Fake Bill Gates

Before, I told you all about how much Fake Bill Gates despises television studios.  Well, the shitteth hath hitteth the fan.  I went to watch How I Met Your Mother, which is a 30 min television show, and I realized that this week’s episode (season 4 episode 11) is 20 minutes and 56 seconds long.  That’s 30.22% commercials.

And studios wonder why people are switching to DVRs, websites and bittorrent to get their video-thang on.

Relevant Ads? No, Just Crappier Products

The funny thing is that this is all about advertising models.  If you’ve seen anything on Hulu or checked out the ad bar on Facebook, you’d see that they have a thumbs-up and thumbs-down.  Supposedly, the idea is that you can get more and more relevant ads. But they constantly feed me crappy ads for garbage that I’ll never buy.  Is it my fault that their products are shit?

I will never eat TV dinners, I don’t need a new car (and I certainly wouldn’t buy domestic), I’ll never drink soy milk, I can’t stand light beer, and I’m perfectly content with my razor having only 3 blades.  I will never buy anything that is “As Seen On TV”.

Misleading Deals and Scams

Of course, Facebook will have ads on the bar about singles networks, FREE IPODS!!!, and free credit reports.  I’m not single (and Facebook knows this), so they shouldn’t be showing me that.  Those free <insert gadget here> sites are all virtually scams.  They usually require you to register for the site, join some amount of trial offers, and then recruit a few friends to do the trial offers.  Of course, the trial offer scam has been going on forever.  Once you sign up, they just don’t bother to stop charging your credit card.

Online medication sites are pretty much the same raw deal.  The vast majority aren’t selling actual drugs — they’re just selling you access to lists of non-US pharmacists.  Even then, there’s no guarantee that these pharmacists will write you a prescription, and that’s assuming that the lists aren’t just full of junk data.  So you buy “access” to these lists on a membership basis, and they’ll constantly charge your credit card, even after you call up a million times to discontinue service.  What are you going to do — go to the authorities and say that you were trying to import drugs illegally, but these guys ripped you off? It’s like a drug dealer reporting a burglary where the thief stole a kilo of cocaine.

And then there’s the bullshit like freecreditreport.com. Sure, they have catchy songs.  But I will never, ever, ever do business with them.  The credit report isn’t free if you have to buy something to get it.  Here, I’ll give you a 5 carat diamond for free, all you have to do is give me $10 million for the box it comes in.  See how preposterous that sounds?

Stupidly Impossible Deals

Then there are the ads that are just impossible to follow through with, usually telecom related.  For example, a fair amount of people live in an apartment or condo that either doesn’t face the southern sky and the building won’t let them run lines across the infrastructure, or the building doesn’t allow drilling into the infrastructure at all, or the building doesn’t allow dishes at all.  We get advertisements for Verizon FiOS and DirecTV.  But, Verizon hasn’t installed FiOS in my building, and my apartment doesn’t face south so I can’t put up a dish.  Yet, these geniuses are constantly telling me how much better their service is than cable.

I’m certainly not moving just so I can go back to watching 30% commercials.

For the longest time, Google was merely a conduit to get to everyone’s content, but Google didn’t actually jump on the hosting bandwagon itself.  But over the last few years, Google has clearly dove into the hosting business.

1. They started up Google Video, and later bought out Youtube. Amusingly, Google Video is still up.
2. A while back, people started hosting code directly on the Google Code project site.
3. Somewhere around then, they threw up Google Patents, which basically took the entire USPTO patent database, digitized the old ones (really old patents are only available as scanned images on the USPTO database), and made the search functionality subtantially better than the PTO’s.
4. Along came Google Knol, which was Google’s counter to Wikipedia.  Of course, many look at this largely as a failed project as a substantial number of articles are simply copied and pasted straight from Wikipedia.
5. Then Google jumped on the book bandwagon, started scanning a ton of books, got sued for it, settled for $125 million, and now will sell print-on-demand versions of scanned books through Google Books, some out of copyright, but many still in copyright.

Now, Google has jumped on the Image bandwagon, by striking a deal with Time Life to get over 10 million images dating back to the 1880s.  The vast majority of these images were never publicly released.

My only question is what license these images have.  Obviously, Life is aware that by putting all these up, people are going to use the images for personal reasons (like setting them as desktop backgrounds), but what about mashups and stock photo use for news articles and website design?  I figure that these are generally off limits, but there’s not even any notice of how you can use these images.

Venture over to the Baskin Robbins website where you can see how ridiculously unhealthy the food is.  There’s a 36 ounce milk shake.  It boasts:

• 2600 calories (the recommended daily allowance for an adult is 2000-2500 for the entire day)
• 135g of artery clogging fat.  Even if you eat nothing else all day, You’ll still have taken over 100 grams more than you should take in any given day.
• 263g of sugar.  just short of a half pound of sugar in one cup.

I recall reading an analysis that stated the average cost of a pack of cigarettes is $40 and climbing when you factor in the demonstrable probability of health costs.  I wonder how much it will run for these artery dams.  Then again, if I got the foundation to give just a few of these to Ethiopia, and each person only took a sample size spoonfull, I could easily feed the entire nation, and still have milk shake to spare.

You know who fucking sucks? AT&T fucking sucks. You know who sucks with them? Apple. These whiny ass douchebags are bitching and complaining about netshare. What is netshare? Well here’s a little back story.

Everyone bitched about the iPhone 1.0 because you couldn’t install pretty much any software for it. Jobs and all those whiny bastards were hyping all the glassy web 2.0 apps (which often make no sense without mouseovers), but the lack of any real syncing solutions pissed everyone off (like give us fucking samba morons — and if they try and patent samba for the iPhone, I will personally come hunt all those dumbasses down and beat their heads in with a brick). Then with iPhone 2.0, you could install software, but it had to go through the iPhone store, thus controlling both piracy and guaranteeing that Apple could take their ridiculously high 30% cut on all software sold. Of course, the same bastards wanted so much control that apparently they can

1. terminate your contract for having unapproved software installed,
2. and demand you pay the ETF for violating your ToS.

What software is so nasty that they can disconnect you and charge you an ETF? That would be netshare. And what does netshare do? Does it send out spam messages? Does it DDOS infrastructure? Is it a distributed bittorrent client and tracker? Nope. It’s simple routing software. CS undergrads write this shit. It lets you connect your laptop or PC to your iPhone to use the wireless broadband connection (their buzzword for it is tethering). And guess what, AT&T and Apple hate you:

The iPhone is not intended to be used as a tethering device and we have no plans to offer separate tethering plans for it.

Tethering is even banned in the ToS:

Furthermore, plans(unless specifically designated for tethering usage) cannot be used for any applications that tether the device (through use of, including without limitation, connection kits, other phone/PDA-to computer accessories, Bluetooth® or any other wireless technology) to Personal Computers (including without limitation, laptops), or other equipment for any purpose.

These crybabies are getting pissy for no good reason. Maybe they are worried that people who tether their iPhones will just hook their laptop and iPhone together to only pay for 1 wireless data plan (instead of two). God forbid anyone doesn’t pay $70+/mo just for wireless data. Fucking money grubbing bastards. A data connection is a data connection. These are the same morons who cried foul when people were trying to use home routers. I understand that these guys are still suck on the “if value, then right” mentality, but

1. They’re not the ones adding value. Independent developers are.
2. They’re trying VERY hard to keep independent developers from adding value.

The worst part is that AT&T/Apple won’t even refund buyers of the software which they sold (and took a 30% cut from) after they approved it, and then they banned. But the piss in their Cheerios is apparently even more sour than that. These chodes yanked a nice little app for ganking movie times called BoxOffice. The app simply grabs movie times, and it does so from sources that allow grabbing for non-commercial use. Well, it got yanked from the iPhone store, and the bastards won’t even explain to the devs why.

Walled garden? Not even. I was tempted to buy an iPhone and turn off my Nokia E61 (opera + putty + wifi + rsync = fucking sexy), but fuck that shit. Apple and AT&T are not getting my money, especially when they act like whiny little crybabies. I can’t wait until Google comes out with Android and embarrasses these retards. And when you look at the iPhone’s TCO ($1975, and that’s not even with the taxes and fees that’ll easily be another $240 over the 2 years for the contract), you’ll be floored. Think about it this way. Right now, my plan is, by todays standards, amazing:

1. 7pm-7am unlimited nights/weekends,
2. unlimited mobile to mobile,
3. 400 anytime minutes,
4. and 50 rollover minutes,

(my plan is from the pre-merger days even before Cingular was on the map), and I pay $40 (which after taxes and fees is always a little over $50). Slap on a $20 unlimited data plan and I can buy a $700 phone, and I’ll still be WAY ahead of buying an iPhone money-wise, and I’ll get to play on the Google side.

And for the record, if you pay for SMS when you have an unlimited data connection, congratulations. You’re the exact kind of moron that AT&T likes to have. It’s cheaper to send a message from outer fucking space than it is to send a text message.  Fuck AT&T and Apple. And this has nothing to do with the fact that Apple is winning the handheld market (actually, they’re not, Blackberry/RIM is still spanking Palm, Apple, and lesser knowns like HTC/O2). All the telecoms and handheld manufacturers are little crybabies about what people can put on handhelds because when they open it up, they’ll miss out on a huge stream of prospective monetizable value. But this whole ordeal about “play by our rules or don’t play at all” is so lame. They wonder why customer satisfaction is so piss poor. They’re like the kid in elementary school who would only play ball in his own back yard, and any time he scored it’d count for 2 points because it’s his yard. I will personally see to it that Google buries them.

People ask what my take is on net neutrality and I keep thinking that net neutrality is basically a guarantee on innovation, for now. The problem is that with the traditional system, the cable company is blasting every single channel into your home, regardless of whether you’re watching it or not. The upside is that changing channels is merely a process of adjusting the frequency the TV listens on, and you get a nearly instantaneous channel change. This is ridiculously wasteful. IPTV saves so much bandwidth by only transferring the data for the channel that you’re tuned into. Even if we used the ridiculously wasteful Blu-ray codec, and the cable industry’s low estimate of coax bandwidth, IPTV could allow you to watch 46 HD channels at once.

I have outlined signals analysis below. The only caveat is that I did not specialize in e-signals, but I took tons of physics and software engineering courses and can set up mythtv with an analog tuner blindfolded, with my hands tied behind my back (okay, maybe not both hands… I still have to type). Please correct me anywhere that I’m wrong.

Data Rates

At 1080x, Blu-ray’s data rate is 54Mbps (~6.75 MBps). Comparatively, HD television providers (namely Verizon and Comcast) regularly transmit 1080x at 10-18 Mbps. Supposedly, Blu-ray sends so much extraneous data for error handling, but something tells me that encryption (which is apparently to protect you from yourself) helps put that overhead up there too.

Coax

Typical coax’s total bandwidth is a total of 672 MHz. The data rate for coax is 6 MHz per 50 Mbps (~6.25 MBps). Slapping down some quick dimensional analysis leaves us with:

672 MHz * 50 Mbps = 5600 Mbps (~700 MBps)

           6 MHz

Now, since IEEE sometimes works in vacuum of theory and formulas that don’t work with such exactitude in the real world, one trade group claims that coax total bandwidth is only 300 MHz. At that rate, we’re still talking 2500 Mbps (~312 MBps, which is pretty close to the new DOCSIS rates). Thus, even if we use Blu-ray’s ridiculously redundant and encrypted codec at 6.75 MBps, and the trade group’s bandwidth estimate (that is half of IEEE’s estimate), you could watch 46 HD channels at once.

To mitigate the channel changing issues, you could easily receive a background signal that transmits a reduced signal resolution which includes every channel. Also, as the new generations grow up where DVRs are standard, live TV will undoubtedly make way for on-demand TV, which dumps channel changing for menus. It will only become further unnecessary to have data constantly blasted into your home that was blasted in just a few hours ago. For example, the Daily Show and Colbert Report are channeled into your home AT LEAST 4 times per day on weekdays. Even then, re-runs and syndication account for a ridiculous portion of data beamed into your home. The result is that you’re “downloading” stuff that you’ve downloaded tens if not hundreds of times. With on-demand TV, loading of data could easily start while on menu screens. Trailers (and beginnings of shows) and video art would quickly be downloaded in the background and then the regular video could be downloaded in real time.

Back to Neutrality

So the moral of the story is that if we require net neutrality, we require innovation, and it’s only a matter of time before we get amazing pipes into our homes that blast ridiculous speeds and tens of concurrent HD signals. Without net neutrality, the incentives are not to make a better system, but to make a system full of more rules and nickel/dime rates.

I’m looking to get a computer for my parents, and we’re pretty stiff on them not getting Vista for the reason’s below. When I was looking at all Dell’s site, I couldn’t find any options that didn’t include Vista. So I joined their CSR chat, and this is what followed.

CSR: Welcome to Dell’s Inspiron Sales Chat! I hope you are doing well and thank you for waiting. My name is Derwin. I will be your personal sales agent, please provide your phone number and e-mail address where I can contact you in case we get disconnected. How may I help you with your purchase today?

Me: I’m looking at one of the Inspiron 1525 packages and I was wondering whether I could get it with Windows XP instead of Vista

CSR: Hi <my name… no I did not type Fake Bill Gates>.

CSR: Dell has followed suite with the industry and we no longer offer XP. I personally use and enjoy Vista though. What concerns do you have with it?

Me: The computer is for my parents and they have some older, yet perfectly good peripherals that Vista doesn’t have drivers for.

Me: My dad’s job also uses some custom software which just crashes on Vista. In fact, they just got new computers a month ago or so, and they were adamant in getting XP instead of Vista

Me: Or is there a way to get the laptop without having to pay for Vista and I can install XP on it?

CSR: I understand. however Dell systems has vista on there systems [sic]

CSR: you can downgraded vista to xp though.

Me: Right, but if we’re not using it, we shouldn’t be paying for it. Does Dell offer refunds for unused Vista licenses?

CSR: No. i apologize for that.

Me: Thank you for your time then.

And that’s about it. Not only did his punctuation and proper capitalization go out the window, he used “there” instead of “their” but he should have said “our” (and his name is Derwin). It’s pretty clear that Dell has been skimping on customer service.

Apparently, Dell won’t let consumers buy !OS laptops to evade the Microsoft Tax, and they won’t let people get XP even if their software isn’t compatible. Good thing for me though. That means they have to buy my software and up my stock price. Thank you, Dell!

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably have heard about the House and Senate voting for retroactive telecom immunity. The funny thing is the Bush administration is claiming the warrantless wiretapping (which may or may not exist of course) wasn’t in any way illegal, but if it wasn’t illegal, then they wouldn’t need retroactive immunity for anyone involved, and could just throw the lawsuits away with summary judgment, and even ask for attorneys fees. Anyways, so the tech geek’s Champion of Change, Mr. Broadband Policy himself, and Supreme Commander of all that is the Neutral Net, Barack Obama repeatedly swore that he’d stand against retroactive telecom immunity.

Obama said there is “little doubt” that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, “has abused [its] authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders. . . . [The bill] does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses.”

That was literally in mid-June. Here we are, not even a month later, and he’s apparently retitled himself to Lord “The Only Change We’ll Deliver is that We’ll Violate Your Rights Instead of Republicans”. Obama voted FOR telecom immunity.

I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program.

So in other words, he feels it’s acceptable to violate our constitutional rights, just as long as he gets to do it instead of Republicans. Trading one administration that violates our rights to another administration that violates our rights certainly isn’t change. The worst part is that after lying about what Obama said he’d support, is that he’s now lying to our face by calling it a compromise. There was no compromise. Republicans wanted retroactive immunity. Democrats were against it. This “compromise” directs all federal courts to dismiss any suits over any alleged NSA wiretapping. That’s not a compromise. The bill removes all accountability entirely. Regardless of which definition of compromise you happen to use, not a single one involves “Republicans get everything they want, and the Democratic majority shows just how spineless they really are.” Despite the obvious substantive due process, procedural due process, and separation of powers issues, Obama (who went to Harvard law nonetheless) has gone ahead and sold his soul.  You know Obama messed up when even the kos kids are blasting him for his piss poor strategy.

Now lets look at Obama’s report card. He’s for higher taxes, for government healthcare, for citizen defenselessness (he calls it “gun control”), and now for government intrusion into our homes whilst lying to our faces about his political indiscretion. You can call it populist, authoritarian, totalitarian, or socialist. I call it “any chance Obama had at me casting my big swing state Florida vote in his favor went out the window yesterday.” I’m not saying McCain is a saint. I’m just saying that neither one has any integrity whatsoever.

Now I want to know, Mr. Obama, can I get some retroactive immunity for all the antitrust suits we lost over the last 10 years? That’d really help my share price, and I might be able to get past Buffet and Helú. We’ll, ummmm, give you some “campaign finance” money. Or at least I think that’s what you call it nowadays.

By the way, there are credits at the end. This is not real, but it’s probably based on true story. I know because I worked IT at one point in my life. Never again.

Computers are evolving so fast. Sorry, you’ll have to flip to about 40 seconds in to get to the skit.

It’s an excerpt from the Onion Movie. Fake Bill Gates does not endorse killing anyone via thrown tools, especially if that anyone is me.

I’m looking around at LCD TVs for when I move in August. I already have a vga-rca converter that I use to connect my computer to my 36 inch SDTV, but I want to get something with a higher resolution. I’m tempted to just get a projector, although replacing bulbs for $200-300 every 2 years isn’t fun.

Then I got to thinking about why I was buying a better TV. When I move in August, I don’t intend to buy any satellite or cable as I have realized that they’re obsolete. I generally watch:

• The Daily Show (on hulu and comedycentral.com)
• Colbert Report (on hulu and comedycentral.com)
• Chuck (on hulu and nbc.com)
• Heroes (on hulu and nbc.com)
• South Park (on southpartstudios.com)
• Assorted stand-up specials (on comedycentral.com)
• Stargate Atlantis
• Mythbusters
• Scrubs
• Good eats

The Daily Show and Colbert Report have four new episodes every week and they’re off a full week every 4 weeks or so. The writer’s strike started in November of 2007, and most of these other shows won’t have a new episode (since the strike) at least until the middle of July. In that 8 month span, I’ve seen all the reruns of every one of these shows except a few episodes of Penn & Teller. Most will come back with roughly 4 episodes per month while in season, and most of these are available for free, some in HD, through legal online venues. Of the last few shows, we’re talking 4 shows x 4 episodes = 16 episodes per month, in season. With a cable/satellite bill at roughly $50 just for the TV service, we’re talking $3.13 per episode, and I have to suffer through all the ridiculous and grossly irrelevant advertising. Here’s a look at what advertisers apparently think is acceptable:

Family Guy is playing, and Bill Engvall comes, pauses the show, and gives a short advertisement, and then unpauses the show. There’s plenty of other ridiculousness as promotions often take up the bottom third of the screen during the regular content.

I won’t even address how ridiculous television news is (that’s for another rant). Between TapTheHive, the Daily Show, and Colbert Report, I get way more and way better quality news that’s highly tailored to my interests.

The part that I don’t get is that advertising time is just under 1/3 of all the television we watch (8-9 min of a 30 min show and 16-19 min of a 60 min show). If you make $6/hr, your 20 minutes are worth $2 in the aggregate (and I’m Fake Bill Gates… my time is worth astronomically more than that). Now, I despise Apple with the burning hot intensity of ten thousand suns, and I wish even more vile things upon DRM, but iTMS is the only decent commercial web-video service around. If there were more stores like it, dumping cable/satellite entirely would be feasible for many more people. Seeing as I’m already paying $3.13 per episode of commercial laden video, if I paid $5 for an episode without advertising, and I make minimum wage, I’d still come out ahead.

And if you’re worried about re-runs, catch them on DVD through netflix or ebay. Hell, the SG-1 box set was $100 at Costco for all 10 seasons. With most seasons having roughly 20 episodes, that’s around 50 cents per episode, all with no commercials.

The problem is that we’re in a rut right now. People use DVRs to skip commercials, and as things shift over to web-based systems, ad-block further decimates revenue for “broadcasters”. Meanwhile, cable reverts to compression to deal with bandwidth overcrowding instead of dumping analog signals for IPTV. Even then, most people are too deluded to do the math on how much of their all-you-can-eat TV plan they actually use. They’re apparently more willing to pay extensively for the opportunity to watch things they don’t actually watch, than actually to just pay for what they watch.

And all of this completely ignores the elephant standing in the room: torrent networks which spew commercial free video for $0 per month via RSS feeds.

Vote with your dollars, and disconnect your cable/satellite. I know I will.