Life, don't talk to me about Life

That of course was a quote made my "Mavin the paranoid Android" from the The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG).

Still, right now I'm so tired of the pointless fight. People aren't valued, effort is only valued for the rewards it brings to the person the effort is made for. Good ideas go unrealised because people need to keep paying for bad ideas because once someone thought it was a clever idea to ensure that a "popular" or "clever" idea remained profitable and somehow unextractably entangled it to some life essencial so we became forced to continue to pay for the bad idea.

Life (by which I mean human effected / created life) seems full of examples of this (indeed these things thrive on this):

• American Laws..

Seemingly if any "bill" is put forward for consideration and is seen to be a potentially "popular" proposition, everyone tries to find a way to Tac on their unpopular little proposal in the hope that people want the good enough to pay for the crap that comes with it (whilst making the crap they add seem plausably connected).

• Loans (Banks),

Sure, you can have that money.. just give it us back (*small print* with 10% extra repayment per day you don't).

•  Most Business

Hey, buy this.. its great and just LOOK how cheap it is (*small print* accessories not included, battery must be replaced weekly, must use OUR model of battery/ink/credits/web-site).

Hell, maybe this is the whole of life. Though, looking at nature, it tends to come with more rewards than traps.

The funny thing is, life is full of examples of how people really value other people. Its just disconnected, it only goes so far and then starts going in reverse (that is, for example.. I value you, you value you friend, your friend values their friend.. good. Though, your friends, friend hates you. You hate your friends, friend, friend. So on). Everyone generally has good reasons for why the like or don't like another person (value or not. If we define here good as making sense to them and their definition of good).

Trying to think about all this just hurts the brain. So, everyone, value everyone.. if you can't see their value, value that they give everyone else a greater sense of value by showing exactly how valuable they are by comparison.. thusly, appriciate them.

As for the people providing definite negative value, the ones killing, bombing, opressing, claiming their way or the highway ect. ect. Well, we can't appriciate them, but we can pity them and remember how their example shows just how bad people are when they don't value or appriciate even one.

People, please stop funding web-crime!

Someone, they are nameless, are paying unscrupulous companies to advertise their products. They may not even know these companies are unscrupulous.

Here is the short tip version:

DO NOT PAY ANYONE FOR HITS!

Hits on your website do not equate to customers or even often remotely interested parties. There seems to be an entire industry built around taking money from people who equate hits on their site to customer awareness or product sales.

Let me explain paitiently.

There is a massive number of ways in which a person may attract "hits" to their website. Howeve, the only quality hit is the hit from a person who has arrived at your site in search of a service or product you are offering. This type of hit is very hard to get because of the MILLIONS of companies out there being PAID by third parties to get ANY kinds of hits to their customers sites (customers who may infact by dying for your services are being redirected to a million sites with people offering them nothing they want). Unscrupulous advertisers are very successfull in this ends. These sites get millions on millions of people directed to them because they are conned, fooled, tricked and otherwise mislead into arriving at these sites. The action of a person thus, conned, fooled, tricked is (in 99% of cases I susspect) to immidiately leave the site and try to find what they ACTUALLY where looking for.

Now, some people paying for web-advertising are slightly better informed, they realise that 'How long a person views your page is an indication of interest' and ask for only these hits to be counted (since this is a measure which can be taken). However, again, unscrupulous companies have this covered! They simply trick the web-public into clicking their advert but avoid the user actually realising they are viewing the advert to it appears they viewed it for a long time (because they either didn't notice it was there or the window appeared under other windows). The customer may be shown a quite "compelling" legitimate" advertisement for their product to add to the fraud.

So, therefore, the length of time each "clicker" spent viewing your page becomes a nonsense as well.

So, stop paying for clicks!

Pay for results! Google has a reasonably solid system to ensure you get quality clicks. However, watch out, because a number of third party companies re-selling Google services can easily warp this system by "trickyly" created pages.

I recommend that whenever you enter into a contract with a company for web advertising, that you contractually only pay them based on the sales comming directly through their advertising program, proven ideally by individual customer acknowledgement or sufficiently by unique ID references placed in the advertising campaign.

If you do go with a clicks only advertiser, should you be lucky enough to get sales from the campaign, you are still hurting your company image over because as millions of misdirected people may see your company as "unscrupulous" as well (since the trick lead them to your company name).

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PEOPLE STOP PAYING FOR CLICKS.. PAY FOR RESULTS.

As my final note, its interesting that this kind of "commerical activity" is entirely LEGAL. I also feel the law should be updated to make "misleading" online an offence against the law.

Argg, Game Designers!

So I officialy luv MineCraft (and this is just a little frustration outlet, so on the off chance Notch comes accross this post, really luv your work to date). Though I officially loath realism in games! Its a game damn it, if I wanted real life I'd go out and fix my crippled social life (crippled by lack of realism in games making them so compelling hehe ;).

The latest update to MineCraft is overshadowed by the damn annoying hunger system. Its something close to what Diablo was like when you had to buy you arrows (tiring and a reason not to play) (ED: Though in general Notch seems to agree with this POV based on his webpage "If something ever doesn't feel fun, I'll remove it").

Fine, people want more point to the game. Well, find a point thats FUN not tedious. I mean who enjoys actually having to find food? Eating, sure, cooking sure, but actually FINDING.

I can't state emphatically enough, hunger in MineCraft is just annoying. If you want to motivate me not to spend so much time underground, put something on the surface I want to come up for.. like wood.. oh you already have that! well leave us damn alone >.<

Yours,
Disgruntled MineCrafter.

ps. MineCraft is still 99% awesome. Only one major bitch, its a miracle!

Software Vendors giving me Terrets

ED: Please note. I am not normally a person who swears or respects swearing but sometimes, with enough annoyances, I guess we all need to sometimes. This IS one of those time and appologies to anyone reading (please don't read if swearing offends).


>.<

F**KING BL**DY G*D DANM F**CKING WAN*ERS!!!!

I am SO fucking sick of software vendors. I've wasted the majority of the day today trying to fucking get control of my own goddamn PC.

First, I can't associate the application I want, placed in the location I desire, with the file type that it uses (since they have gone mad for AppID's and so forth requiring application to be installed and registered with the system). This should have been a fucking trivial task and indeed if I revert back to Window XP it bloody is trivial (how I miss when Microsoft where there to serve the customer [or at least pretended]) .

Why the fucking hell is RPC being used for local traffic application (so I know why, but still in principal)! Lazyness seems to be the simple god-damn answer. They know that there will be senarios where a person will need to do some task or other over RPC so they just write it always to use RPC. Which would be absolutely FINE if local RPC used function calls. NO local RPC has to use local TCP traffic (again, LAZY, no specialisation for a case).

G19 YouTube player rendered worthless by Google Ad's

Installed the latest G19 software for my keyboard. Looks slick, pleasantly surprised about the UI improvements.

However, the single most usefull feature of the G19 keyboard (the G19 YouTube player) has been rendered worthless because, 3 seconds into whatever clip you choose to watch Adverts appear taking up 1/4 of the entire (already small) display and worse, you have no way of "clicking" to close the Ads.

The result? the in keyboard YouTube player is worthless.

YouTube in player Adverts (Ad's) - Say NO!

So i'm sick of YouTube. The in player Ad's is the last straw!

Don't get me wrong, I don't object to Ad's, but I do object to Ad's interrupting and f**king obscuring my vision. Since we still have choice, lets choose to move somewhere where their decient:

Check out this long list of similar style sites:

http://www.reelseo.com/list-video-sharing-websites/

Microsofts mission these days is to prevent choice!

So, i'm trying to do something simple. I have installed my choice of Media Player application where I want it put (in the Documents folder) and so I make use of the nice feature Microsoft added a while back "Open With..." to make it my default media player for AVI files.

Short version it. Doesn't work.

Never mind, its easy enough to make a file association, always has been. Quick tweek of the registry.

Yep, there we go.. shows up and its all good.

Still doesn't f**ing work.

What happens is, it always, regardless of whats set, runs Windows Media Player!

Now I could f**ing go and unregister the DDE conversations and any other way it might be completing the association (explorer extensions.. whatever) but the simple fact is it shouldn't be so f**king hard in the first place. No value has been added and its eliminated choice. Congratulations again Microsoft on maintaining your monopoly through screwing your customers! well f**ing done :P.