Still A Fan Of Netflix

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Zakhar

I have been a Netflix customer for a long time. I’m so glad they decided to keep “partitioned accounts” after announcing they were going to get rid of them. In the past, they reversed a price increase. Recently, they did not back down after splitting disc and streaming plans (but that one didn’t bother me even though it costs me more). Today, I found out their plan to turn the disc plan into Quickster has been abandoned. This is the third major reversal that I have been happy to watch Netflix make. Read the Netflix blog post announcement.

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Ad-free site to check my IP address

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Zakhar

check my IP address at address.cat

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Piracy Is Lending, Not Theft

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Zakhar

I’ve said this for a long time, but my audience is very small, so I’m glad someone with a bigger audience agrees (video below). I’m not ripping off artists if I download their works for free. I don’t think (m)any are. The way I look at it, I give as much as I can. Does that mean I should be barred from the rest? No. Frankly, if the completely legitimate practices of lending and time-shifting are combined, then what we’re doing is totally fine. There’s no way that all of us listening to our collections all at once can add up to the amount of playtime that accumulates from the CDs that have been bought and are just sitting on shelves somewhere. File sharing isn’t theft; it’s (the high tech version of) lending plus time shifting — both of which have been vindicated in U.S. courts.

Neil Gaiman talks to the Open Rights Group about how the internet affects the books and publishing industry

Now if only we could get people to realize copyright (and intellectual property rights) are a big deal. It affects starvation, disease, war, etc., and needs to be reasonable.

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ps.mu noise music iec5010

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Zakhar

ps.mu IEC5010 (noise) Music

A project from more than a few years ago finally surfaces on the web.

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A “Real” Artist Gets It

Posted on January 22, 2011 by Zakhar

The bit about being inspired by those artists that step before you was interesting, but I’m glad to see Francis Ford Coppola pondering the same idea (of artists making a living) I wrote about a couple years ago:

Francis Ford Coppola On Art, Copying And File Sharing: We Want You To Take From Us

… who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

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How to login to the Magnatune app for iPhone iOS

Posted on January 15, 2011 by Zakhar
Magnatune: We Are Not Evil

Magnatune: We Are Not Evil

I’m a Magnatune lifetime member. First thing I wanted to know was how to login to the iPhone app, so I don’t have to hear the spoken message at the end of each track (placed there because every song is free to hear for non-members). It took me a bit, but it’s mentioned on a blog post about the iPhone app: Magnatune iPhone app (but not on Magnatunes page for the app).

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Bandwidth Caps Are Deceptive

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Zakhar

[truck with the word "Scam" on it]

Data Caps Are A Scam. We paid for big trucks, but we have to drive them nearly empty. (photo by Jean-Etienne Poirrier)

Time to revisit my post, “Dramatically Lower Bandwidth Cap” from May 30. It turns out it sparked a mini debate. I am disappointed with joetron2030′s suggestion to “leave” the offending ISP. It seems that Clear does offer uncapped service (but for how long: “… there is pretty strong language in Clear’s Acceptable Use Policy about not hogging bandwidth …“), but there are no other cap-less broadband providers where I live. And Clear is a wireless broadband which doesn’t reach into every home. But more importantly, Earthlink is the alternative ISP — that’s why I signed up with them instead of using (TimeWarner when I signed up, but now) Comcast.

joetron2030′s suggested that this may lead to tiered service. This could be a step in the right direction–but not with data caps. I understand the ISP wanting to manage the network, but they shouldn’t advertise 10+ Mb/s as the speed when we’re really only allowed 0.761 Mb/s to stay within the cap for the month.

It’s okay with me if they offer different speeds, not different caps (and they better not even think about metering per bit). With the 250 gigabyte cap, that’s a less-than-1-megabit-per-second connection. Advertising 10+ is very deceptive. With a 10-megabit-per-second connection, we’ve paid for over three thousand gigabytes per month (edit 8/3: even if it’s 5-megabit, that’s over 1,500 gigabytes per month). 250 is less than 1% of 3,000.

If ISPs really want to worry about network congestion, then they should limit the speed of the “more than 99% of customers” who stay within the 250 gigabyte cap. Otherwise those customers are bursting at high speed at random intervals. I doubt that’s good for the health of the network. It’d be better to trickle spread their data use evenly through the month. But let them know they are getting a (less than) 1 megabit connection, and charge them far less than you’re charging now.

I think the price now is still too high for the (about) 10-megabit connection, but if ISPs introduced the lower priced 1-megabit connection, then I could see them keeping the current price for the current speed (but repeal the data cap!).

Edit (8/1) with this waking thought: You should make me an ally instead trying to squeeze me out because I am an example of your future customers. Soon we’ll all stream audio and video, back up our media collections to the cloud, download apps, patches, and even OS ISOs, and other yet-to-be-thought-of innovative uses of the internet. If you want us to pick you as our ISP for this (instead of completely abandoning you, so you go out of business), then it’s time to start showing you value all 100% of your customers.

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negative income tax

Posted on July 17, 2010 by Zakhar

Even though I’d prefer to go to a capitalistic system which only has sales tax, if we’re stuck with income tax, negative income tax (Wikipedia) seems a reasonable idea.

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Removing Adobe Bonjour CS3 to fix 0.0.0.0 Gateway Address (I hate Adobe)

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Zakhar

In my top 100 things that piss me off is Adobe. I think their motto is “Mistreat Your Users.”

I found hundreds of pages on this issue, but only one full solution (and it wasn’t from Adobe) to remove Adobe Bounjour installed with CS3 which causes network problems. Thank you to Raine at TechArena Community. Reposted here just in case: Continue reading →

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America is NOT a Christian Nation

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Zakhar

I realize it’s more complicated, historically, than these “sound bites,” but the campaign is on the right track: New FFRF Bus Sign Campaign “America is NOT a Christian Nation”

["The United States is not founded on the Christian religion." - John Adams, Treaty of Tripoli, 1797]

["Question with boldness even the existence of a God." - Thomas Jefferson] ["The United States government is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion." - President John Adams, Treaty of Tripoli, 1797]
["I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute." - John F. Kennedy] ["Religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together." - James Madison]
["My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." - Thomas Paine] ["No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office of public trust under the United States." - U.S. Constitution, Article 6, Section 3]

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Does Not Put Me Off

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Zakhar

I realized if I (ha ha) ever wanted to go mainstream, I’ll have to rename this site. Changing “piss” to “put” would be easy enough.

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Dramatically Lower Bandwidth Cap

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Zakhar

OMG, it’s been six months since I posted. Too, too busy.

I got this in the mail this week:

The cards says:

Dear EarthLink Internet Cable Service Powered by Comcast customer:

Effective July 1, 2010 the terms of service for the EarthLink Internet Cable Service Powered by Comcast service will be changed to include a 250 gigabyte monthey data usage cap for all EarthLink Internet Cable Service Powered by Comcast customers. Monthy data usage is the amount of data (for example, photos and videos) that you send, receive, download and upload during a month. It is our experience that the majority of cusomers never come close go using 250 gigabytes of data in a month.

To assist you, we created a web page specifically to answer your questions concerning this new policy. Please refer to the page listed below for more information and thank you for being an EarthLink Internet Cable Service Powered by Comcast customer.

http://support.earthlink.net/comcast250

This is bullshit ridiculous. There was already a per-month data cap. It was the speed I pay for times the seconds in the month. With a 10Mbps connection and about 2,629,743 seconds in a month, that’s about a (natural) 2,500 gigabyte cap.

I should be able to use every advertised bit in the 10 Mbps that was advertised — every single second of the day, not just some times during the day. If that means you restrict the advertised speed, then that’s fair, but you’re advertised bandwidth is currently deceptive: it’s about 10 Mbps — except you’re not allowed to actually go that fast.

What should I do — divide the month into seconds and put my own bandwidth limiter on my router, so I don’t hit the cap? Again, bullshit ridiculous.

Also, if “the majority of customers never come close go using 250 gigabytes of data in a month” then why is a cap even needed? Sounds like a shitload whole lot of customers aren’t using all the product for which they’re paying.

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Backup Software

Posted on January 1, 2010 by Zakhar

I want backup software that does incremental backups at the file level. It might waste more space, but it would be easier to retrieve lost files. It should make a folder for each date-time (YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS) it finds a changed file (continuous backup). It should just store complete files (not a single giant backup file). It should probably also have an XML log / registry in the root of the backups to air a Backup Browser in showing a reconstituted view.

I could then look at the drive and see a \BackUps folder in the root of the drive for all my backuos, a \C folder for files on the C:\ drive, and then \YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS folders for each backup. I could then dig into \BackUps\C\YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS\ or \BackUps\D\YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS\ (D:\ drive, etc.) and fish out any file I needed without using backup software to retrieve the file.

Anyone could then build a Backup Browser (open source or proprietary) to let the backup be browsed reassembled since only the first backup would have all the files. it could look like Time machine’s restore function, or it could look like a Fonder/Explorer window with a date control to look at the file system state on a given date-time. But even without the Backup Browser, you could still get the files.

Windows 7 Backup and Restore (built in backup), Acronis True Image Home 2010, and Rebit, discussed in “Managing Backup: Three Software Solutions Compared : Backup Done Right – Review Tom’s Hardware“, all seem like good options, but if I understand correctly, all require software to look at the files.

If backup software used my standard scheme for storing backups, it would still be helpful to have software to look at the backups in a more meaningful way, but it would not be required — the files would just be there on the drive.

If you want your backup encrypted (which is a weird idea to me, since retrieving the data — the whole point of a backup — could be hampered by encryption), then it would be okay for it to work in the TrueCrypt way. Files are still accessed at the root of a drive, but that drive is an encrypted container somewhere else. Better yet, it could be an encrypted partition. Just make sure the OS and user transparently see it as unencrypted.

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VMWare could be so cool

Posted on November 14, 2009 by Zakhar

I’ve now paid for VMWare Fusion 2 and for an upgrade to 3. It seems the upgrade added a few minor new features. It mostly seemed like bug fixes (like making Windows 7 work properly).

Two big bugs that haven’t been fixed are the problem that Ubuntu’s visual effects won’t work, and when you mouse down to a hidden OS X Dock, it won’t pop up when you’re running full screen.

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horrible etrade baby commercials

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Zakhar

I cannot wait until the day I never have to watch etrade baby commercials ever again. Makes me want to swear to express how blanking stupid the commercials are. I can’t even give a critique. They’re just stupid. So stupid they’ve lost my business.

(note to self) Remember: never do business with them.

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iPhone Features (leftovers)

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Zakhar

In my iPhone Features Sunday, post on February 22nd, 2009, I gave a list of my top choices. I have to say, I think that they’re past the point of pushing normal users to jailbreak their iPhones. I have no need to jailbreak, but I do like that there’s a way to make sure my hardware is really mine. (The fact that Apple controls which software I’m even allowed to install is just not right.)

Before I get to the leftover features that I still didn’t get, I have something to gripe about. I’m happy to hear that MMS will be included in my unlimited messaging — I’ll finally get closer to my money’s worth (AT&T’s Text Messages Cost $1,310 per Megabyte). I am more than unhappy about AT&T sitting around trying to decide how much to charge me per month to turn on a feature that’s built into the iPhone: tethering. I already pay for data. It’s unlimited, but it’s also capped at 5GB per month (which is a whole matter altogether). If I want to route that data through my phone and to my notebook, then I should just be able to do it.

This leads to the leftover features I still want:

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