Viva la POTS

I've had every form of telecommunications service known to man in my house at one point or another. In spite of that, I have steadfastly refused to let Verizon "upgrade" the plain old telephone service on my main line with their FiOS offering. My stubbornness was vindicated this week, as I have lived without power in my house for 7 days now. I have no heat, no internet, marginal cell phone signal, but my telephone has worked flawlessly.

They will have to pry the POTS line from my cold, dead fingers.

Hurricanes - nature's way to wealth redistribution

Hurricane Sandy is expected to do billions of dollars of damage. A pessimist would look on this as a loss, but, ever the optimist, I see this as a wonderful boost to local economies and a redistribution of wealth. There will be basements to pump, trees to clear, windows to replace, roofs to repair, lawn gnomes to recover. Most of this will be done with local labor, putting work in the hands of people who could use it.

In the best cases, insurance claims will be picking up the tab. That's a Robin Hood scenario, where we steal from the dividend payments of stockholders, and place it in the pockets of people who work with their hands. OTOH, I do own stock in insurance companies, and don't work with my hands, so this is not really directly serving my interests. Blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought.

Ubuntu 12.04 - a worthless turd

I've used Ubuntu daily at work and home for the last 5 years. It's been great.

A few weeks ago, I made the mistake of letting the update manager update me to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I have had a barely working system since then.

• 2 displays on an Nvidia card seems completely broken. One of my heads is just dead, no matter what I do.
• It is unstable as a deck of cards on the titanic. Every 30 minutes it freezes, give me a bug report window, and restarts the session manager.
• The new desktop is an abomination, but that's a minor bug. I installed cinnamon to get back to something usable.
• Chrome would not work at all. I had to downgrade to Chromium.
• Networking was broken after the upgrade. In the past, you used to be able to hard assign an IP address, but still use dhcp to get the name servers from the dhcp server. Not any more. The network administration panel seems to have removed most features, so I ended up having to hand edit the start up files to hard assign the name servers.

After 2 weeks of fighting it, there is no alternative than to downgrade back to 10.x or switch to another distribution. And, before you even consider disagreeing with me, let me give you some background.

• I've been using Unix daily since 1978.
• I've written and modified various X window and session managers.
• I've written network trace analyzers.
• I've shipped several commercial software products, that had to install correctly and I had to support when they didn't work.

I'm not some noob off the street. When I conclude 12.04 was not ready to ship, it's because I recognize that it really is too unfinished to give to experts, let alone casual users.

The ITU should stop thinking it can run the internet

The ITU is a closed organization for governments to set up treaties about how communications will work. It wants to set the rules for the internet. That's not a good thing.
https://www.accessnow.org/page/s/itu

WTF: Milliwave XRay at Madison, WI Airport?

Why, I ask myself, why.

The Milliwave X-Ray is not proven safe, not proven to be trustworthy, but it makes good security theater. Why put it in a backwoods airport?

And why, if the TSA is going to deploy these things, can't they put up proper signage? Any frequent traveller knows that you can't have any paper in your pockets at all. That means cash in the pocket goes into your carry-on. Throw out all your tissues. Yet, they let the herds approach the checkpoint with no warning, so we're stuck waiting behind a line of people who take 45 seconds each, because they have no clue what to do.

Cleaning up the basement

I've been trying to sort out and clean up 25 years of accumulated junk in my basement. There is a lot of stuff my wife keeps making me keep. I just printed a label for a box which reads "OMG! More fucking wicker baskets."

A Dish (Network) of ESPN

You have to love affiliate marketing. My son-in-law, who has no permanent address in the US yet, subscribes to one US publication - ESPN News. It comes to my home.

It's fun to see his junk mail. This week it was from Dish Network. That's logical.If you like to read about sports, you must want to watch it on TV. So ESPN happily sells your information to Dish Network.

Let's see what comes next week.

I hate legal documents

From a patent app:

A Web service comprising: one or more processors; a computer-readable medium coupled to the one or more processors having instructions stored thereon that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations comprising: ...


Umm, doesn't that mean "A web service"

So close to believable

It appears that the producers of Glee have taken ratings grabbing to the logical conclusion by secretly killing Whitney Houston in order to make one of this episodes songs a sensation instead of an facile choice for Valentine's Day.

Why I won't buy downloadable software from Staples any more

It is tax time, so I needed this year's TurboTax. I had some Staples rewards credits, so I decided to buy it from them. I have no need for a CD, so I opted for the downloadable version. After purchase, when I got the download link I was presented with a dialog that said I must install the Akamai Netsessions Interface to continue with the download. I did the intelligent thing and clicked the link which said something like "I can't install the Netsessions Interface". That gave me a plain URL for the TurboTax .dmg file. It downloaded in less time than it would have taken to click through the license agreement and installer for the Akamai tool.
I was disappointed with this experience, so I sent feedback to Staples. Their response just added to the disappointment - a combination of corporate doublespeak and the typical public relations technique of explaining why it's a good thing we dumped toxic waste on you.

Staples: On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Staples.com wrote:
Hi Toni, I received your concerns regarding the Staples Download Manager or also know as the Akamai Netsessions Interface.

Tony, not Toni.

Staples: The Interface utilizes a limited amount of your upload bandwidth and PC resources to connect to a peer network, which improves download speed and reliability for you and other end users of the Akamai Netsessions Interface.

Let me translate that into plain language for you. What you have described is essentially bittorrrent. It pushes the cost of large download capability from Staples on to the shoulders of Staple's customers. In a nutshell, this has no benefit for me, but reduces costs for you. Additionally, it requires me to install another piece of software on my machine which I can not independently inspect.

Staples: You are able to read the full License Agreement before choosing to download.

Ah, but you don't get to read the Licence Agreement before purchase. That's what counts. Also, you should not equate the words in a license agreement with an assessment of the safety of installing a piece of software on a particular computer. In most corporations, installing the Akamai download client would require a separate security review.

Important note: Akamai Netsession is required to download successfully. If not already installed on your computer, you will be prompted to download it to continue your installation. This information was listed under the click her on Staples.com with the Questions about downloading software?

That's patently untrue, since I was able to download the .dmg file by clicking on the "I'm having trouble downloading" (or whatever it was) link. That got me a direct URL for the file.

Thank you for this opportunity to respond to your inquiry. I hope you will continue to look to Staples with confidence and satisfaction for all of your office supply needs.
If you would like to speak with one of our representatives, please reply to this email or contact us at the number listed below.

Sigh. I appreciate the fact that they are trying to save money by pushing their download costs onto their users. But please, don't try to BS a person who points that out by telling them it so their advantage.