-year-old USED Treo is better than a brand new $400 iPhone, I will compare the so-called “revolutionary” (quoted from Apple.com) features of the iPhone against those of my Treo:

There you have it.. a side by side comparison between the $400 iPhone, and my $80 used Treo 650 from 2004. There are only two things the iPhone has that my Treo doesn’t:

1. Visual Voicemail
   But who the hell cares? Is it really worth $400 just to have a list of my voicemails? Come on.
2. WiFi
   This is truly a gimmick when included with any phone. If you have a smart device like an iPhone, Treo, or other smartphone, you are primarily going to be in places where there isn’t any WiFi at all, and you’ll have to use your mobile data service from your provider. Considering unlimited data for most providers is like $15 a month… why the hell would I even NEED WiFi? I have a permanent 3mbps connection, no matter where I am. Always. Don’t need WiFi on my cell phone.

Apple has some serious nerve to claim that anything in their iPhone is “new”, let alone “revolutionary”. Read this carefully, iFags: It’s just a phone. Oooh, you got a weather report on it. So did I, and it was loaded 3 times as fast, since my Sprint Treo is on EV-DO, and not EDGE. That’s the other thing.. AT&T kind of sucks… a lot. If the iPhone really was the best phone ever (it isn’t, but this is a what-if) it would still be worth getting a “lesser” phone, just to avoid AT&T.

I can install any program I want onto my Treo, for free. Hell, if I so desired, I could even write my own native apps. iPhone? The closest thing it has is webpages that fit on its screen. Seriously.. dudes.. wtf. That is lame.

The whole ‘triangulate your location for the mapping thing’ is pretty bogus, too. Most people have experienced an accuracy of something along the lines of 300 yards. It may just be me, but doesn’t that sound a bit.. you know… COMPLETELY FUCKING USELESS?! Three football fields?! Yeah thanks Apple, but I could have guesstimated my location to within 300 yards for free all on my own. With the Treo, it costs extra, but I can get a GPS SDIO card with software that will pinpoint my ass right down to 3 yards. That’s 9 feet. I could actually navigate with that.

Besides, any real geek would never touch a phone that couldn’t SSH into their Linux or UNIX server:

Screenshot of justice right there. SSH’ing into my Linux box while taking a dump. Pure geekery, brought to you by the Palm Treo.

Down with the iPhone(y)!

In other words… Amber and I are having a fucking BABY…

…and I just remembered ever single bit of mischievous bullshit my parents had to deal with. Guess I better find a sturdy helmet and a good way to get dried ketchup out of cinder block basement walls.

CLICK HERE FOR THE DRIVERS!

Late last year, I purchased a Gateway MT3421 notebook from Office Depot to replace my damaged and unusable Toshiba Satellite M45. At this point, I wish I had bought another Toshiba.

I have spend the past 5 months trying to find a complete set of Windows XP drivers for this machine, as it came pre-installed with Vista, and I don’t want Vista. This has not been an easy task, but I have finally come out on top, and there are no more yellow (!) in my device manager! Hooray!

To aid those facing similar issues with this particular notebook, I am redistributing the drivers here for everyone.

Note: These will ONLY work with Gateway MT3421. If you have another Gateway model, you’ll need to search elsewhere, and I wish you the best of luck. Without any further ado, the drivers:

nVidia Chipset Driver: . . . . . 84 MB

nVidia Display Driver: . . . . . 46 MB

LAN Driver:. . . . . . . . . . . 40 MB

HDA 56k Modem Driver:. . . . . . 822 KB

RealTek WiFi Driver: . . . . . . 167 KB

SigmaTel HD Audio Driver:. . . . 8 MB

Coprocessor Driver:. . . . . . . 172 KB

Snow 2

I just had some comments.

How do you propose ISPs tackle the problem of file-sharing and illegal downloads?

We understand ISPs can’t monitor all the content going through their pipes. What they could do is, where it has been demonstrated their customers have abused rights holders’ intellectual property and we provide evidence of this, they should close the accounts of those particular customers.

Why? Close the account? No warning? No investigation? What about people stealing WiFi? It’s not always the account holder who is committing the crime.

Once people see you can’t use the internet for illegal activity, because you’ll lose your account, that will act as a deterrent.

Uhhmm… no… it won’t. It will just piss people off, especially those who are wrongly accused.

Secondly, like the insurance industry, the ISPs could compile a register of customers that have been investigated and been found to be abusing the terms and conditions of the ISPs, whereupon they shouldn’t be conducting illegal activity.

Whereupon? What is this, 1869? Anyways, what right does the ISP have to share that information with another private organization? Certainly that violates the customer’s right to privacy, regardless of whether or not they (allegedly) violated the terms and conditions.

Then these people would have no place to hide by going from one ISP to another.

You speak as if people who download pirated software are career criminals who should be cut off from society. “No place to hide.” Who are we talking about, here? Software pirates, or serial killers? Regardless, what’s stopping them from hopping on someone else’s unsecured WiFi? Or getting a cellular phone with Internet access? Are you going to ban them from mobile phone providers as well? Isn’t that a little excessive?

With unsecured wireless accounts and file-sharers potentially falsifying their IP address, isn’t there a danger innocent people are going to find themselves cut off?

This is part of an education process now. There is so much protection available to people: if I use my wireless here, it will show three or four wireless networks around me, but they are heavily encrypted and it’s not possible to do it. The technology’s there to stop that happening.

Just because the technology exists doesn’t mean that everyone uses it, or is obligated to. Until I see legislation written stating that WiFi users are required to encrypt their network, this is bunk. If I forget to lock the door to my house, and someone walks in and steals my computers, and then proceeds to burn my house down, does that mean it’s actually my fault, and I am not only no longer entitled to help from the Police, but also guilty of grand theft and arson? Utterly ridiculous.

Furthermore, “protection”? Please. WEP encryption can be cracked in 10 minutes with some very simple tools, and a crappy laptop. WPA takes a little bit longer, but is similarly easy to circumvent. Heavily encrypted is a severe overstatement. Both WEP and WPA are very insecure encryption schemes, and saying that it is not possible to use an encrypted wireless network without knowing the key is simply an outright fallacy, put out there by a software industry lobbyist who doesn’t know the first thing about the very industry he represents, let alone the technologies that support it.  

Lame, lame, lame, lame, lame. FAST, you aren’t protecting software vendor’s rights, you are scapegoating the users for the vendors’ greed.