November 25th

Microsoft to Replace Pirated Windows XP for Free

Some people may have even more to be thankful for than usual today, especially if they bought a fake copy of Windows XP. Microsoft is offering not only amnesty for the folks who innocently bought a fake copy of XP before November 1st, they are offering a free valid copy! That's pretty darn good of them, if I must say so myself. I'm kind of impressed.

What's the catch?  Not much really. You do need to finger the person or company that peddled the pirated software, and offer proof of purchase, but that's about it. So if you actually bought a copy of XP that you're unsure of, and want to check it out for a possible replacement, go here. From there you'll have to go to the product identification page, where you can perform the check. The above link is for the UK, and I'll see if I can find the equivalent US site.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 24th

Half Life 2 Driving People Half Crazy

Half Life 2 is a very fun game, and it has many ground breaking features. But those features come at a price that many players are now paying. For many HL2 players, the bugs in the game are becoming glaring. In my case, the game crashes my computer several times a day, and it's a hard crash each time, requiring the reset button. I have the classic sound stuttering problem as well, and the hesitations when entering a new scene in the game. I pretty much experience most of the bugs that have been reported in the forums.

Then there is the fact that Valve has disabled over 20,000 STEAM accounts they say are fraudulent. But that even includes people who bought the retail, disk version of the game, and then applied a crack to let them play without the disk in the drive. That's going way too far if you ask me, especially since STEAM users don't need a disk, and didn't even buy the game if they got an ATI voucher.

Then there is STEAM itself, and the many woes therein. I've seen posts on HL2 forums that say STEAM is the best thing since the invention of sex. (They need a life beyond Half Life). Their contention about STEAM's greatness is that you can download 3GB of data on hundreds of computers, and log onto your STEAM account and play on any of them (one at a time, of course). Well, that may be the case, if you've got the time to download 3GB of data multiple times, but it also requires that STEAM versions actually work after downloading.

That's where a friend's recent experiences come in. We'll call him Sean, which is his real name, so that' appropriate. He didn't like Counter Strike Source, which he had installed through STEAM. Sean wanted to remove it to get back the hard drive space, but the STEAM install offers you no way to uninstall CSS by itself, so Sean deleted the Counter Strike directory. After removing the CSS directory, Half Life 2 would not play. STEAM options at this point? Uninstall everything, and start the 3GB download over again. But guess what? Now Sean has Counter Strike Source back, and it plays, but Half Life 2, which played just fine the day before, still doesn't work at all. You gotta love it.

Suggestions STEAM fans?

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 22nd

Republican Lawmakers vs. Average Citizens

You'll be glad to know that now because Republicans have complete control over our government, they are working feverishly to take away any small rights you may have left. Take, for example, the IPPA, or Intellectual Property Protection Act which just passed the Republican controlled House of Representatives. One part of this little conservative giveaway to entertainment industry giants (called The Family Movie Act) should delight red and blue state voters alike. One of the provisions of this bill would make it illegal to manufacture DVD players that would allow consumers to skip the ads at the beginning of movies they just paid $20 for. The players will be permitted to skip sexually explicit or violent scenes, but not the advertisements. This is just one of the small provisions in a large and onerous bill.

I expect that the Republican House and Senate will soon introduce legislation permitting automakers to automatically lock the doors on your car when you get in, after which the ignition key will not work for five minutes during which time you must watch advertisements on a dash mounted video monitor. Only then will the ignition key work. Consumer rights? Never heard of 'em.

Hope all you red state voters are paying attention. Oh sure, just like you're paying attention to the fact that the Republicans raised the national debt ceiling by another $700 billion. Oh sure. Enjoy that DVD you just bought while you can, and make sure your kids have a retirement account set up by age 3 to pay the national debt when they grow up.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

Still Using Bill's Bull$#!+ Browser? Muhahahahaha!

Some of you may occasionally browse over to The Register, a UK IT news website that used to host Mike Magee, but now just has Team Register. Well, if you moseyed  on over to El Reg yesterday morning using Internet Explorer with any Windows platform other than XP Service Pack2, you got infected with the BOFRA exploit, which was dished out by their ad server, Falk AG.

Internet Explorer is so full of security holes we like to call it Bill's colander. Good for draining spaghetti, but not much else. So if you didn't install SP2 on your XP machine, or you are using Windows 2K with Internet Explorer, you might want to reconsider your options. The easiest way to avoid these kinds of booby-trapped web sites and ads is to stop using Bill's Bull$#!+ Browser, and start using Firefox, Opera, or anything else.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 18th

World Sues World; World Loses

As the SCO-IBM/Novell case sputters along toward the eventual death spiral of SCO, a new court case is heating up where Novell is suing Microsoft. This one probably has more personal relevance to computer users from the 1990's.  Sometime back in the mid 1990's Novel bought Word Perfect. It was a dark day for Word Perfect users, who were pretty sure that Novell would just mess up a great word processor. They did, and eventually sold it at a large loss to Corel, who sort of fixed it up again.

But now we learn that what we had been suspecting all along turns out to be true. Microsoft was deliberately making Word Perfect incompatible with MS Word, to make interoperability difficult. Microsoft hoped to force more and more people to MS Office and Word, to avoid the irritating problems when converting between Word Perfect and Word.

So even though Novel didn't do Word Perfect customers any favors, they feel that part of their problem with Word Perfect was artificially induced by Microsoft. Hence the law suit.

The lasting legacy of this nasty practice on Microsoft's part is that most people do use Word instead of Word Perfect, even though Word Perfect is a more robust word processor. In fact, to this day, when I am editing or working on anything that has to be co-edited by others, I switch to Word so that the process goes smoothly. This is because 95% of the people I work with use Word, rather than Word Perfect. So no matter how underhanded, dishonest or illegal Microsoft's business practices are, they still win, and get their way. Ahhhh, the American way.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 16th

Half Life 2 Activated! But Folks Still Can't Play

I knew this would happen. Valve should be taken out to the woodshed and whacked, or perhaps to the wall and shot. Even people with retail purchased HL2 disks can't "authenticate" their copy through the data-choked Valve servers, so they are SOL when it comes to playing the game. Remember, this is a SINGLE PLAYER game, so there should be no need to log onto any server.  That is unless the company wants to mess with the heads of their loyal customers.

Half Life 2's release hasn't just been marred, it's been toasted, roasted and fried. It's a joke, but unfortunately, we are all the butt of that joke. 

Valve is on my black list, and no matter how good the game is, I'll still have a seething anger deep in my gut anytime someone mentions "Valve software", or "STEAM".  You guys blew it big time, pissed off everyone including the distributor, and I hope that Vivendi sues your pants off.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 14th

Half Life 2 On Sale! But Nobody Can Play

It looks as though the Valve/Vivendi game maker-game distributor clash has reached a fever pitch as the release of Half Life 2 approaches. Never has a game release so mimicked a grade B soap opera, as Charlie at the Inquirer would say. You'd think that neither company had any experience releasing a video game before.

Apparently, Half Life 2 went on sale in some stores yesterday, despite the settled release date of Tuesday, November 16th. But just as with the STEAM downloaded version of HL2, the store bought copies must be activated by logging onto Valve servers. What a complete crock. It would seem that Vivendi wanted to jump the gun in order to get as many sales as possible before the downloaded version gets activated on Tuesday. They may have even been counting on STEAM users, who thought the retail game might not have the same activation scheme, would rush out to buy the DVD version of the game, thus driving up Vivendi's profits on the distribution of the hard copy. No such luck. HL2 is sitting on about 2 million computers now, but it's all just wasted hard drive space (and download time for STEAM users) right now.

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that Valve's method of distributing and activating Half Life 2 was the worst example of intrusive, time-consuming, and irritating copy protection I have ever witnessed. It makes Windows XP product activation seem so very tame indeed. After downloading over 2GB of data, STEAM glitched on my system, and the entire process had to be started all over again. I have a terrible feeling that similar problems with the downloaded version will crop up everywhere when the game is activated on Tuesday. If this is the way of the future for video game distribution and activation, please count me out. I'll go for a regular old disk with a serial number any day.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 13th

Pirating OK for Microsoft, but Not You

Microsoft has been caught red-handed using an illegal Warez copy of SoundForge 4.5 (that was a very popular Warez crack from a couple years back) to make the wav files that come with MS Media Player.  Talk about hypocrisy. Obviously, someone at MS used a cracked copy of SoundForge to do their work for Media Player, which just goes to show you what you can expect when you hire kids to do serious work. It's no wonder they call the headquarters of Microsoft, "the campus". The programmers probably download illegal music all day long using P2P software, and this is just one small example of them getting caught in the act using illegally downloaded software/content.

I wonder how much of Windows source code was lifted from somewhere else??

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 12th

Microsoft Will Never Get Security Right

Remember all that hype Microsoft put out about Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)? It took them over a year, and all the time of most of their programmers, to come up with what they said was a solid and secure platform that users could trust to be safe from hacking. When you actually look at what SP2 gives you, like a cheesy firewall, and forcing you to turn automatic updates on, it seems pretty wimpy from a security standpoint. It sure shouldn't have taken that long to put a big fat band-aid on Windows XP.

Well now we hear that even after all the problems in SP2 were supposedly fixed with subsequent patches, it turns out that a security firm has found 10 more major security flaws in SP2. Some of these would let a hacker take over the system if you simply use Internet Explorer to surf to a booby trapped web page. Sounds like a great reason right there to switch to Firefox or Opera for your browsing needs. Bill Gates said Firefox isn't a threat to Internet Explorer, and I agree, Internet Explorer is the biggest threat to Internet Explorer. Using it is downright dangerous.

No word yet on when the patches for the patches will be ready for patching. If Windows were a house you could look at, it would be all boarded up and falling apart with giant holes in the roof. It would be condemned by the local building inspector, and torn down.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 11th

ICANN to Allow Domain Name Hijacking

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is changing its rules tomorrow to allow hostile companies to hijack competitors domain names. The old rule said if a request to transfer the domain name to the new company goes unanswered, then you can consider the answer to be "no, we don't want to give up our domain name". Now, the rule will change so that if the company does not respond to the hostile hijack attempt in 5 days, the transfer of the domain name is automatically completed!

I've never heard of anything so absurd in my life. If the contact person named in Whois was away on vacation for 2 weeks when the request comes in, the domain name is transferred automatically! Who the hell came up with this idea?  Republican corporate lawyers would be my guess. This will obviously benefit corporations with lots of staff and lawyers, and be to the detriment of small companies with overworked staff.

This could only happen in a country where all branches of government are controlled by one party, the party of corporations.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 9th

Tropical Honeybees Survive K/T Boundary

The worst theory I've ever heard is the one about an asteroid/comet killing all the dinosaurs. Most paleontologists never felt comfortable with the idea that a large impact event could be so selective in it's ability to cause extinction. Reptiles made it through the so-called K/T boundary at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago. Amphibians made it through the K/T boundary, as did mammals and birds.  Now it appears that even the tropical honeybee made it through the supposed "nuclear winter" caused by the K/T impact. So why would only the dinosaurs die off, and why would every single type of them die off?

The asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction was invented by a physicist who had no training in biology or paleontology, so that should tell you something right up front. What they didn't tell you, because they were clueless, was that dinosaur species had been dying out in Europe and Asia for millions of years before the K/T event. Only the dinosaur populations in North and South America were still doing well when the K/T event occurred. So apparently, other things were going on, worldwide, that were reducing dinosaur fitness relative to newcomers, such as mammals.

As a biologist, I still prefer many of the old, tried and true biological mechanisms of extinction, including the rise of grasses and flowering plants as the predominant plant forms on earth, growing mountain ranges changing global climate and altering local habitats, competition from the rapidly expanding species of small mammals that may have raided dinosaur nests for their eggs, and the simple fact that dinosaurs were evolving into birds.  Large dinosaurs could not regulate their body temperature as well as smaller, feathered birds could, and the world was changing dramatically 65 million years ago, including getting colder.

There is also a possibility that multiple factors worked together to make large dinosaurs less competitive in a world of small, smart, and fast mammals and birds, including pandemic diseases that affected dinosaurs, but not amphibians, reptiles, birds or mammals. One thing is clear, if you are going to stick to the "asteroid did it" hypothesis, you're going to have to explain to biologists why only the dinosaurs died off, but even the cold-sensitive tropical honeybee didn't.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 8th

Republicans Win Through Misinformed Electorate

Nothing makes a Republican's blood boil faster than some obnoxious liberal telling them they are misinformed. But now it's the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland that is telling Republicans, and the rest of us, that many of Mr. Bush's supporters were misinformed about Iraq, WMD and connections between terrorism and Saddam Hussein. Indeed, 70% of Mr. Bush's supporters believe that the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. Considering that there was no such evidence, a logical person would have to conclude that many of Mr. Bush's supporters were clueless on many of the issues they voted on.

A good example is the idea that Mr. Bush is more "moral" than Democrats.  If we consider that Mr. Bush has lied repeatedly to the public, as was proven with his last State of the Union address, I assume that these Republican moralists are leaving "bearing false witness" from the list of important moral characters.

Republicans are going to get what they asked for now, higher deficits and debt, more elective wars with the death and injury tolls rising, hundreds of billions of tax payers dollars wasted on unnecessary wars, lots more no-bid Halliburton contracts, and a larger federal bureaucracy to keep tabs on US citizens and their activities. Plus they get the most arrogant, dishonest President we've had since Richard Nixon. Mr. Bush said during his recent press conference, much like a spoiled and petulant child, that he had "earned political capital, and I am going to spend it". So much for working with the Democrats.

Any Republicans out there who want to buy a bridge in Brooklyn, real cheap, just drop me a line.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

November 1st

Time to Vote

This is the big one. I haven't ever experienced a Presidential election where I feel there has been more at stake. War or peace, debt or surplus, fear or hope, and for some in harm's way, life or death. There was a somewhat similar feeling during the 1968 campaign of Richard Nixon during the Vietnam war, with the country vividly divided. I feel the same sense of division in the country now, and I hope it doesn't materialize in the form of election day violence at the polls tomorrow. If "poll watchers" try to block people from voting tomorrow, things will get ugly. Let's hope that the polling goes smoothly, and that vigilantes don't disrupt the vote.

Vote tomorrow. You'll be glad you did.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John