teh TODDtastic webLog-a-majig

http://www.macworld.com/article/139333/2009/03/ipod_shuffle_design.html

Apple definitely went to far with this revision of the iPod shuffle. The thing has no buttons at all. They are built into the headphones. So when you loose the headphones, you have to buy special headphones with the controls built in (I’m assuming other companies will develop headphones with controls built in… and charge a premium for them). But the part that will surprise people… is that Apple will still sell the darned thing better than any other companies’ superior MP3 player just because it has the name Apple on it.

Terrible, Apple. Terrible. But please… keep it up. Without Steve around you’re bound to fail anyways.

One thing that seriously annoys me, more than someone that is so hardcore about their religion that they feel everyone has to hear the word of [deity], are people that thank [deity] for their accomplishments. Or on the other side of the spectrum… people that blame [deity] for their lack of accomplishment (and either become to hate [deity] or just brush it off as some master plan).

Do people have no value in themselves or the work that they did to reach a set goal? Do they honestly think that they couldn’t have done it without a character from a book?

It annoys me because it is, in a way, taking any credit you take for an accomplishment (such as winning an Oscar) and making an attempt to shift it to someone else– no mater who that someone else is. It’s analogous to giving credit to your parents every time you make it to class on time, even if there has been no contact with them for several days. I do not go around thanking the sun every time I make it to class on time, nor do I blame the laws of physics when I get a poor grade on a writing assignment. I take full responsibility for my accomplishments or lack there of. I would feel like a jerk if I said “Oh, it wasn’t my doing… it was [deity]’s plan that let me do this.” But when people do thank [deity] for what they do… that is really what I hear. And then I can’t help but think that maybe we should skip the middle man and just go strait to [deity] with any credit we were going to give this person. If don’t feel that it was anything that you did to achieve some recognition for an accomplishment… then you don’t deserve the recognition.

Keep thy religion to thyself. You go and personally thank [deity] on your own time. Thanks.

Last night the power went out from approximately 1:30:44 EST until about 5:45 AM. I had to shut down the server since it was due to thunderstorms and I had no idea how long it would take them to repair the lines. Plus, I needed to save the battery power in case it would become useful for other purposes. I did the same with my desktop, but I kept the network UPS running until its batteries depleated. I also have my cell phone charging off of the network UPS, and I had to charge my phone for the next day.

Then I went to school and I didn’t get my server up and running until about 6:30pm. I know, I know. Unacceptable… but it actually spent more time up than it did during my RAID-5 issues of last week.

Also, I would like to use this opportunity to state that the connection this server runs on is now fatter. Previously we had a 7Mbps/512Kbps, now we have 22Mbps/768Kbps. When we upgraded we thought it was supposed to be 2Mbps up… but clearly Time Warner likes to practice false advertising and they refuse to provide that (even though their infrastructure here is definitely capable of providing it, a la download often reaches 30Mbps). Perhaps in the future they will provide such speed. Either way, we have 50% more upload bandwidth, which should help with handling the high volume of traffic my site gets.

This is a log of the events that happened this week. I am posting this mostly to explain what happened, how I resolved it, and also to state that it will probably happen again in the future. This post may be of great assistance to you if you came across it via google. I know I spent a lot of time dealing with these problems, and lost 200+GB of data (although nothing that was of crucial importance).

If nothing else, the problems I had were not excellently documented on the internet, so hopefully this will serve as such documentation for someone. When searching for the specific errors in dmesg, I found people just saying to ignore them as they were frivolous errors. I did just that until, of course, it turned into a big problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

Slashdot | The Case Against Web Apps.

After reading that…

I also have a case against Web Apps… and it’s as simple as having to remember those times when your Internet is down. Yes, when the Internet is down it already sucks so much because you can’t check your new sites, blogs, podcasts, e-mail, etc. Add on top of that that you can’t watch TV shows on hulu.com or do anything that requires a connection to the Internet… you are screwed.

Having all your apps, such as Word Processors, and any other apps that you might find yourself using on a daily basis for important work… you find yourself completely screwed not having a word processor with you. What if you have a paper due tomorrow that you simply can’y do because your Word processor is on-line and you are not.

As you can see… Computing entirely in the cloud has a significant downfall. So… proceed with caution on that front.

To me it seems like they do. Especially after the release of the new 15″ MacBook Pro.

And now they just released the new 17″ MacBook Pro onto the heap of ’shit professionals don’t want.’

For starters, they are now CHARGING for the Matte screen that used to be a default on these devices! We’ve gone from “Check out out shinny shit at the same price!” to “We like our shinny shit, so we’ll charge you more to have the superior shit because it isn’t as shinny.” Oh well, it’s not that big a deal at only $50.

I guess at least they offer it on the 17″… because the 15″ is still left hanging with a shitty screen. I can’t believe they even had the balls to offer it on the 17″ and not the 15″! That seriously takes some balls! I couldn’t do it if my life depended on it! Professionals prefer accurate screens, believe it or not! And they do not want lighting conditions reflecting back at them!

But that’s fine… Because professionals always want to carry around a 17″ laptop… or do they?

Moving on… the battery really bothers me. Yeah, yeah, they last upto 8 hours (in reality probably only 5-6hrs and only for the first year) and that’s just fine. However… did they just make it non-user-replaceable!??!?!?!?!? On a $3000 laptop!?!?! Are you fucking kidding?!!?! Seriously. I know people that are still carrying around G4 PowerBooks… and I’m sure they’ve had a few batteries. They do not want to be taking it in to a local Apple store and paying someone to replace it for them.

Also, from what I could tell from the pictures shown… the bottom is “sealed” off. I saw no hatch for hard drive or memory replacement. I will not go raging about that until I hear it confirmed that these parts are not supposed to be [easily] user replaceable, but from the looks of it, it seems like they don’t want you opening it yourself… A huge step back for a professional laptop.

(And as a side note on that… if the RAM isn’t user upgradable… no one in their right mind is going to pay $1200 for 8GB of RAM. Is Apple crazy?!)

All-in-all… I really think these recent Pro laptops from Apple are huge leaps backwards when they are supposedly aimed at professionals. It really seems like they are more influenced by the normal consumers than the professionals. Why can’t Apple keep the MacBooks separate from the MacBook Pros? The only practical differences now are the screen size and firewire on the Pros. They even run the same damn chipsets. I really would expect more distinction for a Pro laptop other than size of the Screen and cost.

Apple is really screwing the professionals now. Here is to me not buying another Apple laptop ever again (unless they turn this terrible behavior around). ::clink::

So, I just played a demo of the latest Need For Speed Undercover…. and it is seriously as bad as the last version of the game. It’s the same high speed, shinny roads, with the sun in your eyes crap that it seems Need for Speed is opting for now.

I will admit right now… that I’ve played every single need for speed from the beginning From back when 3D racing was brand new until now. And I might even say that it is a tie between Underground 2 and Porsche Unleashed for my favorites. I’ve been a fan of the entire series and beaten every single one.  At least until Pro Street. I played the Pro Street demo and it was so bad, that I did not even get the full game. And that was a huge disappointment to me. And now that Undercover is equally as bad, I’m really disappointed in EA.

I hope the next one is better so we can move on and just forget about these 2 bumps in the Need For Speed history.

So… consider this my official review on Need For Speed Undercover: It sucks… hardcore.