obive.net

For about one and a half years I have been using an NEC-Mitsubishi FP2141SB CRT monitor.

Up until recently, every single time the monitor was set to 60 Hz (During BIOS POST, Windows boot, OpenGL Games, DirectX games before it was patched, or manually) the monitor would display this huge warning about how 60hz is really low and that it should be higher, refer to the manual for how to set it. Now if this were in Windows only, I would have no problem. 60 Hz sucks. But during POST, I can’t see any of the information. During Windows boot, it nearly completely covers the Windows logo. And during games, I can’t see shit! It did have a method to exit it, but it was so annoying to exit it all the time.

I called tech support. They said that that window was by design and that it was impossible to disable.

Well I am happy to report that I DISSABLED IT! This may not work for you, but I reset the monitor to factory defaults, and now that box never comes up! Hope this helps at least one other user of this display.

This is the registration page for the US Selective Service. Sexists.

This is a Case Logic USB flash memory holder. They use a plastic that turns opaque white when its folded or bent. I think they probably could have found a better plastic to use.

If it's corrupt, then what's the point in not emptying it? And how did it get corrupt in the first place?

Here we see Microsoft Windows Performance Monitor. I was using this to help locate spyware on a friend's computer. For whatever reason, it just stops recording data for a few seconds.

Yes, I can

Can you guess what product or service this is for?

It’s not anything related to self help. It’s not drug that makes you feel better or a drug at all. It’s not something that will improve your ability to do anything that you couldn’t do before you bought it like a car or tool. If you guessed a small urine leakage pad, YOU’RE RIGHT! The slogan for Poise pads is “Yes, I can”. Totally appropriate.

Digg is a pretty cool website. Digg has lots of frequently updated news, lots of great links, and is pretty great overall. However, the community around digg is pretty… mindless.

For whatever reason, there seems to be some reoccurring topics that keep getting diggs. These are AJAX and Web 2.0. Now AJAX has been around for many years, but up until recently it didn't have a name. Some guy was nice enough to give it a name, a slightly cool name at that. Now it's THE thing to talk about. Anything that uses AJAX, no matter how useless, poorly designed, redundant, old, or crappy in general, is immediately dugg up to the front page. Searching for ‘AJAX”, there are 60 pages, 15 items per page. Most likely 60 pages is the maximum result count. That's an average of 2.0 diggs about AJAX per day. Insane. WHO CARES ABOUT AJAX YOU TOOLS!

Yet another reoccurring theme on digg is “Web 2.0”. Some have even mentioned “Web 3.0”. I have yet to see a single definition of either term. I think its safe to say that it involves AJAX, but it has to be more than just that. I can't think of anything though. I mean I can think of things that people may think is important, like the backend scripting language, data transfer protocols and formats, many things. But nothing that has been around for less than 5 years, which would most definitely have been part of “Web 1.0”. Anyone that uses a word or term without having a definition for it has no reason to use it. If I made up a term like “Internet 6.3b1” and defined it, it would be much more right in using it because it actually has meaning to at least one person. Joel Spolsky says: " The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness.” Correct!

The last thing about digg that bugs me a lot is the comments people leave. Here are some comments from some of the latest digg postings:

“YAY!”, “This isn't new.” (could have rated it old news), “Awsome!!”, “Awesome”, “Digg++”, “Cool !” (notice the space), “Fun stuff. +digg.”, “Great news.”, “nice..”, “i love wikipedia.” (don't we all), “i digg it yo !”, “Fantastic!”, “lol”, “cool”

Do any of these contribute anything to anything? No. Not only did you waste 5 of your seconds and 500 KB of your bandwidth (digg has really HUGE Javascripts if they aren't cached), you wasted 5 of my seconds and maybe 5 KB of my bandwidth. Multiply that by the number of users, and that's … (if you use 3 times the number of a front page digg, 3000 people, reading the comments) 5 hours of wasted time and 16 MB per worthless comment. Multiply that times 10 or so worthless comments per digg, that's 2 days of wasted time and 160 MB of wasted traffic. Thanks for making my day just that much better by making those amazingly awesome comments. Your life--.

Some nearly verbatim quotes from my Civilizations book:

The people from long ago probably ate things.

We can conclude this obvious worthless information and make all these worthlessly useless detailed comments on that information that you probably would have guessed by yourself without us telling you about it because you are obviously smart enough to read or you wouldn't be reading this book.

From: Charlie Hayes
Subject: Fundamentals of Physics, 7th Edition
To: j.walker@csuohio.edu, davidhalliday@msn.com

I am a student in a physics class that is using the text book you and your co-authors wrote. I have a few comments to make about it.

I enjoy the consistency of the book. The style of the images and diagrams (however absurd) are remarkably consistent.

I like the idea that I only ever have to buy one physics book (theoretically) for 3 classes.

The book is well organized.

The URL in the preface of the book is incorrect. It reads "http:www..." this is an invalid URL. You need to have slashes after the colon. It should be "http://www...". I would suggest you look for more competent editors.

The lightning on the cover of the book is obviously added using a computer graphics program and looks amazingly fake. Also, the vast majority of lightning strikes from the ground to the sky. The lightning on the cover of the book looks like it is striking from the sky to the ground. This is unacceptable for a book about physics. Its like me writing a computer programming text book and putting source code on the front that wont compile due to syntax errors.

Claiming that combining two chapters and changing the problems around warrants a new edition is bullshit. These changes CLEARLY do not warrant a new edition. You should be honest with your readers and tell them that a new edition was published so that you would be able to make more money.

Eagerly awaiting your response,
Charlie Hayes

The context is: I made a proposal; person said I was insane; we argued over the proposal which he disagreed with.

Charlie:  i think YOUR insane
Person:   that's fine
Person:   I make more money than you :)
Person:   and I'm going to bed
Charlie:  good night
Person:   have fun in ny

Person signed off (went away).

Of course checking to see if you actually have a modem installed in your computer wouldn't make sense. Most people have 56k I'm sure. WHO HAS 28.8? It's cheaper to get DSL! All major providers have it for less than $20 a month.

I'm Alive [CD-SINGLE] [IMPORT]
I'm Alive Pt.1 (Enhanced) [CD-SINGLE] [IMPORT]
I'm Alive [CD-SINGLE] [ENHANCED] [IMPORT]
I'm Alive [CD-SINGLE] [ENHANCED]
I'm Alive [CD-SINGLE] [IMPORT]
I'm Alive [CD-SINGLE] [IMPORT]

We have moved to our new Virtual Dedicated server.

Here is a quote from a foam matress store's website:

During the course of the day, the human body accumulates and stores static electricity. This stored static charge has a negative effect on sleep. Lowering the body's static charge helps the body rid itself of tension and improves the quality of sleep. This is the primary function of the revolutionary Intense cover. Dr. Chris Idzikowsi, one of the world's leading specialists in sleep research, demonstrated that people sleeping on static-reducing Intense were better rested and required less sleep.

Apparently when you get shocked touching a doorknob, you aren't actually disscharging that static charge? Must be so!

Diggnation and Hak.5 both have these STUPID hosts that talk about beer. It is SO funny because they were nerds, so they did not fit into the typical beer-loving crowd assholes in college, so now they have these silly shows where they drink beer. The revenge of the nerds? I think not. The morons drinking beer like morons? I think so! Also, those 'elite' hackers at hak.5 can't even set up their fricken mime-types right. Mime-types. I mean come on!

Some more single word sentences

Zircon Axia A108

Capture it. Share it.
Save it. Print it.
Work with it. Play with it.
Learn from it. Prepare for it.
Use it. Feel it.
Your life. Your call.

Apple Airport Express

Connect. Print. Listen. Wirelessly

Target

See. Spot. Save.
Expect more. Pay less.

Cool People

An actual person posted this message on digg.com. I think it says a lot about the person's character.

Could Google be making an IM client similar to Trillian. If  they did I would sure use it.

Pictures

Some how the Add Hardware window turned into this.

I don’t know where this picture is from, but it looks like a bee, not a fly as the caption would sugguest.

This is what happened when I was installing iTunes. Our favorite install program InstallShield appears to use something called “InstallDriver”, and that something crashed during the install. iTunes works fine.

A windows painting bug.

What's cool about Microsoft Word is that every time you save a document, it creates a new hidden temporary file in the same directory as the document you’re working on is in. So after you have been working on a document for 2 hours, you have about 20 temp files. What is even cooler is that they only go away when you close Word, so when the not-so-rare and expected crash of word occurs they don't get deleted.

When I change the style of this one image from "Header 1" to "Body Text" it goes into an infinite loop of adding blank pages to the document. It’s totally reproducible too. Quite amusing.

This screen shot was immediately taken after reselecting the style and clicking reapply. Even though the style explicitly states that it should not be italic, it some how is italic! When I click to uncheck the italic toolbar button, it remains italic, even though the button is released. If I move the cursor to somewhere else and then back, the button is again depressed.

I got this awesome message box when Windows shit a brick on me over the weekend. Fortunately it was not on my main computer and reinstalling wasn’t a problem.

Many people have noted that I like to argue. Some say that it's good that I have an opinion. Some say that it's annoying. Some say both. I say that if some one says something that is against what you believe, you are less of a person not to find out why they think differently or argue your point with them.

Some times it is inappropriate to argue. Some times a person's beliefs are really close or one does not have the appropriate domain knowledge to argue with them. However, it is hard for me not to argue against something that, up to this point in my life, my experience overwhelmingly proves my point of view correct over theirs.

In an attempt to counter my arguments, some people tell me that I must be wrong because I am not keeping an open mind and that I wont change my views to suit theirs without supporting evidence.

For example, by definition, momentum equals mass times velocity. Also, by definition, a photon has no mass and has momentum. There is no way that you can make that equation fit that definition of a photon, so one of those MUST be wrong. There is NO possible way to argue to the contrary. NONE! However, two people have argued to the contrary and say that I don't understand and that I must be wrong!

How can I be misunderstanding this? If mass = zero, then momentum must be zero. Maybe something times zero can be something other than zero. Maybe my entire understanding of algebra is incorrect. Maybe everything I have ever been taught and everyone I know that has been taught the same way, as I are wrong. Or maybe the one of the statements is wrong. Which is more likely?

What is more likely is that Newtonian physics falls apart when velocity approaches the speed of light. So if that is the case, teaching Newtonian physics is like teaching what is essentially not true. Don't get me wrong, the calculations involved in a superior method are most likely many times more complex and that the result is nearly the same as the Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics would obviously be more appropriate for computer games or similar simulations where exactness is not as important as speed. However, we should not be teaching (or in my case, I should not have been taught) something that has been known to be incorrect for many years!

As another example, the Amber alert inconveniences millions of people every time child abduction is reported. The statistics publish by the organization responsible for the amber alert state that since the alert was started, over 200 children have been saved! The alert started in 1996, so that means 40 saved children a year. I am pretty sure that more than 40 children are abducted every year, although you would never know that from their statistics. It doesn't say "200 of our 200 broadcasts have ended in success" or "90% have succeeded". Obviously a statement like that would be much more convincing of the success rate of the Amber alert. So the logical conclusion? The amber alert is so UN successful that they withhold vital statistics.

Again, don't get me wrong; I don't want children to die. But if the point is to save lives, then lets broadcast to millions every time any single person's life is threatened. If some one has a stroke, broadcast that a doctor is needed for immediate medical assistance! If some one is going to starve to death, send them food. And just to be fair, we need to broadcast to everyone, not just doctors or people with food. Since 99.99999 percent of the people the Amber alert reaches have no impact on the success of it, we need to make sure that we blanket broadcast so that we can get our success statistics just as low! If we give every person a fair chance at their own alerts, we will be forced to watch more alerts than we can possibly have time to watch. Obviously when you analyze the Amber alert, it's merits break down. Just so you know, I tried requesting statistics on their success rate, but the email address they have posted on their website for more information bounces back.

These two arguments are the big recipients of "I hate arguing with you" rebuttals. If you can refute my logic, please do. I don't want to sound stupid by stating things that are illogical or stupid. However, if you can't back up your claims, don't get mad at me. Arguing is a battle of endurance and logic. If you can't endure some one else's argument, then you lose. If some one else's logic breaks yours, you lose. If you say "I don't like arguing with you" then you are admitting you cannot endure and/or that your logic can be broken; you lose.

I don't want people to be angry with me or think I am annoying, but at the same time I do not want people thinking things that are clearly incorrect. If you have views that I think are incorrect and are not willing to accept that you may be wrong, can't argue your point, don't want to argue at all, or don't have the time, then don't say anything like "your wrong" when I state my opinion, say "okay" or "acknowledged". Then neither of us will be upset! If my views are wrong, prove it, and I will appreciate you making me look less stupid.

UPDATED: I reversed the order and fixed some formatting

From: Charlie Hayes
To: info@u3.com
Subject: U3 benefits?

I was reading through your list of benefits, and I can't find anything different about U3 devices over normal USB Memory drives:

Application mobility:
Any well-written application can run on any type of disk already.

U3 smart software works on any U3 smart drive:
Same as above, 99% of software isn't tied to a specific drive.

Intuitive user interface and application launcher:
Windows Explorer launches applications already, why are you adding another layer? Almost every application launcher in existence is Unintuitive and ugly. The Windows shell already has this functionality anyway!

Private and protected computing:
Already built into Windows using NTFS. Encryption programs have been available for 20 years, how is any of this new?

Seamless launch and exit:
Almost all existing applications have "seamless launch and exit".

Multiple applications on one device:
How is this different than any other USB memory device?

Always mass storage:
I have never had or used a USB storage device that was anything but USB Mass Storage

Easy Deployment:
You can already deploy your application to any type of memory without a special API, now your requiring developers use your API to get the same functionality that was available without it. This is harder, not easier.

-Charlie Hayes

From: Nathan Gold
To: Charlie Hayes
Subject: RE: U3 benefits?

Hi Charlie:

Why don't you give me a call when you have a chance or tell me how to reach you and we can talk.

Until next time,

Nathan Gold | U3 LLC | Sr. Director, Business Development |

From: Charlie Hayes
To: Nathan Gold
Subject: RE: U3 benefits?

If it's ok, I would rather communicate via e-mail.

-Charlie

From: Nathan Gold
To: Charlie Hayes
Subject: RE: U3 benefits?

Hi Charlie:

Actually, since the product is not yet released, you have not signed up as a developer, and we don't have a signed NDA with you, I can only have brief telephone conversations about this technology. Once the product is released to consumers in the stores later this month, I will be free to discuss anything and everything with you via email, smail, or any method you choose.

Until next time,

Nathan Gold | U3 LLC | Sr. Director, Business Development |

From: Charlie Hayes
To: Nathan Gold
Subject: RE: U3 benefits?

I think you misunderstand my interests.

As an educated consumer, I desire a market where companies compete by listing unique features of their products to differentiate them. I do not wish for companies, such as yours, to utilize buzzword marketing in an attempt to persuade un-educated consumers away from competing products. The end result of such marketing is a market where consumers are confused and unconfident in their purchases.

Your current product literature lists universally common features as unique to your product. 100% of current USB Memory devices offer 100% of the features you are touting as unique to your product.

If your product actually has unique features, you may wish to reconsider your marketing tactics and update your product literature to reflect those unique features. If customers such as myself see products such as yours in the store bullet pointing common features, they will simply skip to the more easily identifiable unique features of product such as the price/size ratio and aesthetics of the device in question. If your product only lists unique features, it will most likely be considered more often.

I plead with you to refrain from littering the market with clones that deceitfully list features as unique when they are not.

Educated consumer and developer,

Charlie Hayes

I have moved in to the house this past weekend. I have a whole bunch of really cool pictures to post. I have so much free time that I can't spend it posting them.

Five bad advertising techniques:

One word or two word sentences

AppWorx: Automate. Integrate. Accelerate.
Macromedia: Different people. Different needs. One solution.
Apple DVD Studio Pro 4: Encode. Author. Burn. Deliver.

A period defines the end of a sentence. A sentence needs a noun and a verb. If you don't have both, it's not a sentence, and therefore, does not need a period. In fact, a period at the end of a single word makes you look stupid.

Where is the verb? Where is the noun?

Definitions

def ? i ? ni ? tion n.

1. Statement conveying fundamental character.

2. Statement of the meaning of a word, phrase, or term, as in a dictionary entry

It is most likely better to assume your customers know what words mean and that if they didn't, they could go look them up on their own. Assuming they don't know them and then putting these ugly definitions on your website or product literature is like saying ?Hey stupid! You're stupid!? You probably shouldn't insult your potential customers.

The only thing that doesn't look silly on is a dictionary.

Introducing

I agree it sounds good on the seller's side. But on the buyer's side its clich? and boring. Since your not selling the product to yourself, maybe you should not introduce your product.

Hiding information

Don't put your information behind a registration system. That's like putting a lock on the door in front of your store. People are just going to walk away. When I have to register, I will either

A. Close the browser tab
B. Use phony contact information.

Both of which will not help you sell your product.

Stock art

Websites that have pictures of people that are smiling, having fun, and laughing are just silly.

How about a screenshot of your application instead? Thanks.

Bea

BEA, the company that sells crazy expensive software for serving web applications, says on their website that their JRockit application is ?Compatible with J2SE 1.4.1? and that it is ?Certified with the latest Java standards?. J2SE 1.4.1 is THREE years old. I emailed them and said that they should correct their web page. They responded:

Hello Charlie,
Thank you for contacting BEA Systems. Per the BEA JRockit product manager; JRockit 5.0 tracks the latest release of J2SE 5.0 very, very closely.
More updated info: http://dev2dev.bea.com/wljrockit/ 

Apparently the information on their software that is less than 3 years old is on a secret hidden page.

Windows Certification

These panels are from a Microsoft Certification example exam from their website.

If it's not a plug and play monitor, your going to need to install the driver.

I may be wrong, but if the disk drive, video camera, or printer were self powered, they should work in a bus-powered hub.

What is this question even asking? Which file should you sign? Which file should you edit to point to a signature? Which file should you look at to see which file is not signed? And if it is the later, no one outside Microsoft should be doing this in the first place.

A program that's idle could be using 200 threads, while a single application could be overwhelming the system with a single thread. You would most likely want to know if its more than one thread that's using the CPU, in that case, you will probably want to check the rate of context switches. Microsoft thinks otherwise.

Other miscellaneous pictures and such

Here we see a save dialogue box for MSPaint. As you can clearly see, I am trying to save to ?2.bmp?. Why is it asking if I want to replace ?3.bmp?? I think it is because I clicked on ?3.bmp? in the file list. BUG!

Here is a good error from Computer Associates AllFusion Harvest Change Manager (my, that's a mouth full). Those log files are located on the desktop, not the current working directory or the application directory or the root of the disk. The templog.txt file is empty. The Harvest Session Log (which looks to be like the title of that window behind the error) has some cryptic worthless information. The content of the window with the same title is empty. I called CA and they told me that Visual C++ 6 with the embedded compiler isn't supported. Screw you CA.

Here we see a Sun Microsystem's website. Apparently, if you click download, then cancel the download window or hit back or something, it will prevent you from downloading it again. Their FAQ says this is a security problem. As it stands now, it's a HUGE usability problem. Additionally, they should put the file name before ?was? to make that a complete sentence.

Andy Dick rocks

I e-mailed Nortel to tell them that I think their website should not use ALL CAPS BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE THEY ARE YELLING AT THE CUSTOMER AND BECAUSE IT IS HARD TO READ.

Well they called back and said that they communicated my comment to the creative team and they are investigating it! I am quite impressed with customer feedback policy relitive to others. All companies should be like Nortel. As for Nortel's products... They leave something to be desired. SIP compatibiltiy and the ability for their phones to operate on other non-Nortel networks come to mind.

SBC is advertising that their yellow pages is better because it has more ads. I would rather have one with LESS ads. What psychos.

Textual Content:

I would just like to point out how fantastically intuitive Computer Associates Harvest change manager is. To create a package for "State" B, you create a package in State A (named 'Create request'). This will not create a package in the Create Request state; it creates the package in the 'Unit Test' state. Create Package isn't even an option for the Unit Test state.

Pictorial Content with Textual Content Captions:

Here is a screen shot of the Windows Media Player for Mac download page. How come the size and download time for the .bin file is not available?

Here we see Microsoft Word has ran out of memory. In the first screen shot, Word says that the hard disk is full, with some added punctuation. Windows Explorer says that there's 65 gigabytes free. In the second screen shot, Word was a little more general with it's out of memory error. There are the same 65 gigabytes free, and then you can see there's about 750 megabytes of free physical memory. Microsoft needs to change those dialogs to something like "Word's programming is pure shit, we some how cant allocate more memory from your huge pool of free memory, and we cant allocate more disk space from your even huger pool of disk space, so chances are you need to close the program and reopen it." Maybe they could code in like "if free memory is greater then the average total memory for normal users, don't display this box!"

Here we see some operating system requirements from IBM. They are really specific about which version of Suse you can use, RedHat, AIX, Windows, etc. Then they say you can use "Linux". I don't think it will run on every version of Linux.

This is a really good promotion from IBM. If you spend a million bagillion dollars on one of their servers, they will give you an iPod shuffle! Now lets look at this a bit. If you can afford one of their servers, I think you would already own an iPod. A 100 dollar "freebee" for purchasing something that costs 20,000 seems a little insignificant. So if your company does buy one of these servers, who will get the SINGLE iPod Shuffle? I see a fight coming on.

In this screen shot, we see IBM giving a link to contact an operating system. If I were going to buy a crazy expensive OS from IBM, I would rather talk to IBM, not the OS. Actually, I would like to talk to the OS, it would probably be really interesting? or really boring.

Here is another good IBM development. It seems some of the features of this software are these web servers. Most are running Apache, but it seems one is running the original web server. It must not be WebSphere, IBM wouldn't pass up the opportunity to toot their horn. Ether way, I want it. Original flavors are usually better than the other ones.

What? More from IBM? Here IBM is talking about some 31 bit CPU. I would guess that it was a typo, but the mention it in two places.

And last but not least, we have a Windows Update screen shot. I don't know what to make of this.