Posts by Peter Ramins

Bush makes last-minute grab for civil liberties

The last thing

My country did to make me proud...

Well, the ongoing space efforts.

That's it.

So we got NASA going on for us, at least. Until the TSA starts hassling astronauts.

US judge decrees open source licenses valid

oustanding.

And here we have copyright doing what it should do. Who knew it could do that?

Senator slams DHS boss over border laptop searches

Don't you get it?

I have some really snide comments, but I find I don't want to post them because I used my real name.

Which... I guess is comment enough in its own right, sadly.

Stormtrooper helmet sales still legal in Britain

License?

George, are you that hard up for cash (we know you're not) that you couldn't just grandfather in a generous licensing scheme (and maybe have him include some pamphlets for YOUR stuff in the box) for this guy?

I mean, since he was sort of instrumental in the creation of one of the most iconic elements of the entire Star Wars universe... seems like you could dig deep and find a soft spot for his him.

A few dollars (or pounds, euros, whatever) per suit, what do you say?

Yahoo! shoots DRM servers, swallows keys to tunes

Can we call these services what they really are?

You don't buy music from an online DRM repository.

You rent it.

When the service goes tits up, there goes your ongoing rental. (Even if you paid the entire rental fee upfront.)

Grissom bows out of CSI

Meh.

Peterson did alright in CSI, adding most of the life to the show, and certainly adding an ongoing focus of interest... but he is not all that.

If you've seen 1986's Manhunter aka Red Dragon bla bla Hannibal Lecter, then... you know he has some absolutely dodgy acting roots.

eBay breaks bread with luxury goods firms

This is just ridiculous.

I imagine the newspapers across the pond have an equivalent to our 'classifieds' section, in which people can list items for sale with a telephone number and then sell them to interested parties. If I answered an ad for an HDTV and it turned out to be a 'Sorny' or 'Magnetbox' on closer inspection after purchase, I wouldn't hold the paper liable for facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods.

What ebay really needs is better tracking of just who is the person or entity behind the accounts. If I do buy a counterfeit something from ebay when I'm expecting the real deal, it would be nice to be able to get justice or a refund and not just be totally screwed, which is usually the case. Ebay should be working on making their service safer overall, and all of these other little problems would be a lot more accountable for it.

If Tiffany really wants to have some inspection power, they can offer to appraise the items that buyers receive, and then pursue the sellers at their discretion.

Intel stinks

For shame Intel

And Motorola, providing the industrial economic foundation that created the jobs that pay for whatever services these malcontents work at that allowed them to buy new homes.

Pull up stakes and move somewhere else. How about near me? I'd love to work for Intel. =)

Microsoft dropped Vista hardware spec to raise Intel profits

@David Wiernicki

This situation isn't over claims of anti-competitive practices, it's over claims of deceptive and misleading advertising practices.

I'm going to open a gas station, fill the pumps with 70 octane "gas" and label them "90 octane compatible."

Your car will still MOVE, you just won't like the experience. The flip side is opening up a car dealership and selling cars that require aviation gasoline and telling people they can use 87 octane.

I don't care if Microsoft did this "to help Intel out." That's beside the point - THEY would clearly benefit with a likely sale of the Vista OS at some point as well, all based on a faulty premise of "it will work well!"

When you see a "Vista capable" badge or sticker on a machine you're considering purchasing, the natural assumption is that it will run the OS with no hiccups or problems, not be sluggish or require you to turn off large feature sets of the operating system.

But really...

The problem here isn't REALLY that Microsoft claimed that the 915's gfx hardware (and similar) was enough to run Vista... The problem is that Microsoft bulled ahead and released a piece of shit OS that ran like crap on chipsets with "broad availability in the market." You know - the majority of PCs in the market (both business and home) can't run Vista NEARLY as well as they run XP or 2k (or any flavor of *nix you happen to love, like Ubuntu as an example).

...When there was absolutely no need to do it. Now we have businesses with new Vista machines and employees thereof that can't even do simple things like print to a network printer. People with "Vista capable" machines that act like XP installed on a 64mb p2 machine. Let's not even get into the clusterfuck that is Vista's DRM. Good going Microsoft, way to meet your market.

Yahoo! backs! OpenID!

haha

I just never! get tired! of these headlines!

Google funds hold Firefox fate (for sure)

Still not right...

I've never 'been plagued' by google's ads. They're like ads should be - not intrusive, not irritating, not huge, and hey! - occasionally they're even relevant!

I really think AdBlock has lost it's way. A significant portion of the internet I like to visit depends on ad revenue, and they've done it by depending on sedate and reasonable ad content. No matter, AdBlock has recently (the last year-ish or so?) been rather indiscriminate in what gets blocked.

Punch the monkey to win a prize? Yeah, block that damn thing.

Unobtrusive silent small little old google ads? Who on earth is bothered by those?

Dutch Consumer Association declares war on Vista

Fock Vista.

All the people saying "it's likely just old computers with a problem" - you're sort of missing a pretty large point.

It's not up to Microsoft to tell people when to upgrade their computers, and it's certainly not up to Microsoft to FORCE people to upgrade their computers. Honestly, so long as the hardware lasts, a modern office could easily survive and thrive day-to-day ops on early 90s hardware AND software, Blackberries not withstanding.

It's a huge racket. Let's release a new office suite every 2 years that really doesn't offer ANYTHING new over the previous release, certainly not enough to justify a full point release, but let's get it bundle with new computers so people into "old office trying to open new office document" problems as often as possible, and maybe they'll run out and drop $400 on the new copy.

It's the same thing with the OS. Win2k is still a fine operating system. In fact, if you strip XP of 90% of the stuff that pisses people off, you're left with... 2k. Except hey, I have an idea, even though the operating systems are virtually identical from a hardware standpoint, let's make it so drivers will refuse to work on 2k installs even though there is no real reason they couldn't. Maybe this way people will go out and buy XP upgrades.

Same with Vista, except Vista's growing pains are far worse than XP's ever were. My particular favorite thing about Vista is how it requires ~700mb of ram footprint to... show you a desktop, if you have the bells and whistles turned on. Wow, that's efficiency. Good jorb, Microsoft. Get any handjobs from the hardware lobby lately?

Hugo Chavez rails against teen Bulgarian airbags

So seriously...

I'm uninformed about Chavez's normal operations. I'm assuming he's making occasional trips to his local town square to leave his unneeded goods like refrigerators and whatnot, right?

Right?