E-Dribble

I tend to get giddy when stories ridiculing various targets of opportunity overlap.  In a story that might leave me smiling for weeks, Techdirt has regaled us with the potential fantasticalness  of both “The Cloud” and Microsoft.

Microsoft bought out Danger, the maker of the Sidekick phone.  One of the phone’s main selling features was that your data was stored on remote servers.  I know, how fucking handy is that, right?

(continue reading…)

There’s a lot of technological advancements that fall short of their potential, not because of any shortsightedness during development, but because idiots and lemmings are the first to embrace said technology, causing all future effort to be spent on developing for asshats.

Twitter.  This is definitely one of those technologies.  Let’s not talk about a company that can’t even manage to turn a buck off of the most malleable and gullible of society.  No, let’s talk talk about a company that can successfully exploit those people.  Let’s talk about the iPhone.

(continue reading…)

I’ve mentioned before my amazement that Microsoft allows Steve Ballmer to speak to anyone, much less to someone with a tape recorder.

From an interview concerning Microsoft’s new mobile phone software:

“Free is not a business model,” he said. “We are a commercial company, we will look to gain revenue and profit from our activities. You’ll have to ask our competitors if they’ll make money on free things.”

So it’s Microsoft’s official stance that free isn’t a business model, huh Steve? Maybe he meant aside from browsers, search apps, malware removers, and the hundred or so other downloads that Microsoft themselves offer.

Ok, maybe he meant “free as in speech” isn’t a business model? I guess not.

Either Steve has been calling in sick for a very, very long time or as I’ve long suspected, he’s just a complete idiot that is still employed only because he knows the boss.

Way to go, Steve.

As an early Christmas present, my lovely wife allowed me to purchase a computer to replace my aging work machine.  So I bought a new gaming computer.

Wait a steenking meenoot.  I know what you’re thinking.  I was supposed to be buying a work computer.  Here’s how you too can manage to get a new gaming computer any time you need a work computer.

I purchase the snazziest gaming computer I can afford without making us homeless, then relegate the old gaming machine to work detail.  In this case, I’m getting a quad core 2.4 ghz/4mb ram with a 9xxx Nvidia card as a work machine.  The new machine is almost identical, but with dual graphics cards.

<insert evil laugh here>

I’ve already burnt the latest iso’s for the distro’s I’m going to try on it.  I don’t know what I’ll settle on but I can say that I’m going for ease of use.  I don’t think I’ll stick with Dreamlinux this time around.  I’m probably either going to go with Mint, Ubu or Fedora.  Fedora is comfortably familiar, Ubu is popular enough to have tons of apps and mods available and Mint takes a kitchen sink approach to dirty stuff, which I like.

It will be the first time I’ve ever run linux on a machine from this decade, so I’m understandably excited to see the results.

I’m wondering if any of them will install drivers for the stupid miniviewer that’s built into the case.

Another week in the news and while Microsoft continues pushing their next big OS and Mac releases another commercial making fun of Windows, the open source community deliberates on why there’s so much sexism in the FOSS world. It’s not the first time that the question has been raised in the community.

While I wait for the people that develop my OS to put on their big-boy pants and join the adult world, I have time to wonder how we got the reputation that we did.  I mean, let’s be honest with ourselves.  In spite of the fact that inarguably *nix is a better foundation upon which to build an OS, a very small percentage of the technical community takes the movement seriously.  I have my own suspicions but to be honest, I’m cynical, jaded and very often wrong.  I try to at least challenge my preconceptions and prejudices, so I won’t waste anyone’s time putting them to paper.  Instead of my canned rhetoric, I’m hoping for some enlightenment.

(continue reading…)

If there was any part of your being, no matter how small, that thought the techs at BestBuy had any knowledge concerning computers, this should snuff that out.

Microsoft partnered with BestBuy to create a tutorial/exam designed to show the techs why Microsoft Windows 7 was a superior choice to linux.

I shit you not when I say that it’s a fantastic read.  The original post lost it’s images, but I’ve linked to a mirror, so hopefully you will get to witness exam in all it’s bullshit.

Opera 10 has been released to great fanfare and many news outlets are taking the time to let us know how great it is.  Cnet wants us to know about the great game widgets you can install on it.

There’s still no easy way to block ads.  But you can now play basketball with it.

Opera has stated that it won’t implement an ad blocking measure into the browser for altruistic reasons.  They don’t feel that they  have the right to strip content providers of income.

In reality, it wasn’t too long ago that Opera was forcing you to look at ads that they embedded in their own browser if you opted not to pay for a web browser.

So, it’s simple.  They feel a kinship to people serving ads.

For those that missed it though, you can now play basketball in Opera.

Just what we needed.

This is the first legitimate thing I’ve found Twitter being used for. Hackers have begun utilizing Twitter to control bot-nets, posting encrypted URL’s to other control and info centers that infected computers monitor to retrieve updated data.  As more people come to realize that Twitter is something you use in lieu of having a life, it’s refreshing to see it get used to it’s full potential.  Between this and the recent DDoS attacks on the service, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has decided that he has figured out how to save the internet from DDoS attacks and other nefarious actions happening inside the various tubes of the intardnet.  His proposal?  Kick Windows off of the web.  His reasoning is along the lines that Windows is terribly insecure and linux is impervious to bad people.

After his attention grabbing headline, used to ensure that he’s gotten you all riled up, he completely dismisses his proposal and waters it down to “patch your OS before being allowed on the web”.

Regardless, his points concerning the inferiority of Windows made me smile.  People being completely wrong tend to elicit that reaction from me.

(continue reading…)

I found this article in my feed reader this morning, which piqued my interest because, as you all know, I think the mind numbing number of forks is one of the most asinine aspects of linux.

Sadly, it was hard to follow the article long enough find any merit in his opinions.  I couldn’t get past the written lashing he assigned to the poor bastard he quoted at the start of his post. Since quotation marks were used in his article, I was made aware that he was  quoting someone.  If there was any doubt however, he did name the author of the missive prior to the actual quote.  In spite of this, he used my favorite quoting tool, (sic).  Meaning thus or so, this allows the reader to understand that the written error belongs to the person quoted and not the person quoting.  Additionally, it lets the reader know that the author feels that the quotes alone weren’t enough to ensure that the reader blame someone other than the author.

But wait, there’s more.

(continue reading…)