Tuesday, 8 November 2011

A random cartoon...

More Microsoft Tricks! (makes me want to hug open source.. poor as it makes me)

So, Microsoft want us to upgrade our internet browser. From what I can figure out their *strategy* to get us to upgrade goes as follows:
  1. End Support
  2. Try to force the upgrade upon us via Windows Update (if possible)
  3. Update all their webpages so they use a feature of the new browser, which just happens (*cough bullshit*) to break compatibility with their oldest brower still compatible.
  4. Provided other "security updates" to 'related' parts of the operating system which *cough* again just happen to slowly break their oldest browser in increasingly annoying and agravating ways (example with IE 7, alignments suddenly different for same pages.. Suddenly the arrow keys no longer work for scrolling pages etc, previously smooth scrolling replaced by jagged glitchy scrolling).
  5. If any user notices these facets, they will say "Please update your browser to resolve this issue, thank you".
  6. Make the browser completely (artificially) incompatable with their next operating systems.
So, there you go.. if anyone reading this knows a Microsoft Executive who is be behind (or in support of) these "ideas" please, please, please do something just a little nasty to them (hide their car keys, erase their address books, factory reset their phone).

Let me know you have in comments and make my day ;).

Thursday, 3 November 2011

Cancel is NOT Undo! Damnit!

Reciently I've had a few problems with my PC which necessitated some reinstallation. So I needed to reinstall a few programs. I had the files already inplace and just needed to restore the registry settings. So I run the install, and ooh nice it put the settings back =) hurray. I don't need to put in the other 4 CD's to complete the install, i'll just cancel the install here and all will be good.

So, I hit cancel.. .the "£(*$ application starts REMOVING all the files. OMG! Cancel, Cancel!!!! NOT UNDO. >.<

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

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.

Tuesday, 27 September 2011

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.

Saturday, 24 September 2011

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!

Wednesday, 31 August 2011

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).